Quintuplets

I’ve been thinking about quintuplets, or fives, a lot in my practicing lately. I’ve been trying to implement them in my fusion playing as well as the hip hop feel best described as Dilla beats.

In my experience, 5 and 7 note groupings tend to get overlooked by teachers when they are working with student musicians. This was certainly the case for me. For many, 5s and 7s are unusual, exotic, and difficult to master. I believe if we start teaching students about these groupings at a young age, they will come as naturally as 8th and 16th notes.

What I’ve also noticed is that there seems to be no universal way of counting quintuplets in western music. In fact, everyone who responded to a deeply unscientific poll I posed on Instagram yesterday had a different answer for how the count fives. Many people use different syllable words such as ‘serendipity’ and 'hippopotamus.’ For some reason I was taught ‘homosexual’ for 5s and ‘homosexuality’ for 7s, which is obviously extremely problematic! Fellow percussionist Jeremy Yaddaw provided me with a few 5-syllable phrases, including ‘back to stick control’ and get me out of here,’ which I found particularly amusing. A few people also suggested counting 12,123 or 123,12 depending on how the phrase is grouped.

I find myself using a combination of methods for counting 5s. Sometimes I’ll use a 5-syllable word, sometimes I may just count to 5, sometimes I may just concentrate on ending on the correct hand at the correct time. I’m curious how YOU count 5s. Please comment below!