Rhythmic Subdivisions

One final piece of music theory: your use of subdivisions — how many beats you divide a bar into. Quarter notes (“one, two, three, four”), eighth notes (“one and two and”), sixteenths, or even thirty-second notes (super fast, almost never used in worship). The point is you can fit a lot of notes into a single bar.

The problem: everyone playing the same rhythm

Here’s the trap: when everybody plays the same rhythm, it gets sloppy — and crowded. Take This Is Amazing Grace. If the hi-hats are doing sixteenth notes, and the electric guitar is doing sixteenths, and the bass is doing sixteenths, and the acoustic is doing sixteenths, it falls apart fast. Not only does it get sloppy — because no group of musicians can stay perfectly aligned — it also gets so crowded you can’t discern what’s happening. There’s no clarity.

The fix: spread the subdivisions out

Assign different amounts of subdivision to different instruments so each one takes its turn:

• Hi-hats: sixteenth notes
• Electric guitar: a busier sixteenth-note line
• Bass: eighth notes
• Acoustic guitar: quarter notes
• Piano: whole notes

When you spread it out like this, sound comes in and out at different rates, each instrument outlines the chords better, and the players make space for one another — not just in the frequency spectrum, but in the rhythmic timing spectrum.

Don’t clutter your subdivisions up. Spread things out. Assign different amounts of subdivision to different instruments. I promise you this will clean up your parts and clarify what is coming through your speakers.

Application

• Listen to one of your busier songs. Are multiple instruments hammering the same subdivision? That’s likely your sloppiness and clutter.
• Assign each instrument a distinct subdivision — hi-hats fast, piano sustained, others in between — and re-run the song. Does it clean up?
• Pair this with what you learned about frequencies: spacing your band in both time and frequency is how arrangements gain clarity.