This is a complex topic in its totality (or at least there are a lot of possibilities and you need to spend a decent amount of time practicing them to get good at them), but the basic concept is pretty simple. We have standard accent patterns in each time signature, but we can change the accent pattern to something else, and that creates cross-rhythm. The new accents go “across” the original accent pattern and add interest to a piece or passage of a piece that might otherwise be boring (in music we usually call it “square” when something is just following the standard pattern all the time). Each meter will have its own set of common cross-rhythms, and it’s useful to learn to play them very well because they come up a lot!

There are several standard cross-rhythms in different meters. 2/4 will mostly be related to 4/4, just halved in note value, and really I haven’t seen that many examples of cross-rhythm in 2/4. I’m going to save cross-rhythms in 3/4 (and 6/8) for the next section below, because that’s very common and used in a specific way, and it is related to (though not the same as another rhythm technique called hemiola.

So let’s look at 4/4, 5/4, and 9/8 cross-rhythms here. I’ll show some general notation for the most common cross-rhythms, then I’ll show some specific examples in actual pieces of music.

The most common cross rhythm is going to be what I call the 3-3-2 cross rhythm (these numbers will refer to accent groups of eighth notes, where the standard accent can be called either 2-2-2-2 or 4-4 depending on how you feel it). In our counting numbers, it works like this (capitalized means accented): “ONE-and-two-AND-three-and-FOUR-and”. Here’s what this one looks like in notation:

If we show just the accented notes as long note values, we get this (note the use of the “Invisible Barline”):

There are lots of styles and songs that make use of this cross-rhythm. It isn’t all that common in classical music before the 20th century, when elements from jazz and from other world music traditions started to influence classical music, but I’ve pulled a couple of examples from some other traditions. The first one is a track from Tania Opland and Mike Freeman’s album “Cut to Rhythms”. The track is “Jovano, Jovanke”, and the underlying groove uses the 3-3-2 rhythm in the percussion and guitar.

One more example, this time from the Scottish fiddle world - this one is a track from a group called “Ben the Hoose”, and is the first track from their album The Little Cascade, called “Kissin’ is the Best”. It opens with a double-stop groove that uses three bars of 3-3-2 followed by another rhythm as a fill, and repeats that pattern several times. Several other songs on that album use the groove as well under some of the other tunes.

We’ll see some other examples that could be said to use 3-3-2 in this next 4/4 cross-rhythm, which I call 3-3-3-3-2-2 cross-rhythm. This one is probably my personal favorite. It can be found in a lot of rock music, and a swung version of it even shows up in swing jazz pieces. We can derive it by putting two bars of 3-3-2 together:

Then we rearrange them so that all of the 3s are together, and both of the 2s are together. Now it looks like this:

We can halve the note values to get it in one bar, which is also common (16th notes)

If we then make the accents solid note values we get this (2 bar version):

Or this (1 bar version):

Now we can try some variations on it (in 2 bar format to make it a little easier to read):

Var. A:

One more thing to note - because of the way we derived this from two bars of 3-3-2, we can also skip every other one in the 3-3-3-3-2-2 pattern and get a big 3-3-2 back, which you will sometimes find with big hits on every other accent while something else keeps ticking away the 8th notes (or 16th notes in the one bar version). The Dark Knight example below shows this in some places.

Now for some real-world examples of this. It is very popular in the film scoring world, particularly in action movies. Here’s a track from The Dark Knight soundtrack by Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard - the first track, “Why So Serious?” starting at the end of the initial distorted electric cello line. This one uses quite a few variations on the 3-3-3-3-2-2 rhythm, starting with steady 8th notes in violin double-stops in the 3-3-3-3-2-2 rhythm, and then with a variety of hits in the broader accent pattern over the track (which almost start to sound like the Clave pattern in a few spots - see next rhythm below), as well as some that show how the 3-3-3-3-2-2 cross-rhythm could be a large 3-3-2 rhythm if you played every other accent group. Here’s the track:

I mentioned that it shows up in swing jazz - here is one of the most famous big band hits, “In The Mood” from the Glenn Miller band, and when the main theme comes in after the introduction (0:11 in the video), the saxophones are playing a swung version of the 3-3-3-3-2-2 cross rhythm:

This is my (rough) transcription of the tune they are playing. It’s an arpeggiation of a very slight variant of a 12-bar blues chord progression for the first half, in a swung version of our 3-3-3-3-2-2 pattern we’ve been looking at (the 2-2 is a rest). This is sometimes called a shuffle pattern. The second half of the theme shows an example of “hocketing” like we looked at back in Chapter 2. This is a common technique in big band writing used this way, with the saxophones and the trumpets (and sometimes trombones) trading off on bits of the tune. It makes a clear line as shown here, but with more interest for both the players and the audience.

Another famous 3-3-3-3-2-2 shuffle pattern shows up in this next example from the bluegrass/country fiddle world. It is also extremely fast in this one. This is the bluegrass standard “Orange Blossom Special”, here performed by the Charlie Daniels band. The video is cued to the shuffle part.

This rhythm shows up in so many places that I could easily find dozens more examples almost without even trying (and we may see some more later in the guide in other sections). But I can’t resist adding one more example here. This one is from one of my good friends (and my first fiddle teacher!) Sarah Wilfong, and her musical partner Steve Peavey, who had a band and an album called Heart of Pluto a few years ago. They appear to have taken the album offline, but I got permission from Steve to upload one of his tracks from their album just for this guide, because it is a great example of a track that is built almost entirely off of 3-3-3-3-2-2 cross-rhythms. Even in the section in the middle where it goes into a more straight-ahead 4/4 pattern, you can still hear bits of the cross-rhythm in the background. Listen for the variation B from above in the bowed strings in the middle part. This track is called “Great Wall of China”. Here it is:

This one also shows one other phenomenon throughout much of the piece, including in the first few bars I transcribed above. Just like we took two bars of 3-3-2 and put them together to derive this pattern, you can keep on taking groups of three and sticking them on. In order to maintain the cross-rhythm feel, you will need to break out of the pattern at some point with a group of 2 (quarter note, in this context), or just stop that pattern and go back to something straighter. If you keep the threes going for too long, it may start to seem like a kind of metric modulation and changing the meter.

In this track, they do the 3-3-3-3-2-2 pattern twice, then take that pattern and keep three going for twice as long before breaking it. This is short enough to maintain the cross-rhythm feel. I’ve notated it in the two bar (and 4 bar) pattern to make it easier to read it, though I think I’m really feeling it in the one bar version (so it would be one bar each at first, then across two bars with three 16th-note (dotted 8th-note) groups).

Another cross-rhythm that is very common, ubitquitous in several Latin styles, is the “Clave” pattern (that’s “claw-ve”, not “clayv”, by the way - think Spanish). This is a variation of the 3-3-3-3-2-2 rhythm, where we displace the last of the 3s by an 8th note so that we get two quarter notes in the second part with a longer gap between the two parts. It is also frequently compressed so that it fits in one bar of 4/4 (note values halved), and once you recognize this pattern you will hear it everywhere! It works well against a lot of things too. Here it is shown in 8ths:

Var. B:

And now the way the Claves would actually play it (only on the accented notes), in two and in one bar versions:

Listen to any number of Latin tracks for this one, here are a couple of examples just to show you what it sounds like: (Insert Latin Example)

And here’s an example of a folk-rock sea shanty track from William Pint and Felicia Dale, the title track of their album “Round the Corner”. This one is interesting, because they slip between clave and 3-3-3-3-2-2 and you can see how through variations on both of these patterns you can get to the same place. I could probably have gotten away with putting this one in the 3-3-3-3-2-2 section above, but it does feel to me more like the clave pattern and variations, so I’m putting it here. The groove starts to fade in with the guitar around 0:14, and becomes established as the Clave at about 0:29. If you listen carefully, you’ll notice that the 3-3-3-3-2-2 mostly happens during the instrumental breaks. During the vocal verses they stick with Clave and variants.

5/4 has a kind of built-in cross rhythm, in that its standard patterns can be either 3+2 or 2+3. These aren’t really used against each other though, and so the primary actual cross-rhythm is based on the 3+2 underlying pattern, and I call it the 3-3-2-2 pattern.

This one is also a favorite of the film scoring world, and is also used in a lot of action movies like the 3-3-3-3-2-2 cross-rhythm above. You can think of it as a 3-3-2 rhythm with another 2 tacked on to the end, and it can also be seen as a 10-pattern (from 10/8, which is related to 5/4 - just if you counted all the 8th notes separately). Here is the 3-3-2-2 rhythm in notation (all 8th notes with accents):

And here it is with solid note values based on the accents:

Now on to some real world examples. This first one is almost certainly the most well-known use of this rhythm in a media context - the theme from the Mission: Impossible movies. The opening groove is the 3-3-2-2 rhythm, and when I think of this rhythm, I often call it the “Mission: Impossible rhythm”.

Here’s a rather different use of that rhythm as a dance figure in a string orchestra concert piece I played with the Topanga Symphony Orchestra (not our performance - in fact I think this is a mockup, not a live performance). This is the 4th movement of Ron Jones’ string orchestra suite “Momentum Suite” - this is “Moonlight’s Dance”. This rhythm gave some people some trouble at the Topanga Symphony, but I just noted that it was the “Mission: Impossible” rhythm, and kept on going. Like I said, it pays to practice these sorts of things as they come up often enough!

Finally, one more very different use for the 3-3-2-2 rhythm. This one is from the Irish chorus Anuna, from their album Sensation. The track is “Shining Water”. The groove and the melody are both pretty much the 3-3-2-2 pattern the whole time. This one is quite different again from the action theme of Mission Impossible or the dance from the Momentum Suite. In this one, they’ve pulled out all the stops to make a magical, mystical sounding song. The tempo is fairly slow. I clock it at q=120 for the 5/4 quarter note, which in this case feels downright dreamy.

The continuous pentatonic harp glissando, the 8th note shaker, the wind chimes in the background, the slow low whistle, the vibraphone, the high soprano lead vocal, and the gentle chorus all come together to add to this magical quality. The dominant 7th and add9 chords, and the modal character of the melody play in as well (basically mixolydian mode), and then in the case of this video, the nature of the imagery in the music video also plays into the overall feel. But even in the audio track with no video, it has a very magical sound. So this just proves that these cross-rhythms can be used for a variety of moods!

9/8 is most often 3+3+3 as mentioned earlier in this guide, but there is one other rhythm I’ve run across a few times that can be pretty neat.

One of the more interesting options in certain kinds of dance music is 2+2+2+3 - “ONE and TWO and THREE and FOUR-and-a”. This is found in certain Eastern European dance types, and is also the pattern in the Dave Brubeck song “Blue Rondo A La Turk” from his Jazz album “Time Out”. This track uses three bars of 2-2-2-3 and then one bar of 3-3-3 for its pattern for most of the first half, and then goes into a straight 4 swing which gets continually interrupted by the first measure later in the piece.

I’ve included notation for the first phrase, which repeats immediately (my transcription). I debated how to notate this one - in my tip on Beaming (Chapter 4) I said to beam by meter, not by accent group. In this case to make the rhythm more clear for this example, I have beamed by accent group. I think I’d probably write it this way normally in this instance since the feel is so consistent, and its all steady eighth notes. See the next example for the other way of writing this, which makes more sense to me in that context.

I also learned that pattern in a tune we learned at the Scottish Fiddlers of Los Angeles one time, the “Kerry Polska”. In both of these pieces, the pattern is three bars 2-2-2-3, then one bar of 3-3-3. The rhythm on Kerry Polska really threw me until I figured out that the rhythm was the same as the Brubeck tune, and then it clicked and I got it immediately.

Again, I’ve included my transcription of the first four bars of this tune. You can see this time I used the invisible barline rule in standard 9/8. Because the basic rhythm was quarter notes or longer, I decided that would be easier to read in this case than making all of the first three notes quarter note. When you hear it, you can still hear the 2-2-2-3 pattern. It’s really interesting that these two tunes have the same underlying groove, because I wouldn’t say that they otherwise have a similar feel at all. Rhythm is extremely important, but it isn’t everything!

3/4 and 6/8 are each other’s cross-rhythms. This is one of the most widely used cross-rhythm patterns in all of music, particularly in common-practice classical music, which didn’t use the rhythms above as much as popular music or some more recent classical music has. These rhythms can be used either simultaneously (see polyrhythm below), or in sequence. They are frequently used back to back, as our real-world example will show below in this section.

For the basic feel let’s take six 8th notes out of context:

With these six notes, we can either set them up in 3/4, with our standard simple triple meter we discussed back in chapter 2: “ONE and TWO and THREE and”:

Or we can set them up in 6/8, with our standard compound duple meter we discussed in chapter 2: “ONE and a TWO and a”:

We can then put them together in sequence, like so. It doesn’t matter whether we said we were in 3/4 or 6/8, you just mark the accents accordingly, and you should beam based on the time signature meter as well even if the accent pattern cuts against that beaming (remember this is a cross-rhythm function, so it should go against the time signature at some point). In this example I actually did it wrong by changing the beaming between them, but that’s just for show now to help you see it a little better at the moment.

If you want to assign numbers like we had the in the section above, this is a 3-3-2-2-2 cross-rhythm, or in reverse it’s a 2-2-2-3-3 cross-rhythm.

For our real world example of this one, I’ve chosen one of the most famous examples of a 3/4 - 6/8 cross-rhythm in a relatively recent piece - Leonard Bernstein’s score to West Side Story, in the song “America”. The main melody in the fast part is identical to the rhythm I’ve shown above. “I like to be in A-mer - i - ca” (underlining the accents). Note that if you go back to the beginning of this video, the first music you hear is the clave pattern from above!

The next pattern we’ll look at is the 3-in-4 or 4-in-3 pattern. This is Hemiola - using a 3 accent in a 2 feel, or a 2 accent in a 3 feel (4 is just double 2). This one pops up sometimes in classical music, so we finally have a chance to pull from that world in this chapter! The first example I’m going to use is from Gustav Holst’s suite The Planets, from the opening of the 4th movement, “Jupiter - the Bringer of Jolity”. The pattern we’re working with here can be shown this way. Here are eight 16th notes in 2/4:

Now we’re going to continually accent in groups of three:

You will notice that it takes 3 bars to get around to accenting the downbeat again. Now instead of accents, we’re going to use 3 cycling pitches instead, but do the same thing. Then we get the opening of this movement in the strings. We’re further going to have each line enter in a staggered fashion, and then we’re going to put a syncopated melody in the horns and low strings, and hope that we can count our parts and keep our place in the piece! You really have to have a strong internal sense of where the quarter note beat is in order not to get lost in this one! Feel free to listen to the whole piece here, this is one of my favorite movements from one of my favorite pieces in the repertoire - I provided the score video so you can see the whole thing if you want.

So that was 3-in-4, now for 4-in-3, we’re going to something completely different! This will be from J.S. Bach’s Sonata in Gm for Unaccompanied Violin, specifically the Presto at the end of the sonata. Rachel Barton Pine released an edition of the six sonatas and partitas, and she notes that in this movement, Bach has some hemiolas in the middle where there are groups of four 16th notes but we’re in 3/8 with six 16th notes per measure, so this pattern cuts across the barline. In her edition she bows it so you can see that part (mm. 33-35 in the snippet I’ve pulled here). I’ll start the video from the beginning though, as it goes so fast it would be hard to get your bearings if I started there. Also, note the 6/16 hemiolas (compound duple) against the 3/8 time signature in mm. 17-24.

This is Rachel Barton Pine performing the piece as well, from her album “Testament”, a complete set of the Bach Unaccompanied Violin Sonatas and Partitas. Note that I’ve only pulled the first half of this piece from the sheet music here. You can buy this edition from the publisher here (either ebook or print), or find free copies (of other editions) at IMSLP like usual.

If you aren’t a violinist, these are some of the most iconic works in the solo repertoire, and particularly the unaccompanied solo repertoire - all classically trained violinists have to learn at least some of these (at least a movement or two is usually expected for an undergraduate audition into a classical college program regardless of your desired major), and anyone who is a violin performance major in college will be doing the full set.

And for good measure, I might as well throw in one more video since I’ve gotten this deep into this one - here is Rachel Barton Pine herself explaining what she thinks about for this movement, from her series RBP on JSB that goes along with her album and her edition.

Our final section for this chapter will be Polyrhythm, which is related in some ways to cross-rhythm. The main difference is that you play both rhythms simultaneously rather than back-to-back, or just generally across the prevailing time signature. You can have cross-rhythms play against the straight rhythm simultaneously, in which case it becomes a kind of polyrhythm, but here we’ll focus on that concept in some detail, starting with what is probably the simplest and most common polyrhythm, 3-against-2. First, here’s an old video from Dr. Josh Wright (we met him with the Mazurka example in the Rubato section in Chapter 3 earlier). In this video, he explains how to work out 3-against-2, and the next type, 4-against-3. Rather than rehash what he said, I’ll leave his video here, and we’ll look at some examples of this in other pieces.

I will add that when I was at Berklee and was working on these polyrhythms as part of my cross-rhythm practice in my string improv class, they suggested that we spend time trying all of these patterns with multiple body parts on a regular basis - it may sound a little strange, but it really works! It seems obvious to do it between two hands, but also try it between one hand (on your knee or something) and one foot, or say one pattern out loud and tap the other with a hand or a foot. And make sure you trade off which body part is doing which rhythm part so you get comfortable with each of them everywhere. At CSUN, they are doing some polyrhythm training with their rhythm exercises in Musicianship, and they are having the students say one line and clap the other (and these are mixed lines where they aren’t doing just one constant rhythm the whole time with either side of that).

Another thing I’ve found since I learned to do these is that I have a hard time just clapping to a beat now - I can do it just fine, but I often find myself “body drumming” instead, and usually in one of these cross-rhythm patterns. If the piece is in 4/4, I am likely to tap straight 4 (often in 8th notes) with one hand and some kind of 3-3-3-3-2-2 pattern with the other against that. It works on most songs, even if they aren’t in cross-rhythm themselves. I just hope I don’t annoy the people around me too much when I do that!

As I’ve been going through my music library looking for examples for this guide, I’ve found examples of polyrhythm in a variety of pieces, especially solo piano - the romantic piano composers loved this technique. Josh’s video above mentioned Frederic Chopin’s Op. 72 Nocturne in E Minor. We’ll look at some others in a minute, but first I also found this pattern in this track from the Americana group The Civil Wars. The track is called “The Girl with the Red Balloon” from their album Barton Hollow, and it’s particularly interesting because it features 3-against-2 in the guitar between the bass notes and the lead line, while the melody is a relatively normal 3 melody, and then the guitar shifts to a straight-ahead waltz pattern (in 3), while the melody itself becomes the 2 against it. They go back and forth like this a few times on the track.