Understanding Rhythmic Displacement

Music is many things: wonderful, confusing, challenging… I'm sure we could all come up with an enormous list of adjectives to describe music, but I'm sure this would be on everyone's list - never-ending. Like a relentless hydra, every time we achieve a musical goal, many more pop-up to remind us how truly vast the world of music is.

I used to think that I needed to use every new lick, technique or theory tidbit in all of my playing to prove to myself that I was actually improving. As you can imagine, this quickly became quite exhausting, and if anything, made my playing even more predictable, as I was playing the same things over, and over again.

At its core, rhythmic displacement is a very simple concept - we simply change where a certain note or beat is placed in the context of the music. For example, if we had just one note at the start of a bar of 4/4, and moved it to the second beat, we would have rhythmically displaced the note. You might be thinking to yourself that this seems obvious, and might not affect your playing - but stick with me here, it'll all make sense very soon!

Every bar of music has a pulse (a regular beat) which helps shape the feel of the song. We categorise different pulses into time signatures - which help organise the amount of beats, and what type of beat we have in a bar. For instance, a bar of the most common time signature, 4/4, would be divided into four quarter-notes (or crotchets). Whereas, a bar of 6/8 would be broken into six evenly spaced eighth-notes (quavers). I'll provide a diagram below to help understand time signatures, but we'll go into detail in another lesson soon…

So, why is this important? It's because even though the pulse in each bar is divided into even beats, not every beat will be accented in the same way. For example, when you talk, not every word is accented or stressed in the same way, which is what breathes life into conversation. The use of stressed and un-stressed syllables in words is reflected directly in music with accented and non-accented notes.

Let's put this into practice by exploring a handful of different places accents are put in the context of a bar of 4/4. Before we pick up our guitar, we're going to practice clapping along to a metronome. I find the easiest metronome to access is the one on Google - simply type in 'metronome', and one will appear on the search page. Once you've got a metronome ready, set the bpm (beats per minute) to 100, and we're good to go!

The easiest accent to practice is the 1st beat of every bar. This is the beat that shapes the overall feel of 4/4, and most musicians will find that they naturally add a slight accent on the down-beat without thinking about it. Once you've got the hang of this, try adding the 3rd beat along side it - this will help you get used to dividing the bar into further beats. Next, let's try and shift the beats and clap the 2nd and 4th beat of the bar. This might feel more natural, as this is typical the pattern people clap along to, to mimic the snare hit.

We've got one more bit of clapping to do before we get to the fun stuff - we need to practice clapping the eighth-notes. To do this, start by clapping all four beats of the bar, and imagine or sing an extra note evenly between each clap. Once you're confident that you're clapping even eighth-notes, you're ready to pick up the guitar!

The first thing to do is practice accenting the same beats that we clapped over a metronome. This will give you the feel for how you want to control your picking and general dynamics. Next, take some time to learn the lick written out below - it's essentially a D major 7 arpeggio composed entirely of eighth-notes with one rest, which we will be able to move around. I find the easiest way to play this is by catching the 7th fret on the G string with your middle finger to allow you to play the 6th fret with your first finger. Then, roll (flatten) your middle finger to catch the 7th fret on the B string without having to change finger or position. This will let you comfortably catch the 5th fret of the e-string with your first finger, and the 9th fret with your pinky.

Now that you've got the lick under your fingers and you're confident playing it, we're going to move the rest around to showcase the power of rhythmic displacement! It might feel strange at first, but we're going to keep pushing the rest one beat further in the bar to see how changing the accented note creates an entirely different flavour for the same melody.

Now that you've mastered the lick and have come to grips with the idea of rhythmic displacement, you might be thinking to yourself that this only works for melodies that make use of rests. Wrong! This can work for any melody, as we can basically force a rest in at any time to push where the accents would sit. There's another lick tabbed out below that I'd like you to try - this one is arpeggiating an E minor 7 chord. This one might feel a bit nicer under the fingers, as you can allocate your first finger to play the 7th fret, your second finger on the 8th, third finger on the 9th, and pinky on the 10th.

We're going to start by putting a rest in at the beginning of the second bar, and continue by pushing it one beat further upon each repeat. The key difference with this lick is that it will 'spill' onto the next bar as we're essentially adding an extra beat with the rest. This, again, alters where the accents are within the melody, and allows us to recycle the same notes and create a complete melody.

At this point you might be a bit bored of playing the same melody on loop for what could feel like an eternity (or at least until the loop ends and the phrase starts from its initial point again), and I can't say I blame you… Rhythmic displacement is an incredible tool to help create interesting music without overloading musical information, but it should be used sensibly. There's a (subjective) sweet spot for repetition, and you'll have to be the judge of it in your own playing. As a little bonus, I've provided tabs to an ending for the second lick - see how many times you want to repeat the main lick before going into the ending.

And there you have it! If you've made it this far, I sincerely hope you'll find value from using rhythmic displacement, and that you'll start to use it in your playing. I hope that it helps you create interesting musical ideas, and takes some pressure away while improvising.

Just as a side note before we wrap up - we've used an eighth-note rest to help displace rhythm in the two examples, but it doesn't always have to be the same! Try changing the value of the rest, or repeat a note instead of the rest - the choice is completely yours to make, and there is no wrong answer. Have fun exploring, and I'll see you in the next lesson!