How do you play this rhythm?

[lagin]

Okay, I give up!  How do you play 7 against 8?  (Bar after bar after bar..........)  There has to be a way!   Help.

[pita bread]

What on earth are you trying to play now?

Basically you just fit it in. There's a metrenome trick out there- you set the metrenome beat to one per measure, play the 8s, play the 7s, keep alternating, then just put it together.

[lagin]

What on earth are you trying to play now?

Lol!  What is that suppost to mean!  I'm not trying to play anything yet.  I'm getting ready to play something   .  I want to play Barber's Excursion no. 3, but I don't have the music yet.  Does anyone have it?  And pretty piano playing told me that was the rhythm of the piece, so I'm like practicing with random notes, so I can get good at it when I get the music!

[sonatainfsharp]

Okay, I give up!  How do you play 7 against 8?  (Bar after bar after bar..........)  There has to be a way!   Help.

Barber's third Excursion? Hate to say it, but just feel it; everything lines up at the end of the bar. It's actually quite simple.

Start by practicing scales in polyrhythms. Pretty soon you will get out of a locked rhythmic feel and be able to feel much, much larger groups of rhythms.

[tac-tics]

Run it through a MIDI sequencer and memorize how it sounds.

[lagin]

Never mind.  I got my answer from a piano workshop.  You just start the first note in each hand together.  Then the hand with 8 notes in the bar plays the next note since it's moving fast than the other hand.  Then they just aternate!  Duh   Silly me!

[cjp_piano]

Never mind.  I got my answer from a piano workshop.  You just start the first note in each hand together.  Then the hand with 8 notes in the bar plays the next note since it's moving fast than the other hand.  Then they just aternate!  Duh   Silly me!

No, that isn't exactly right.  If you do that, they won't be even.  To be totally accurate, you can put it in MIDI as someone else said.  Another way would be to divide the measure into 56ths, since it is divisible by both 7 and 8, and then map out when each one would fall.  I just did it for fun (yeah, I'm a nerd):

Counting from 1 to 56
one hand will play on 1   8   15   22    29   36    43    50
one hand will play on 1    9   17     25    33     41     49

As you can see, it IS both at first, then every other one, but not evenly.  9 is right after 8, but then 17 is 2 56ths after 15, etc.

But of course, this is much to tedious and really pointless, because, like others have said, just FEEL it!   

[lagin]

No, no, that was not pointless at all, but most helpful!  I actually just found out that it would end up being a bit off doing it my way.  This really helps me because I'm a visual learner, so even though I don't want to count to 56 for every bar (though, when I'm sight reading it I probably will), this helps me get a feel for the layout, so thank you so much!

[pita bread]

Hahaha... oh wow.

It was late at night when I first posted on this thread. When I saw your name, Lagin, I read it wrong and confused it with Lau (the kid who's trying to play the Liszt Mazeppa), hence the "what on earth are you trying to play now" comment.

Sorry about that dear!