The MOST INSANE Polymeter Ever!! (King Crimson - Discipline)

Added: 2026-05-12

[00:00:05]All right, fine. I'll do it.

[00:00:07]>> [music] [music] [music] >> I put out a lesson on the polymeters of the King Crimson classic frame-by-frame a few months ago and it absolutely exploded. It's the biggest video on my channel already. Honestly, I wasn't expecting much from that video, but I underestimated the fanaticism of the King Crimson fans. That being said, a lot of you mentioned in the comments the song Discipline off the same album as being an even crazier example of polymeter. And you know what? You were right. Now, that's not to say that frame-by-frame is simple because it definitely isn't, but this song has multiple sections of polymeter and in the specific section I'm going to cover today, there are five meters happening at once. Every band member is in their own time signature. Like most of my videos, this one will probably get demonetized. So, if you want to help support what I do here, consider joining my Patreon or becoming a channel member here on YouTube. I have sheet music and tabs available for this lesson as well as all of my other lessons if you join on either platform and I do have some availability at the moment for private lessons if you want some more in-depth personal instruction. Links to all of that is down below. I'm going to look specifically at the section that begins at 1 minute and 43 seconds in the song.

[00:01:47]This section does return later in the song with some variations and I'll briefly touch on those later, but I want to focus on this section because it's the clearest example of polymeter in the whole song. As I mentioned, every band member is in their own time signature.

[00:01:59]I'll go through each member and what they're playing and then talk about how they all sync up. First up is Adrian Belew's guitar part. I have this written in 5/4 even though none of the instruments are playing in 5/4 and I'll explain that later. But Belew's part looks like this. We have 15 16th notes or 15/16. This 15 is divided into smaller groups of five which are then divided even further into groups of three and two.

[00:02:27]The first two groups of five are identical.

[00:02:31]And the last group of five has a higher note on the fourth note of the pattern.

[00:02:36]So all together.

[00:02:40]This is all coming from F sharp minor pentatonic and that's actually what happens in the polymetric section in Frame by Frame as well.

[00:02:48]>> [music] >> With something this rhythmically complex, it's best to keep it simple harmonically. So we have this stagnant harmony here. The bass is rooted on F sharp. I'll talk about the bass part later. And the guitars are using this F sharp minor pentatonic. And this allows for this complex rhythm to not clash harmonically. You can change chords while you're doing polymeter but that adds a whole 'nother level of complexity and this is already complicated enough.

[00:03:10]Now this isn't a guitar lesson but I will talk briefly about how to play this. There's a couple different ways you could approach this. I'll talk about what Robert Fripp is actually doing and then explain a little bit what I was doing. At the beginning there, if you watch me, I was hybrid picking through most of this and really that's just because this pattern lasts for so long and the stamina needed to keep it going with picking just wasn't working for me.

[00:03:31]I am making this lesson for the rhythms to explain the rhythms, not as a guitar cover or to show off how great I am. I would have to practice this quite a bit more to do it with picking. I can do it up to speed for a certain number of repetitions and then my hand starts to tire up. So this is something I definitely need to practice myself but this is how Robert Fripp is playing this. What's weird is you have this odd pattern, right? You have a 15-note pattern. So, I strict alternate picking isn't going to work great because you're going to have to flip the pick around every single time. So, what Robert Fripp is doing is this what we call double down technique. So, he's basically starting all of the patterns of three and two with a downstroke. So, he's going down up down down up.

[00:04:10]>> [music] >> That's what he does the entire time, even when the higher one happens, too.

[00:04:18]>> [music] >> Of course, Robert Fripp's pattern changes later on, but he's still doing a similar thing once his pattern changes.

[00:04:24]I don't know what Belew is doing. I couldn't find a good video, but I did find a good video of Fripp playing this.

[00:04:28]So, that's what he's doing, and that's very tricky. They sort of down to down like over a string.

[00:04:36]Down skip a string to another down. And I can actually play this fairly well, but my hand starts to get tired after a couple repetitions.

[00:04:44]>> [music] >> And because this is so complex rhythmically and I had to think a lot while I was playing it, it was just easier for me to do the hybrid picking, which for me is a little more consistent. So, what I'm doing there is basically replacing the upstrokes with my middle finger. So, I'm middle finger up down middle finger down. [music] And it's not the ideal sound. It doesn't sound quite the same, but it worked well for me. I did work out a couple other ways to do this as well. You could do like a sweeping kind of thing.

[00:05:15]So, it's like down up up down up.

[00:05:23]That works pretty well. And then I also had an outside picking version. Up up down up down.

[00:05:31]>> [music] >> I really like that one, but it's just a little too fast for me to do that consistently.

[00:05:41]>> [music] >> I think I'd get really tired after doing that for almost an entire minute, which is how long this section last. I want to explain why I have this written in 5/4 before I get back into the actual lesson. One, it's because there's large parts of this song that are in 5/4, the intro, the section right after this, and a few other parts as well. And secondly, because the band all lines up after 12 bars of 5/4, and even though this pattern is 15/16 notes long, the smaller patterns of five inside of it do fit into 5/4 nicely. Now, there's no real right answer when it comes to notating polymetric music like this, but I try to do it in a way that makes some kind of sense. Next up, we have Robert Fripp's part. Fripp starts by playing with Belew for three repetitions of the 15/16 pattern, and then on the fourth time he cuts off the very last note to get a pattern of 14/16 or 7/8.

[00:06:33]If you watch my video on Frame by Frame, you'll recognize that this is exactly what Fripp did in that song as well, to cut off one note from the original pattern. This isn't a crazy idea, but what it does is make this wild phasing effect where the two guitars get out of sync, and then they eventually sync back up. Fripp plays the 15 pattern three times, then he plays the 14 pattern 10 times, and then he plays the last 10 notes of the 15 pattern as a way to sync back up with Belew's guitar. Here's the math. When the two guitars start to play opposing patterns, Belew plays 10 repeats of the 15 pattern before they sync back up, and Fripp plays 10 repeats of the 14 pattern plus 10 extra notes.

[00:07:10]10 * 15 is 150 16th notes. That's what Belew is doing. Fripp is playing 10 of the 14 pattern, so that's 140 notes, plus the extra 10 gives you 150. And then at that point, they play the 15 pattern together three more times before it moves to the next section of the song. So, in total, they play the 15 pattern three times, desync patterns for a total of 150 16th notes, and then sync back up and play the 15 pattern three more times. This fits into 12 bars of 5/4.

[00:07:40]>> [music] [music] [music] [music] [music] >> This actually does happen again later in the song in a slightly different way at about 2 minutes and 50 seconds into the song. Fripp in this case is actually starting the 14 pattern earlier on the second repetition instead of the fourth.

[00:08:31]So, it ends up syncing back with Belou earlier. It's also in a different key, but it's the same pattern. So, we're in C minor here instead of F# minor. There's also this last section of the song in 6/4.

[00:08:44]Guitar-wise, this is the same idea.

[00:08:46]Belou is playing a 12-note pattern here >> [music] >> in C# minor and Fripp cuts off the last note for a pattern of 11.

[00:08:57]>> [music] >> I don't want to cover this part much because the drums and bass are pretty straightforward, but that's not the case for the first polymetric section. Let's look at what Tony Levin is doing. I have this written in tab for a four-string bass. He's using a Chapman Stick here, so obviously it's not going to look exactly the same as what he's doing, but the rhythms and the notes are what I'm really focused on here. The pattern the bass is playing is a total of 34 16th notes or 17 eighth notes, so 17 eighth.

[00:09:25]I'm looking at this as two smaller groups, one that's five quarter notes long or 5/4 and one that's seven eighth notes long or 7/8. The 5/4 bit sounds like this.

[00:09:35]>> [music] >> So, you have this pattern.

[00:09:40]>> [music] >> You have this octave jump and then this chromatic rising figure.

[00:09:46]Which is coming from our F sharp minor blue scale.

[00:09:51]And obviously this works perfectly with the F sharp minor pentatonic on top.

[00:09:55]Their blue scale is a pentatonic scale with an added flat five, right?

[00:10:00]The 7/8 part looks like this.

[00:10:04]Starts with this same figure from earlier twice.

[00:10:07]>> [music] >> And then this six note figure.

[00:10:11]And then the whole 17/8 pattern begins again, but this second time it's starting on an offbeat instead of on the beat. So this whole pattern feels different against the quarter note pulse the second time it plays. This bass pattern plays a total of seven times. We have a total of 12 bars of 5/4 in this section or 60 quarter notes or 128th notes. 17 * 7 is 119 eighth notes, which means there's a remainder of one eighth note after Levin plays this pattern seven times. So he tags on the first eighth note of the pattern to fill out this extra space.

[00:10:44]Just those two notes and that lines him up with the band at the top of the next section. Lastly, let's look at the drums. There are two main elements here that Bill Bruford is playing. One is the steady quarter note in the kick drum and what sounds like a triangle. These are keeping that steady pulse that all the other instruments are fighting against.

[00:11:01]This is essential in this kind of polymeter. It gives the listener and the players something they can latch onto.

[00:11:06]When I was playing this I was really focused in on that kick drum using it like a metronome so I could track where I was and stay in tempo. The other part the drums are playing are in this low tom or it might be a timbale. In some live videos I've seen this is actually played by an auxiliary percussionist.

[00:11:21]Not sure exactly. You King Crimson fanatics can let me know, but here's what it's doing. This has a 7/16 pattern that starts on the fourth 16th note of the first measure. This pattern is 5 5 2 5 or 5 5 7 and there's one hit at the beginning of each of these groupings of 552 and 5. This pattern plays 14 times with the very last group of five shortened to four to line up with the beginning of the next section. There are a total of 240 16th notes in this whole section. 14 * 7 gives you 238, but we're starting on the fourth 16th note, so we add three to that to get 241. Then we subtract that last note to get 240. The math is probably unnecessary, but it does give you an idea of how these kinds of polymeters need to be adjusted to sync up with each other. Here we have this overall section of 12 bars of 5/4 or 60 quarter notes and each of these different meters happening simultaneously have to line up at the end of that, so some of them need to be adjusted accordingly once they reach that point. So they might not be all the way through their pattern once the end of this section happens, so you need to cut off a note or add a few notes to make it fit. To recap, we have the two guitars playing a 15/16 pattern which Robert Fripp then plays a 14/16 pattern against until they sync back up.

[00:12:32]The bass is in 17/8. The kick drum is in 5/4 just playing a steady pulse and the timbale or low tom is playing a 17/16 pattern starting on the fourth 16th note of the first measure. So really we have five different time signatures at the same time, a very extreme example of polymeter.

[00:12:52]>> [music] [music] [music] [music] [music] >> All of you who were saying this one was even more nuts than frame by frame were right. This might be the most insane polymetric section I've ever come across in Prague. And to think this was done more than 40 years ago is absolutely insane. Hopefully some of this made sense to you. Honestly, I'm still kind of wrapping my head around it myself.

[00:13:44]And if you want the sheet music for this, you can find it by joining my Patreon or becoming a channel member here on YouTube. And make sure you subscribe, hit the bell notification, like, comment, share, all of that good stuff. And I will see you in the next lesson. Till then, stay proggy.

[00:14:00]>> [music] [music] [music]