At the other end of the trained musician spectrum, I was in a garage band in college with my roommate as the drummer - he had been playing about a year. Once we were cranking through Louie Louie, and when I started playing the solo, the whole song fell apart. I looked over and he said, “I don’t know man, I was following you.”
Hearing that from my drummer made me mentally recalibrate just how not ready for prime time this band was.
FWIW, I converted the time signature to 12/8 in Garage Band and didn’t change anything else. It seem to accept it. It still plays exactly the same.
Here’s what it looks like.
Great story! Did things eventually improve for you (or him)?
I could be completely wrong about this, but a lifetime of observation has led me to conclude that musical ability is something you either have or you don’t. Obviously, practice and experience will greatly improve one’s skills, but if the basic spark isn’t there, no amount of hard work will lead you to acquire it. There has to be a root level of “feel” for music there somewhere.
While classical music is a bit more strict rhythmically, there is the idea of “rubato” which is analogous somewhat to swing, especially in Romantic era classical music (although it exists as a form of expression in most classical music.) There’s a couple different ways of going about it. Literally “rubato” means “robbed,” so one idea is to rob time from some notes in a phrase and make them up in other notes. Kind of like “swing” in that way, where time is “robbed” from the second half of an eighth note and added to the first, although in classical rubato where the “time robbing” occurs is usually over the course of a series of notes in a phrase. One type of rubato has the accompaniment steady (like the left hand in piano), while the melody freely pushes and pulls against the pulse. Another type has both playing freely with the timing.
Also, there are also notations like “ad lib.” or “a carpaccio” which indicates to the performer to vary the tempo at their discretion.
So, music notation is not as “exact” as it seems to be, even in classical music, although it’s more obvious in rock/jazz/folk music.
It would better be notated as quarter-eighth-quarter-eighth,etc., with a faster tempo rather than eighth-sixteenth. That would be the more usual way for that tempo and that beat.