What is syncopation?

(Meta-level note: I rewrite this explainer every few years and now that I have a couple of new music theory gigs, I am rewriting it yet again.)

Syncopation is to rhythm what dissonance is to harmony: conflict, surprise, defiance of expectation. If you place your rhythmic accents where listeners expect them, then the music gets boring fast. If you place them where listeners don’t expect them, that’s where the fun starts.

To understand syncopation, you need to understand the concept of strong and weak beats (and subdivisions of beats). The strong beats (and subdivisions) are where you expect accents and other important musical events to fall. If you accent weaker beats (or subdivisions), syncopation is the result. The weaker the beats that you are accenting, the more intense the syncopation.

So what are strong and weak beats? Imagine a measure of 4/4 time as a clock face, with the downbeat at 12 o’clock. The downbeat is the strongest beat by definition. You find the other beats by dividing the circle in half, and by dividing those halves in half. You find subdivisions of the beats by subdividing the circle further. The more times you have to subdivide the circle to get to a certain beat or subdivision, the weaker it is.

Beat three is the strongest beat aside from the downbeat. You only have to divide the circle in half once to get there. This beat is so strong as to function almost as a second downbeat.

If you divide the circle again, you get beats two and four, the backbeats. They are weaker than beats one and three.

Dividing again gives you the eighth note offbeats. These are all weaker than any of the four onbeats. The weakest ones are the ones closest to the strong beats.

Subdividing again gives you the sixteenth note offbeats, which are weaker than the eighth note offbeats. Accenting the sixteenth note offbeats is where you get those really advanced James Brown funk rhythms.

You could keep subdividing infinitely if you wanted, but pop usually doesn’t use note values smaller than sixteenth notes except in microrhythmic nuances that you can’t notate anyway.

(By the way, I have been limiting my discussion here to 4/4 time on purpose. You can use syncopation in triple and odd meters too, but it’s harder to understand in those contexts.)

How do you use this information in practice? Randomly accenting the sixteenth note offbeats doesn’t usually sound good. It helps if you have a system. There are two especially important syncopations in Anglo-American pop: the backbeat and tresillo. Let’s take them one at a time.

The term “backbeat” means a rhythm pattern with strong accents on beats two and four. That accent could come from a snare drum, hi-hats, handclaps, tambourine, guitar strums, or any other percussive sound. Accented backbeats have been a constant in American popular and vernacular styles from ragtime to country to blues to gospel to R&B to rock to funk to reggae to hip-hop. In fact, it is such a constant that you might not consider it to be a syncopation at all. The whole point of syncopation is that it’s unexpected, but anyone who listens to any pop music will expect the backbeat. In a passage that cites me, Nicole Biamonte explains:

Because it is an essential component of the meter, functioning as a timeline—a rhythmic ostinato around which the other parts are organized—I consider the backbeat in rock music to be an instance of displacement consonance rather than dissonance… the backbeat is contextually consonant because it is a basic rhythmic unit that typically continues throughout the song, with no expectation of a resolution to a consonant pattern. A pitch-based analogy is the consonant status of the dominant 7th chord in the context of the blues: it is the basic harmonic unit, which does not resolve… temporal dissonance in rock music is typically expressed by patterns that create tensions against the underlying backbeat ([6.2]).

Since the backbeat is practically a strong beat at this point, you can get very exciting syncopation by displacing one or both of the backbeats. In Herbie Hancock’s “Chameleon“, drummer Harvey Mason plays the snare on beat two a sixteenth note earlier than you’re expecting, and the effect is excitingly disruptive.

The other most important syncopation in pop is the one you get from grouping subdivisions in units of three. This most commonly takes the form of the tresillo rhythm, a grouping of 3+3+2 subdivisions (usually sixteenth notes in current pop.) The accent on that second group of three is always on a weak subdivision, but the underlying logic of three against four polymeter keeps it from sounding weird or random. Tresillo forms the first half of 3-2 son clave, which is itself a hugely important rhythm across American pop styles and eras.

You can extend the logic of the backbeat and tresillo to create your own syncopated rhythms. Try placing hi-hats on each eighth note offbeat to make a kind of meta-backbeat. Try using groups of three subdivisions that don’t start on the downbeat, or try constructing rhythms from groups of five or seven.

Last thing: let’s distinguish syncopation from swing. People sometimes use the terms interchangeably, but they are different concepts. Syncopation means accenting surprising metrical locations within the bar, while swing is a displacement of every offbeat subdivision. Another way to put this: syncopation highlights unexpected cells in the metrical grid; swing is a warping of the metrical grid itself.

People mix up syncopation and swing because musicians who use one will frequently use the other. However, you can have swing without syncopation and vice versa. Freddie Green, the guitarist in Count Basie’s band, hardly ever uses syncopation — he plays a steady “chunk chunk chunk chunk” on every quarter note — but he swings like crazy. Meanwhile, if you listen to Latin music, you will hear layers of complex syncopation, but you will probably not hear much swing.