chemn
shmemn
Polyrhythmic.
Getting to grips with time signatures...halp!
- Thread starter The Groke
- Start date
Polyrhythmic.
This is an imcomplete very short excerpt I wrote last weeK:
http://www.soundclick.com/bands/page_songInfo.cfm?bandID=971832&songID=7877676
It uses C as it's base throughout.
Roughly speaking : bar 1 goes for the tritonic scale, bar 2 whole tone scale, bar 3 chromatic scale, bar 4-6 whole tone scale, bar 7-8 C minor, then bars 4-8 are repeated before abruptly coming to a stop ('cos I haven't written any more).
I'm no masisve musical expert, I know just enough theory so I can write cod-classical music for my own amusement. I'm not 100% sure what you mean by listening to something in the wrong key. I think the more complex the music is and the more it departs from traditonal tonal music the harder it is to hear a key signature.
Modal music can often appear (when seen as sheet music) to be in one key, but when it is played doesn't sound like it's in that key at all. E.g. something written in the Dorian mode on D looks like it's in C major, but infact is not in any major or minor key and sounds nothing like C major.
8ball
As seen on TikTok
It sounds like the backdrop to a silent movie about seasickness.
I was guitarist in a punk band so my knowledge is way more limited than yours.
I mean like when you have the car radio on and it's too quoet or there's a lot of road noise and whatever and you might hear a song in C but due to the fact that you can't hear it properly and the shared intervals you start listening in G with all the tonal expectations that implies but it sounds like when you're looking at a 'magic eye' picture and you've over-focused - there are valleys where the hills should be etc.
Then you finally plus into what the real key is and it's like everything pops back into place, or like when you finally understand some mathematical principle you've been struggling with.
It sounds like the backdrop to a silent movie about seasickness.
Yep, the dissonant unresolved sound of the tritonic scale is quite a cheap (and slightly cheesy) way to create a feeling of drama/tension, that's the sort of silent movie melodrama sound. The whole tone scale has that unsettling seasickness sound.
What the tritonic, wholetone (and chormatic scale) have in common is that the interval between each successive note on the scale is the same. So whilst I've said it's based on C, in many ways each notes in the sections based on these scales have the same importance which undermines the idea of a tonic (a note on which the scale is based).
I sort of know what you mean: like when you use a filter to get rid of some of the frquencies. and your left with a tinny sound that's lost soem of the harmony.
The Groke
hot hail/Paging Dr. Beat
But, The Groke, if you're making each of those beats a crotchet, you must be operating at some stratospheric rate of bpm!
140
8ball
As seen on TikTok
Um, I don't know enough to say either way but it doesn't sound quite what I'm talking about. I do find that when I mention this to people they usually report experiencing it in the next couple of weeks so I think it's something that's quite common but most people ignore until they're sort of watching out for it.
Like how I never noticed that every other car on the road seems to be a Nissan Micra until I got one myself.
Time signatures are conventions. And like all conventions, they're usually used to make things simpler - and if you're working with more than one musician, one of the things that makes things simpler is a way of knowing where in a song - or in the rhythmic sequence - you are, hence time signatures. I have to say, I think I'd find the idea of scoring (ie notating) music in two different time signatures rather unhelpful, and an affectation I couldn't see being used for practical purposes.
In practice, lots of music might be scored in one time signature and played in another, in the sense that the rhythmic flow progresses across barlines without any obvious regard for them: Samuel Barber's famous Adagio is a good example of this, or some heavily syncopated Latin music, where you'll often hear 3 being played against 4, or 2 against 3 (big blues/jazz thing, that, too).
Again, with keys, much musical notation is convention. It so happens that certain sequences of musical pitches please our ears, and that's why most folk musics tend to revolve around the pentatonic scale, or, particularly in Eastern music, what we in Western musical culture call the harmonic minor scale.
All of these scales are effectively just ways of relating musical pitches to each other, and when they're notated, that relationship is being documented. We use key signatures, more than anything else, because we had to have an absolute standard for pitches, which meant that if you wanted a piece of music to be played on a scale starting at a pitch of (say) 4/3 the frequency of another note, you need to be able to indicate it in some way - hence musical note names and key signatures.
So "music without a key signature" is a slightly ambiguous concept. Most classical musicians would say "Ah, you mean C major" (because it doesn't have any sharps or flats in its key signature"), but then someone else might say, "no, look at 12 tone music", as 12-tone doesn't have a key as such...or you could just go for cocophany
Lots of people really jibe at the whole tyranny of musical theory - keys, time signatures, conventional harmony and so on - because it feels to them like it's cramping their freedom to express themselves musically. But, actually, when you look more closely, you see that a lot of these conventions are basically codifications of stuff that has been what people tend to feel sounds "good" over the centuries. They're not unbreakable laws, but without them making good music becomes a question of more luck than judgement; with them, someone who has learned the techniques and understood the rules can then fall back on his creativity and skill to know just when and how to break them to best effect...Bach was rather good at this, for example.
In practice, lots of music might be scored in one time signature and played in another, in the sense that the rhythmic flow progresses across barlines without any obvious regard for them: Samuel Barber's famous Adagio is a good example of this, or some heavily syncopated Latin music, where you'll often hear 3 being played against 4, or 2 against 3 (big blues/jazz thing, that, too).
Again, with keys, much musical notation is convention. It so happens that certain sequences of musical pitches please our ears, and that's why most folk musics tend to revolve around the pentatonic scale, or, particularly in Eastern music, what we in Western musical culture call the harmonic minor scale.
All of these scales are effectively just ways of relating musical pitches to each other, and when they're notated, that relationship is being documented. We use key signatures, more than anything else, because we had to have an absolute standard for pitches, which meant that if you wanted a piece of music to be played on a scale starting at a pitch of (say) 4/3 the frequency of another note, you need to be able to indicate it in some way - hence musical note names and key signatures.
So "music without a key signature" is a slightly ambiguous concept. Most classical musicians would say "Ah, you mean C major" (because it doesn't have any sharps or flats in its key signature"), but then someone else might say, "no, look at 12 tone music", as 12-tone doesn't have a key as such...or you could just go for cocophany
Lots of people really jibe at the whole tyranny of musical theory - keys, time signatures, conventional harmony and so on - because it feels to them like it's cramping their freedom to express themselves musically. But, actually, when you look more closely, you see that a lot of these conventions are basically codifications of stuff that has been what people tend to feel sounds "good" over the centuries. They're not unbreakable laws, but without them making good music becomes a question of more luck than judgement; with them, someone who has learned the techniques and understood the rules can then fall back on his creativity and skill to know just when and how to break them to best effect...Bach was rather good at this, for example.
8ball
As seen on TikTok
I agree with all of this, but then I think there is also a lot to be said for being able to break them in an uneducated manner too (ie. breaking the rules just because you don't know what they are). The Kristin Hersh song I posted up looks like a case of the product of an 'accident' while two people were sitting around playing stuff and I don't think that would have happened with a pre-agreed time sig.
I never really got the 'feeling' for where the bar lines should be - it always felt a bit arbitrary, but then I just learnt to play by ear, coming to some sketchy half-understanding of written music and theory much later. The emphases in my head always seem to fall somewhere away from the bar lines. Maybe that's not the point, though.
A friend of mine who learnt fretless bass guitar by ear hates fretted basses because 'she can't play the notes inbetween'.
I never really got the 'feeling' for where the bar lines should be - it always felt a bit arbitrary, but then I just learnt to play by ear, coming to some sketchy half-understanding of written music and theory much later. The emphases in my head always seem to fall somewhere away from the bar lines. Maybe that's not the point, though.
A friend of mine who learnt fretless bass guitar by ear hates fretted basses because 'she can't play the notes inbetween'.
Yeah, I find fretted instruments pretty frustrating because they restrict you somewhat. And that's coming from someone who was plenty restricted already as a result of a classical training.I agree with all of this, but then I think there is also a lot to be said for being able to break them in an uneducated manner too (ie. breaking the rules just because you don't know what they are). The Kristin Hersh song I posted up looks like a case of the product of an 'accident' while two people were sitting around playing stuff and I don't think that would have happened with a pre-agreed time sig.
I never really got the 'feeling' for where the bar lines should be - it always felt a bit arbitrary, but then I just learnt to play by ear, coming to some sketchy half-understanding of written music and theory much later. The emphases in my head always seem to fall somewhere away from the bar lines. Maybe that's not the point, though.
A friend of mine who learnt fretless bass guitar by ear hates fretted basses because 'she can't play the notes inbetween'.
I think it is possible to get too hung up on the rules: that classical training is a great example - you can end up with mental "blind spots" about musical ideas that work fine but which break the rules so can't possibly be OK
But I'd refer you back to my "more luck than judgement" comment as far as, er, uninformed rule-breaking goes. I do agree that good stuff can happen that way - after all, very few of the great blues artists (and to a lesser degree jazz ones) had any kind of formal musical training. But what they will have had was a pretty intensive grounding in the basic principles, if only from hearing, say, gospel week in week out. To some extent, learning musical theory shortcuts a lot of that learning, though it does sometimes come at the price of stifling some of the spontaneity of "from the guts" musicality.And I have heard an awful lot of unlistenable bollocks that's been trotted out under the "Hey, man, don't bring my creativity down with all that rules shit..." in my time
8ball
As seen on TikTok
And I have heard an awful lot of unlistenable bollocks that's been trotted out under the "Hey, man, don't bring my creativity down with all that rules shit..." in my time
Yeah, but you have to wonder whether if these people had a classical training they'd have just been producing unlistenable bollocks that fits on the staves better.
No, I think there are some fairly fundamental "sounds right" criteria that apply. One of the most fundamental is, I think, structure - we will tolerate, and even enjoy, even quite discordant music if we have some idea of where we are within it. Of course, the really clever artist knows how to mess around with even those boundaries, but my argument is that he's already going to have some idea (through some kind of experience or training) of where those boundaries are before he starts messing around with them.Yeah, but you have to wonder whether if these people had a classical training they'd have just been producing unlistenable bollocks that fits on the staves better.
But there is a spectrum, and as you move from the most highly-ordered, rhythmically or tonally, to the most chaotic and random, you tend to find that the music needs something else to keep it interesting, appealing, or maybe just tolerable...skilled musicians can do that, unskilled ones tend to get it by luck, if at all.
8ball
As seen on TikTok
I don't mean 'unskilled' so much as 'not formally trained'.
I'm sure there are plenty of formally trained musicians producing complete cack, and I doubt the Pixies got so much right purely by chance.
Yeah, I was being careful to pick my words. There are many, many hugely skilled musicians out there who are completely without formal training, and who couldn't tell you what a tonic or a subdominant one was if you tried to make them. But they have served some kind of apprenticeship somewhere: I think you could probably count the people who have come to a particular musical form completely cold, no experience, exposure or training, picked up an instrument and made amazing music, effectively innately, on the fingers of one head.
That training happened somewhere. The kind of attitude I was referring to was more the one that thinks that training - of whatever kind - is irrelevant, and that nobody's got anything to teach them.
*cough* enharmonics *cough*
But that's probably distracting from the thread, and rather overcomplicating things, so I'll shaddap
Similar threads
