Ascending Accent Shift

Now for the fun stuff! In this exercise you’ll be playing the same four note sequence from the first “Ascending 4’s” exercise, but now you’ll be distributing the notes over a changing rhythm. Because the rhythm (one dotted quarter followed by six sixteenth notes) has a different number of notes than there are in the four note patter, the longer held note ends up being a different note each time. The ability to accent certain notes by displacing a pattern over a rhythm like this is a very useful technique and gets used to great effect in many Dream Theater riffs and licks.