10/13/1999

While I was getting ready for work this morning -- puttering around the apartment, eating breakfast -- the standard morning routine, I found myself thinking a rhythm. You know how this sort of thing is, I'm sure, though most people are probably most familiar with it in terms of a song from the radio or a jingle from some commercial getting stuck in your head. Since I've been drumming, I've found that I now get rhythms stuck in my head, which makes a great deal of sense when you stop to think about it. When I'm on an intense writing binge, I also find that certain phrases can get stuck in my head, though words alone tend to be a bit less catchy, catching and sticky than music, or something with a rhythm or tune behind it.

Anyway, there I was, doing my thing, and thinking of this rhythm. It was fairly undefined -- no sense of emphasis or type of beat (gun/dun, go/do, or pa/ta) -- just the basics:
...boom^boom^boom..boom^boom^boomboom...
(sorry, it doesn't translate well into visuals :) I hardly even realized I was thinking this rhythm until I found myself trying to "hand" it, that is, figure out which hand I would use to make each beat. I was thinking:
...right^right^right..left^right^rightleft...
But I thought that handing was a little odd, since it was heavy on the right hand. Now, I'm right handed, and a lot of rhythms do emphasize one hand or the other, but since I hadn't identified this rhythm, it was strange that I so strongly associated each beat with one hand or the other. When I tried to think of it associated with different hands, it didn't work right in my head at all.

I didn't give it a lot of thought, though, and just kept getting ready to head out the door. The rhythm was getting more defined in my head, though, and now it was sounding like:
...right^RIGHT^right..left^RIGHT^rightleft
So I started to try to translate it into the type of beat. Which would be a gun, which a go, and which a ta? Almost as soon as I started thinking that way, it came to me:
...gun..pa!...gun.dun.pa!.godo...
Which is (eureka!) the funk rhythm!

Now, don't feel bad if you know that rhythm and didn't recognize it here. My notation is completely intuitive and probably only works for me, and even then, it only works because I know what I'm talking about :)

Now, the point here isn't to show off that I know the funk rhythm, or that the funk rhythm I know is cooler than the funk rhythm you know. No, the point is that it was really really really neat to have it come popping out of my subconscious like that! I hadn't played it in several days, and it's not one of the ones that I tend to sing to myself when I'm walking or cooking or anything like that. It was truly a eureka moment!

Wow! I'm becoming a drummer!