Piano Forum

Are you aiming for mathetmatical evenness here?

2/3 and 3/4 (3/2 or 4/3) are the easier ones to learn and so might be worth trying out a few of them before going into more difficult ones.

There are loads of things online, such as repeated metronomes that tell you exactly where the notes go, and I watched a couple of Paul Barton / Josh Wright videos that explain it using words that may help you. Anyway here's the maths.

Find the lowest common denominator (the lowest value that both numbers can be multipled into) between the two, draw that many even lines on a piece of paper and mark out where the notes would go.

I don't know if these are common polyrhythms, this theory works much better for 2/3, 3/4  where the denominators are a bit easier to work with (2/3 is 6 and 3/4 is 12!) anyway, don't let the lines throw you off, they're just there to make sure your note spaces are even.

9/5 is 45 (5x9 / 9x5) So as 9 goes into 45 5 times, the notes will be every 5 lines apart, and 5 goes into 45 9 times, so their notes will be 9 lines apart. (I haven't checked how this will look yet when I press post, if the formatting's buggered i'll attach as an image!

1      2         3        4        5         6        7        8         9
I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I
1              2                3                 4                5                         

(please assume the numbers are supposed to be inline with the I's, something that's difficult to do on a computer, the 3 is off a tad!!)       

Next after this you may want to work out a sentence or something that works for you. I don't think you can really play stuff like this to the millisecond, but it hopefully maps out at least where the notes should go

I think it can be handy to compare it to leg movements, so in this i'd say Jump, hop, trip, skip, skip, trip, hop. (notice after the jump the hop, trip, skip mirror each other)

9/4 is 36 (4x9 / 9x4) so draw out 36 even lines, put the 9 notes every 4 lines and the 4 notes every line notes and work out what you got.

Maybe do the metronome marks in a different colour so you can then start a metronome and tap these beats as you see them on the paper