In this lesson, we’re going to open some pretty-advanced doors in the world of Quintuplets. Definitely make sure you’ve worked through the exercises in the first quintuplet lesson before attempting this one.
We’ll work with displacement, we’ll develop and quintuplet-based groove using both single anddouble kick, and we’ll work on placing a dotted-eighth pattern over a quintuplet, producing a crazy metric modulation against the metronome.
Why is this useful? The whole aim of this lesson is to develop your quintuplet feel within a couple of more advanced concepts. The more we work with this feel, the more automated it will become for you, and so the more you’ll be able to drop into this feel at your leisure.
In this exercise, we’ll play a bar of groove, based around the five-stroke roll, very similar to the ghost-note groove we developed in exercise five of the first Quintuplet lesson. The only difference is we’re going to place a snare accent in the middle of the bar.
Then the second bar is going to play a repeating Quintuplet, again with a snare accent in the middle. We’re also going to drop the right hand from playing anything on the first note of each quintuplet and only play the third note within each group. This is going to create a consistent displaced stack pattern against the groove.
Exercise 2 – Quintuplet Groove
In this exercise, we’ll play a bar of straight 4/4 groove (elaborate here however you like!), followed by a more-complex quintuplet-based groove where the pattern will change for every group of quintuplets. This idea here is to get you used to transitioning between the straight feel and the quintuplet feel while maintaining the groove.
Exercise 3 – Quintuplet Double Kick Groove
In this exercise, we’ll play a bar of straight 4/4 groove (elaborate here however you like!), followed by a bar of double-kick quintuplets. A great exercise would be to mix up the pattern you’re playing these quintuplets, for example, R L R L R, L R L R L (straight singles), R L R L R, R L R L R (restarting right-lead), R L R R L (five-stroke roll).
In this exercise, we’ll play a couple of bars of straight 4/4 groove (elaborate here however you like!), followed by three bars of a quintuplet-based groove, over the top of which we’ll keep a dotted 8th note pattern on the right hand. The dotted 8th is locked into the quintuplet feel, however, rather than sitting as a true dotted 8th against the quarter-note metronome. In my opinion, this helps to make the quintuplet groove.
This is a similar concept to the beginning of ‘Nocturne’ by TesseracT – it’s going to take three full bars of quintuplets for the right-hand pattern to naturally repeat and only on the first bar does the right hand start on the first beat of the bar – for the second bar the right-hand starts on 2nd 8th note within the quintuplet group, and for the third bar, the right-hand comes in on the third beat within the quintuplet group.
