I’d love to know what the time sig is for the first two songs on this album:
And I understand basic 3/4 or 4/4 but struggle in determining more obscure time signatures. Is there some easy way to determine these?If you feel an eighth note pulse in the first one, you basically have three bars of 4/4, followed by a bar of 2/4.
In the second one, you have a similar idea. You can count it as 6/4.
I’m not 100% sure that’s the best way of notating it, but that’s how I’d count it.
Yup.
I’d write the second one as 3/4.
The underlying drum part and the cycling of the guitar line suggests a count of 6 to me. I’m counting it as kick drum on 1, 3, 5 and snare on 2,4,6. (I’m counting each guitar note as an eighth note.) Otherwise, if we’re both counting the same beats, you end up with a weird 3/4 where it’s “kick-snare-kick” for the first measure and “snare-kick-snare” for the second measure.
Now, if you’re hearing those guitar as sixteenth notes, I guess I could see 3/4, but it just doesn’t feel right to me to notate it that way.
The fun thing with that second song is the guitar part is playing eighth notes in a cluster of 4+5+3 over a straightforward 6/4 drum part. So, you have 12 beats in both, but the 5+3 in the guitar part gives it a bit more rhythmic interest.
Actually, now that I think about it, 3/2 might be a reasonable way to write it out. It gets confusing, because 6/4 is usually divided 3+3/4 (compound) and not 2+2+2/4(simple). 3/2, though, usually is a simple meter subdivided this way.
At any rate, however it’s written out, “six” is the important number to remember. (Looking at Youtube and other sources, though, it seems using 6/4 for a simple meter is becoming more and more common. That’s how I’d notate it, at any rate.)
Good point. I was paying more attention to guitar, bass, and vocals, all of which work great as 3/4, but the backbeat does imply a 6-count measure.
I think 3/2 would be confusing … mostly on the count-in. 
I know 6/8 is compound, but wasn’t sure that 6/4 would be. The rule for “compound” seems a bit arbitrary!
I agree. I did in the meantime find this discussion on that type of time signature, and it looks like one publisher did go the 3/2 route to indicate a 6/4 measure in simple time, but the majority opinion seems to be that it should have just been written as 6/4. I agree. Much easier to read 6/4+5/4+2/4+5/4+6/4 rather than 3/2+5/4+2/4+5/4+3/2 (well, for certain values of “much.”)
First of all, a “time signature” is not an absolute construct. We have absolutely no information from the sound alone if the basic beat is a quarter note, eighth note, half note, or any other division possible from 64th to double whole note. Note values are not absolutely time-dependent, only relatively so.
However, modern convention is to use a quarter note as the most common beat division (200 years ago, this was not the case). Although I understand what other posters have felt as 3/4, 4/4 or alternating meters, I just counted out the entire first song on the album in 4/4, and while not all accents fall on beat one of four, I came out with the last beat landing on beat one of four.
So counting the entire cut as 4/4 seems to work without resorting to 3/3, 4/4, etc. It may not be necessary to use anything else other than 4/4. So why do it?
(I’d have to try it again to be sure, but the song really grates on my ears, and I really don’t want to.)
ETA: The backbeat never varies, so some division of 2 would be prudent.
For me, it’s because it helps to feel the “one”, especially the first song. I find it easier to know where I am in a bar that way. It’s three counts of four, and one count of two, and then we’re back at the one. With 4/4, half the time, the “one” would come in on beat three. To me, that’s more difficult to read and count than 4/4 bars with a 2/4 bar appended at the end–that is literally how I count stuff like this when playing. Plus it just “feels” that way: like a part of measure has been cut, and that bar of 2/4 is why it feels that way. And it’s not terribly unusual notation, either. I see stuff like that a lot in church music, when a beat gets removed or a bar cut in half, so a 4/4 song has 2/4 or 3/4 sprinkled throughout it. Also, see the verses for “All You Need is Love” for example, although that’s 4/4 and 3/4 alternating, so it might feel more off-kilter writing it in 4/4, since it’s not an even split of a 4/4 bar, but a 4/4 with a single beat removed.
I’d have put the first at 2/4 (also known as cut time) and the second piece as 6/4, or maybe 12/4, depending on how you like to count the beats. You could even put it as 9/4-3/4 mixed signature. Just a quick opinion. Others have given nice explanations already.
Moderator Action
Since this is about music, it is best suited to CS.
Moving thread from General Questions to Cafe Society.
You could write it all as 4/4 but a lot of the phrasing would start and stop in the middle of measures. Since it is mostly 4/4 but with some abbreviated 2/4 phrasing it makes more sense to me to write it that way.
As noted though, time signatures aren’t absolute and you can certainly write the same piece in multiple different ways.
You could write it out that way, but the phrasing to me seems more suited to 4/4 for most of it. That’s more a matter of opinion than anything else though.
Obligatory link to Unsquare Dance
I would say the first song is in relatively straight 4/4, the second song in 6/4, and the third one, I can’t quite make out and is really complex.
As an aside, here’s a really nice song in 6/4.
Hmm…I wonder if we’re all counting the same way. Here’s what I hear (with an eight note pulse, so the first kick falls on ONE and the snare falls on two and four, denoted by the asterisk):
“ONE-and-two*-and-three-and-four*-and, ONE-and-two*-and-three-and-four*-and, ONE-and-two*-and-three-and-four*-and-ONE-and-two*-and” and back to the beginning of the phrase.
That said, the drums plod along in 4/4. There’s no clear sense of where the beginning of the phrase is from them, so the guitar line could be playing in a sequence slightly offset from the drums (or the 2/4 interpretation works for me, too.)
Yeah, I was going by the snare drums, too.
The first one sounds like straight forward 4/4 to me. The guitar part shifts around a bit, but the feeling of the piece is definite in 4.
The second one sounds to me like an oddly divided 6/4. Normally 6/4 is thought of as two sets of three, but this is most definitely a set of 4 followed by a set of two. If I were transcribing it, I’d keep it simple: make it 2/4 throughout, but put in phrasing marks to indicate that the first and second measures of each three measure set go together. The simpler you make it, the easier it is for the person who’s reading it to read it.
I dunno. I still feel a bar of 2/4 in it. If I count straight four through, I end up on the wrong side of the one (in other words, on the three) after the guitar phrase repeats. That is to say, my brain wants to hear the repetition of the guitar phrase as the one, not the three, which is where it is every second time if you count it in four. It seems like the drummer could count in four and not have any problems, as the drums don’t really deviate and give a give a clue of where the one is, but counting the guitar line, I would count it as I gave it above. Then again, maybe I’m weird that way.