J. Anthony Allen breaks down rhythmic triplets: three notes squeezed into the space of two eighth notes. He shows how to notate them with a beam and "3", then walks through counting patterns like "1, 2, Tati, 3, 4, Tati" so you can hear and feel the difference from straight eighth notes.
Okay, so triplets. Now, remember, if we take a quarter note, we divide that in half, we have eighth notes, right? And it looks like that. So this rhythm is going to be very metrical, right? It's going to be exactly on the beat. So I'm going to clap and sing it, I'm going to clap and count it. Let's say I should never refer to what I do as singing, like, ever. I'm just going to make a mental note about that. Okay, Here we go. 1, 2, 3 and 4. And okay, that's this rhythm. 1, 2, 3 and four. And so this is three and this is four, right? Okay. Now what if. Let's say in one of these places, let's say on beat four. What if on beat four, I want to just smash three notes in the place of these two notes? I can do that. It would be kind of like for that one beat, switching over to compound meter. Right? And this is how we do it. We use a triplet. Okay, so I've put two of them here. So we have a quarter note and a triplet. So this is not going to perfectly line up with the ace note, because this is oddly smashing. Three beats in the space of. Or three eighth notes in the space of two eighth notes in this case. So the way we notate it is we beam them together. In this case, we can. And then we put a little number three under it and we say there are three of these here. Figure it out. How it goes is I'll clap and count, not sing. Okay, Here we go. 1, 2, Tati, 3, 4, Tati. Right, so these get a little kind of hop of a feel to them. It gets even more obvious if I was to do this. Let's take that, let's get rid of that. And let's go just eighth notes here. Okay, what we have now is one and then just eighth notes. Two and three and. And then a triplet for Ta ti. Right? So in context, it's going to sound like this. 1, 2 and 3 and 4. Ta ti one. Right. I'm gonna. I'll do it like three times in a row. So you can kind of feel that. Triplet. One, two and three and four. Ta ti one, two and three and four. Ta ti one, two and three and four. Ta ti one. Okay, so that's a triplet where we just kind of smash these three notes together.
