something sounds odd about this song’s tempo, particularly that cymbal (maybe?) that’s going like 3 times faster than the rest of the drums. i thought it was in 3/3 in one place, but it was going too fast for my poor little tempo-challenged brain. does anyone know the deal with the time signature?
3/3 isn’t a time signature… the bottom number must be divisible by 4. From my counting I’ve determined this song to be mostly in 6/4. If it were in the usual 6 feel, which is 6/8, you probably would have been able to count it a lot more easily.
Cheers
WTF are you talking about, Forty-Six&Two? You can have time signatures with any numbers on the top or bottom. Nobody feed him. 
gypsymoth3, I don’t know the song, but if the cymbals are going 3x as fast, try ignoring them and paying attention to the rest of the drums…
Ummm… no you can’t. Well, you can but not for any practical reason. I mean a composer can choose to write his music that way or any other way, to serve some conceptual purpose I’d imagine, but the bottom number is either 2 (rare), 4, 8, or 16 99% of the time. Theoretically it can be 32 or 64 but there’s just no reason for it.
A 3 on the bottom would theoretically mean that a quarter note triplet represents one beat of time. There is absolutely no reason to do this. It would be like asking for (x - 6/2)[sup]2[/sup] = 81 bagels, instead of simply asking for a dozen.
I don’t know the song, but if the cymbals are going 3X faster than other drums, the bottom number is most likely 8.
sorry… typo. i meant 3/4.
I don’t know the answer, but for anyone who wants to give the track a listen, you can do it here at the official APC webpage.
I’m pretty sure it’s in 3 - my guess is 3/4. The cymbals (I don’t know exactly what’s producing that percussive sound) that you think are going 3 times faster are going 4 times faster. So if the beat is represented as a quarter note, the rhythm of the cymbals would be represented by 16th notes.
There’s a drum rhythm underneath the words “desparate and powerless, weak and powerless” that’s quarter, dotted eighth, dotted eighth, eighth.
You could record the analog sound to a file on your pc, then use some tempo stretcher (like a Winamp plug-in) to slow down the song so you could hear it better. Just playing it at half-speed could help.
First, this might have been better posted to Cafe Society. But then I probably wouldn’t have read it and wouldn’t be giving you this answer, so…
After listening to interface2’s audio link, I’m inclined to think the entire song is in 3/4. What might be throwing you off are our friend Maynard’s fine vocals, which sound like a four-against-three figure: the rhythm he’s singing in the verses is essentially 16th-8th-16th-8th-16th-8th-16th-8th, with strong accents on the sixteenth notes; so he’s singing four “beats” in a three-beat bar.
Also, I wrote something here about the drumbeats falling in odd places in the chorus, but on preview I see rowrrbazzle beat me to it. Although I’m not sure that there’s an initial quarter note - it may be a quarter rest.
In summary, plain text is an awful medium to attempt to describe musical notation.
yeah, i noticed it was probably the vocals that were throwing me off. this is why i wish i had one of those awesome systems that can focus on one instrument… among other reasons.
Can I have -6 bagels with that?
yep, 3/4.
nope, 6/4
count the beats in the bass intro, definitely 6 per measure
i have a question by the way, is 6/4 essentially the same thing as 12/8 or 18/12?
Yeah, I agree that the intro section is 6/4. I was going to mention it but I was in a rush. The following section though becomes a clear 3/4. I haven’t listened to the whole thing through so I don’t know what happens next.
No, 6/4 is NOT 12/8.
8 is used on the bottom when the subdivisions of the beat are divisible by 3. So 12/8 really means 4 beats each divided in 3. i.e.:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12
6/4 is counted: 1 & 2 & 3 & 4 & 5 & 6 &
And again, there is no such thing, in any conventional sense, as 18/12, because there is no (commonly used) twelfth-note.
Howyadoin,
Ignorant question. [sub]Mamma always told to go with my strengths…[/sub]
Does the beat have to resolve at some multiplier of the bottom number to turn the construct around? That’s what the 6/4 does if you follow the bass drum, right? This assumes a Western arrangement of some sort…
-Rav
After listening to the track from the link above, I’m still kind of clueless. Somewhere around 2:00, it seems to change beat and at that point it sounds distinctly 6/8, but then goes back to… whatever it was before. I would also like to point out that occasionally two instruments can be playing simultaneously in different time signatures. For example, one instrument could be in 2/4 while another is in 6/8. That could be better understood by changing all the 6/8 stuff from “1 2 3 4 5 6” to 8th-note-triplets within the 2/4 beat, which is “1 and a 2 and a” but that can be a little harder to read, even though they are played exactly the same way. My point is just that the question “What is the time signature of this song?” might be a little too simple for this particular song.
Also, this thread would do much better in Cafe Society, as someone said already.
I think you are right. At that point (for about 8 bars beginning at around 2 mins.) there is an interesting polyrhythm. The drums are actually in 4/4. But the bass, guitar, and vocals all strongly suggest 6/8.
In rock, this is true. If you venture into other sorts of music, you can run into some truly wacked-out time signatures. My ex once played some Bartok piece which had a signature of…crap, something like 3+2+2 over 4. You don’t see stuff like that much, though, even in classical music.
Unfortunately, everything I know about time signatures just flew out of my head.
I take it to be 6/8 but counted like 1 2 3 4, 1 2 instead of the usual 1 2 3, 1 2 3.
3+2+2/4 is 7/8, just with the subdivisions written out for clarity.
You will find this occassionally in popular music. The most common of these rhythms is 3+3+2 over 8, but is almost always written out 4/4. (With good reason, too, as the back beat tends to be in 4/4 and 3+3+2 part is a rhythmic counterpoint to the 4/4.) If anyone knows the musical “Pippen,” there’s a song called “Extraordinary” in which the “bridge” is actually written out in 3+3+2 over 8. It’s not that weird at all; just usually not notated as such.
7/8 is rare in most pop music, but does creap up a lot in folk music (especially Balkan music.) Once you get the feel for it, it is not difficult at all to keep time to it.
As for time signatures over 32, you do see them creep up from time to time in classical music. But they are few and far between. I’ve never seen a tune in a sig over 64.
We’ve had a discussion of time sigs in pop music before several times here, but I’ll point out that “Silent Lucidity” by Queensryche starts out in 15/16, Juliana Hatfield’s “Spin the Bottle” is in 5/4, the “Sun, Sun, Sun Here it comes” part in the the Beatles “Here Comes the Sun” is something like 11/8 to 4/4 to 7/8.
I haven’t heard the song linked, but if it does count out to 1 2 3 4, 1 2, then it’s probably in 6/4.