Hi, music lovers!
I’m trying to get the bass line from Dazed and Confused under my fingers. Most of it is not too bad, except for the part that starts around 3:30:
So, my plan is to start slow and work my way up to it. I think that part is moving along briskly at 184 bpm, or thereabouts.
That got me curious about the official temp of the song, and everywhere it says it’s 87 bpm. However, when I tap the quarter notes (?) on my metronome, I’m getting 52 bpm (say, each of the notes on the downward walk that starts on G and moves down chromatically). If, instead, I tap triplets, I get around 155 (not surprisingly). None of these are multiples of 87.
What rhythm in the song is 87? Also, is it my imagination, or does the song tempo move around a bit?
I see 52 bpm on the first sheet music hit.
Tapping it out, I’m getting the same result as you. When it switches from a 12/8 feel to a 4/4 feel (the foot high-hat stomps and “ah-ah” call-and-response between Plant and Bonham with JPJ, I’m getting a tempo of around 80 or 160, depending on where you’re counting the quarters (I’d call it quarter note = 160 or possibly notate it as cut time with half note = 80, though you don’t typically see cut time notated in popular music.) The tempo change kind of makes sense in relation to the rest of the song. The main part of the song is, when notated in 12/8, dotted quarter equals 52. If you figure out what a quarter note would be in that 12/8 tempo, it’s 78 of them in a minute. So, basically the tempo almost exactly tripled at this part (from 52 to about 180). I assume they just did it by feel.
(ETA: Actulally, it needn’t be done by feel. You just take those triplets 123/456 and just keep tapping those out with the hi-hat foot, but instead of making the beat 1234456, you subdivide those exact ones as [ib]12341**2, etc. So if you keep the same timing for each hit, you get a tempo of dotted quarter = 52 in the first, and quarter = 156 in the latter, which is exactly our tempos. Or tempi. Or whatever.)
And, yeah, it does seem the tempo does waver around slightly – like the end I’m getting closer to 54 bpm for that verse part, but that’s not unusual in the days before slavish adherence to the click track and putting everything “on the grid.” I miss some of that natural ebb and flow.
Man, I totally mucked up the coding there. Let’s try again.
123456123456
turns into
123412341234
And let me correct the tempo:
If the top is 52 on the bolded beats (so dotted quarter in 12/8), then the bottom tempo in 4/4 is 78 bpm. But the feel, to me, is more like 12341234, with every beat as the quarter, which would mean quarter = 166 if you’re notating it that way.
That should be 52 to about 160, not 180. I really need to proof these better before submitting.
OK, 52 bpm makes sense. I’m glad my sense of rhythm isn’t so bad that I’m confusing 52 with 87!
Here are a few sites that show it at 87, which I don’t understand at all:
https://tunebat.com/Info/Dazed-and-Confused-Led-Zeppelin/6hu1f1cXSw7OAqhpSQ2zDy
https://www.notediscover.com/song/led-zeppelin-dazed-and-confused#:~:text=Dazed%20and%20Confused%20by%20Led%20Zeppelin%20is%20in%20the%20key,on%201969-01-12.
I wonder if those numbers are being generated by some algorithm and it’s getting confused by something in the song.
ETA: Just saw your second post – yeah, I figured out what you meant.
Yeah, I’m wondering if it’s some automatic tempo marking program that analyzed the beat peaks on the whole song and just, basically, ended up averaging out the tempo or something like that.