For all drummers, instrumentalists, singers, producers — and every musician ready for rhythmic freedom
You’ve spent years on harmony, melody and sounds
— but when it comes to rhythm?
Western education forgot to give you a system
Twice a week I'm posting a lesson to boost your imagination for improvisation, composition and beatmaking. Built on almost 20 years of independent research, we go all the way from basics to futurism with an ongoing symbiosis of intellectual and embodied practice.
Topics range from Konnakol syllables, polyrhythms (up to 31), subdivisions (beyond 8), odd meters, metric modulations, nested tuplets, and morphing… all the way to instructions on how to use and visualize them, plus fun stuff and general thoughts about practicing, music, and life.“
2 new lessons per week · group calls · cancel anytime · from basics to futurism
You can already play the notes! But there is a whole world of rhythm waiting to be explored.
Because we are rarely given a real system to practice it, our inner sense of rhythm stays restricted, and we hit the same walls:
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You can count and read a more complex rhythmic sequence, but you can't embody it yet. The groove stays in your head — leaving zero room to actually improvise or play freely.
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When improvising, composing and beatmaking, you fall back on the same familiar strategies because your rhythmic vocabulary lacks options.
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You have endless routines for scales, chords and synth patches, but probably way less structured systems to expand your rhythm.
This is where so much untapped potential in modern music still lies. When we shift our focus to rhythm, we open up an entirely new dimension of creative expression and connection.
Rhythm is deep work, just like pitches and sound design. But it is also a gateway to deep creative freedom.
The goal of this Patreon is not to give you a quick trick, but to fundamentally reshape how you perceive time. When you start training rhythm with a systematic approach, your playing or programming changes on a structural level:
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Complex meters and polyrhythms stop being things you might avoid and become structures you can actively create with.
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By internalizing the grid, you learn to outgrow it. Your brain gets the breathing room to transcend the meter, improvise, and hear new possibilities in real time.
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Your compositions and beats gain an entirely new depth because your execution can finally match your imagination.
This is a continuous, rewarding process to make your music and playing even more colorful and flexible.
Once you understand the core principles, the whole world becomes your practice room — you can train your rhythmic imagination anywhere, anytime, with or without an instrument.
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Twice a week, a new lesson drops. Short, focused video inputs on imagination and embodiment, opening new paths towards improvisation, composition and production. Practice right away with me, or take the input wherever you want to.
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The Ecosystem of Embodiment, Basics, Intellectuality, and Futurism. This is not a linear path where you leave the basics behind. It is a constant interweaving: we ground complex, mathematical structures deeply in your body so they become intuitive, and use raw embodiment to unlock the absolute edge of modern rhythm.
- Methods you won’t find anywhere else, featuring original concepts like the X-over-Y No Borders System — your key to instantly shifting between complex polyrhythms beyond 8 — and the Extended Rhythm Pyramid.
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Beyond Rhythm will follow: Access to my wider musical world of unconventional harmonic and melodic concepts, the Speculative Multiple Dimensions Concept for intervallic improvisation and composition, guitar techniques, and insights from my band and solo productions.
Your ongoing rhythm training — independent, deeply structured, and immediately actionable.
10€ / month
for around 9 lessons / month (ca. 8-15 minutes each) · group calls · cancel anytime · from basics to futurism
What my Patreons say:
"Even after university, I had no system for rhythm. This is an incredible development tool — a real rhythmic workout. With just the first lessons, I could feel myself making progress in rhythmic feeling, understanding, hearing, limb independence and sight-reading. It’s transformed my daily life as a musician and already given me so many ideas for composing." — Svetlana Marinchenko (professional pianist, bandleader and composer)
"Jo is a true rhythmic visionary. His understanding of rhythmical interdependence and polyrhythmic layering is one of a kind. He is constantly searching to expand and deepen his art, and through his process he has opened up whole new concepts and fields of study for the rest of us.
It is hard to find someone who has single-handedly expanded rhythmic conception in improvised music (or any music for that matter) to the extent that he has.
On top of that, he has always viewed himself as part of the broader jazz and improvised music community, and has done so much to open up spaces for performance and discourse. Jo presents his material with a modest and unassuming manner that is refreshing in these times. There is much more here than you may think—go listen and practice.“
— Prof. Marc Muellbauer (Jazz Double Bass Professor, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz)
Hi, this is Jo aka Beatdenker
I’m a guitarist, finger drummer, bandleader, composer, producer, creator, future socialist and privileged inhabitant of planet Earth. I dedicated my life to music to help it evolve — to make it more colorful, pluralistic, global, captivating, and witty.Through my music, my research, my real-utopian thinking and actions, and these tutorials, I hope to be a source of
inspiration and motivation for you. My aim here is simple: to enhance your musical imagination, precision, performance and production.
Around 50 of my Recursive Rhythm Get-Togethers — open, free, two-hour sessions with international professional musicians — are the living proof of this approach. Now I'm bringing all of it together in one place, for you.
Btw: This space means one thing: no bullshit — just fun, growth, love and respect.
Grow as a musician and a human. Here are some learnings beyond rhythm:
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Radical Imagination: Societal structures are fluid like rhythm. If rhythm can change, the systems we live in can change. Let’s envision alternative worlds.
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Focus Over Dopamine: Reclaiming our attention span. Trading quick digital kicks for patience and the pure joy of solving a complex "rhythmic puzzle".
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Countering Harmonic Hegemony: Western music theory lacks embodiment. We bring rhythmic ingenuity to the same level to unlock total creative freedom.
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XenoBeats & Empathy: Replacing the fear of the unknown (xeno) with global openness. Unfamiliar rhythms are an invitation to exchange and respect.
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Understanding Complexity: Practicing complex rhythms with people teaches us to tolerate ambiguities and resolve paradoxes simultaneously—empowering us to intervene in an overwhelming reality and build a world worth living for all.
Current members include novices, intermediates, music students, professionals, and professors from diverse countries and musical backgrounds.
Step out of the grid and step into a rhythmic world most musicians haven't even discovered yet.
Join the system on Patreon. Get your two weekly inputs, unlock the full archive, and let’s grow this community together.
Yippie n peace out
Jo
10€ / month
for around 9 lessons / month (ca. 8-15 minutes each) · group calls · cancel anytime · full archive
New Music Beats I - 2015
Substructures for Improvisable Complexistic rhythms
Some compositional notes on NMB 1-10
The works NMB 1-10 combine two basic (philosophical) ideas.
Namely to find freedom in something fixed, as well as to bring things from the future into the present.
First, the idea of the New York School around John Cage, Earle Brown, Morton Feldman etc., who experimented with the four components structure, form, material, method and their openness. Certain musical aspects - often organized nevertheless - are not fully notated. Which accordingly had to go hand in hand with new forms of notation.
Secondly, the idea of the postcontemporary. According to the speculative realist Armen Avanessian, the fact that time or temporality as such is changing. It is no longer linear, but rather things from the future determine our present more and more. For example, preemptive personality, preemptive politics and police work. What means in relation to music, for example, that certain algorithms already know which music can best be sold.
In order to circumvent a deterministic world or music, a positive vision of the future is needed, a self-determined and at the same time - in a positive sense - speculative one, as can be seen in jazz or the new complexity trend within new music. Electronic sounds and more complex rhythms are used more and more, because after centuries of searching for new acoustic sounds as well as harmonies and melodies, now researching musicians are thereby predicting the future of a stronger focus on rhythm and its necessity and try to put it into practice.
The aim of the ten works is to improvise with complexistic rhythms (higher polyrhythms, equidistances, isorhythms, double and triple rhythmic shifts, rhythms with two or three brackets and metric overlays) individually within a prestructured form and prestructured melodic material, but free in handling, performance, articulation, variation, expression and sound. This is supported by the notation form developed for this purpose, so that in the end a constantly new and individual postcontemporary new music can emerge.
The instrumentation (the frequently suggested combination of guitar (g), bass (b) and drums (d) is not mandatory) as well as the choice between acoustic and electronic sounds is free. Even if more or less automatically complex beats are created by the defined frame.
The 43 sound examples are recorded with guitar, guitar with octave and MPC drum samples and selected in a way that on the one hand it clarifies the notation and on the other hand it presents one individual manifestation of the plural contingencies. The works were composed in autumn 2015 and the examples were recorded in spring 2016.