One-two, one-two is the first rhythm we experience: our mother’s heartbeat. When everything else has leaked out from our atrophied brain, it seems we still understand that and respond to it. No wonder it’s the basis for most of the music we know and why we call the time signature* 4/4, ‘common time’.
But we also discover the lilting joy of one-two-three, or ‘waltz time’ (the time signature 3/4). We savour its hint of rebellion, yet remain secure in the certainty that two of these cycles make three comforting back-and-forth one-twos. Much African and Latin American music uses this pleasing tension between two- and three-beats in an accumulated 12-beat rhythm, which is both four sets of three beats and three sets of four. The chugging blues uses the same 12 beats but with much less subtlety: four main beats each sub-divided into three, of which we hear the first and third (i.e. duh, der-duh, der-duh, der-duh, etc). In truth, this rhythm is closer to that of an actual heartbeat, so that may be why we are so at ease with it.
We can all dance to music built on a base of three or four beats. But how about five beats? Or seven? Tricky. That’s why such oddities are generally only found in jazz or prog rock, where dancing is not the prime objective.
I think Jethro Tull’s Living In The Past is the only song in 5/4 time to ever make the UK charts (it got to number 3 back in 1969).
Dave Brubeck’s Take Five is probably more well-known but it never got played on Top Of The Pops and most people know it as an instrumental (although Brubeck and his wife wrote some lyrics for it). There have been several other well-known songs that have sections with ‘extra’ or ‘missing’ beats (The Beatles’ All You Need Is Love, The Stranglers’ Golden Brown and Pink Floyd’s Money are all partially in 7/4 but they usually revert to 4/4 for the chorus or solo).
Is it possible to create a worthwhile song with an unusual time signature that doesn’t simply sound like something written to impress music nerds? Here are a few examples for your consideration. Do you know others (i.e. songs with lyrics and one time signature all the way through)?
- PJ Harvey – Water. Flowing in five beats to the bar, from her debut album, Dry.
- Soft Machine – As Long As He Lies Perfectly Still. Most of Soft Machine’s Volume Two is in 7/4 (or 7/8). This section has words. (Another Canterbury band, Caravan, played my long-time favourite in 7/4, If I Could Do It All Over Again, I’d Do It All Over You, here on YT.)
- Grateful Dead – Playing In The Band. The sheet music insists this is a repeated cycle of two bars of 4/4 and one of 2/4. That makes a complete cycle of ten beats; this performance sticks to it through the instrumental (I think!).
- Grateful Dead – The Eleven. A standard 4/4 jam morphs into a repeated cycle of 3/3/3/2. And it changes back later than you think.
- Grateful Dead – Estimated Prophet. The sheet music has this as a repeated cycle of 3/4 and 4/4 but the full cycle is 14 beats. Count ‘em.
*For those unsure, a time signature is a two-part instruction for playing a piece of music, in the form x/y. ‘x’ tells you how many beats there are in a bar (a repeating cycle) and the ‘y’ tells you how long each of these beats lasts. ‘y’ is (almost) always 4 or 8; a ‘4’ beat being twice as long as an ‘8’. In this post – and generally in describing rhythm – we’re only interested in the ‘x’ bit.
I remember Martin Carthy talking about Sovay‘s time signature once…but I can’t remember what he said it was and I can’t work it out…
Sovay by Martin Carthy and Dave Swarbrick
Discussion on Sovay time signature here…
Love the idea behind this post, Chris, will try and join in later.
Oh, I read that, debby(m) but they’re mostly just trying to score points off each other. I know I heard MC say what it was…
According to Dave Swarbrick, the time signature for their version of Sovay is “alternate bars of 6 beats and 7 beats but with odd exceptions to fit the words” – http://www.talkawhile.co.uk/yabbse/index.php?topic=39694.0
There is also the musical notation, and some interesting notes on the origins of Carthy’s version here: http://www.joe-offer.com/folkinfo/songs/129.html
I can’t work it out either! I’m pretty sure it’s not the same time signature throughout, like many a folk tune. I suspect that folk ballads (as opposed to dance tunes) weren’t originally sung with much attention to a regular rhythm, so when they became formalised some of the odd timings cropped up to account for the way they were traditionally sung. And, in this instance, Swarb at least would relish the challenge of adding a couple of his own!
I found this version which, I think, is slightly different. And rather fantastic.
Oh, yes – I love that, Chris!
I never understand this. I love music, I can read a little bit of music and I play mainly by ear but I can never get the hang of time signatures. How about Plan b and “She Said”? is this unusual or not?
Otherwise there’s Solsbury Hill by Peter Gabriel but I couldn’t tell you what time signature it is.
I think you’re looking for something more complicated than it is, Ali.
If you start tapping your foot/finger/pen/celery stick along with the music at an even pace (forget about the details of the rhythm), start counting the taps. You’ll find that each 2 or 4 taps is a repeat. In Polly’s Water, the repeat is 5 taps.
[sigh] … I am back in the maths class where my teacher gave up and taught me to make paper flowers … Gone Foreign is colouring them in … Enjoying the music, though!
Except Ali, that your ears are telling you pretty reliably that the rhythms are off-kilter compared to a standard 3 or 4 to the bar. I’m thinking about Solsbury Hill from memory, but pretty sure it’s alternate bars of 3 and 4, which could also be written as a regular cycle of 7. The accent on each 7th beat is pretty strong on the words “Hill”….. “Lights”….. “Still” etc, with that feeling that thise words come earlier than they’re ‘due’ in a ‘normal’ rhythm.
Full marks for musical feel, even if the counting bit is defeating you.
Way over my head but I’m going to make time to listen and see if I can figure this out. Thanks for the explanation, Chris.
DOND!
Me too. I haven’t the first clue.
Another 11! (But with a couple of 4′s under the break). Lovely counter-rhythm/harmony build towards the end.
Is that you Nilpferd?
yep.
Good topic, I have suggested this one to Adam, something like “unusual time signatures”.
I like the occasional dip into 5 beats: Blondie’s Heart Of Glass sneaks the occasional extra beat into the 4/4, so that you find the feet moving on the opposite beat. Bacharach / David’s I Say A Little Prayer goes from 4/4 to 5 beats to scan perfectly the lyric “…stay in my heart and I will…”. Start counting at the start of the chorus (the “ever” in “forever”). For most of it, it fits to 1-2-3-4-1-2-3-4; but for that line, you need the extra beat.
And Dave Brubeck got to no. 5 in 1961 with Take Five, written by his clarinettist, Paul Desmond. Before TOTP got going, as you say Chris, but a hit nonetheless.
Oops. Didn’t check on Take Five being a hit. But it wasn’t the version with lyrics…
I think we need theme suggesters to host their own theme. Adam B owes us a final playlist for his secret Underground pimp out & you owe us a month in the hot seat along with the lovely Lambrethina & Helen.
There’s a thought – co-gurus.
I have another guru stint in a few weeks and requested a theme. See if i actually get it.
Ooh crikey, yes – agree with Shoegazer. I would come a total cropper if I had to guru ‘unusual time signatures’. I could never work them out when doing O Level Music and still can’t now.
Bish -
When i signed up for guru the first time i said i had no musical training whatsoever so i couldn’t do a topic that required musical knowledge. I’ve had to sit out the topics that did too.
Yes, I never meant my list from the Oxford Dictionary Of Quotations to pop up quite so often.
Adam ad its to Inbox management issues, I think the trick is either to push your own topic for your own stint, or ask him for your topic a few days ahead and ask him to change it if you don’t like it / it’s been done before.
I’m pencilled in again in April, but not for the whole month….
I guess MBV’s ‘To Here Knows When’ has one of the strangest time-beat-thingies. The Cocteau’s ‘Feet Like Fins’ does, as well: it begins gently, glistening – stops, then lurches into a different time frame.
I prefer to think of it as jittering and juddering, personally. That’s a vocabulary I can understand, cos me brain don’t function so right at complex stuffs.
Rich, want to consider signing up to do a Spill Game playlist one of these Tuesdays? You always have good tunes.
According to Wiki, the intro to Primus’ Fish On is transcribed as: 4/4, 2/4, 4/4, 3/4, 4/4, 2/4, 4/4, 2/4, 7/8, 12/8, 14/8, 4/4, 4/4, 12/8 (7 times) and 6/8. I think it might be jazz.
Or just perverse.
He has three thumbs & not all of them are in the same time zone.
Think my theory is (if there is one) go with what works & let the beat counters figure it out later.
& those who figure it out in advance are suspicious.
We had one song in the hymnal that was in 5/4 time and I can’t think of the title for the life of me because no one knew how to sing it. Everything was in conventional signatures like 3/4, 4/4, and 6/8.
“Money” is in 7/4 except for the instrumental break from 3:05 to 5:05
Oops, Money is mentioned above.
Ok, other than Brubeck, this is probably the most famous composition in 5/4
(only finally got round to getting a wordpress account today so first reply using it – hello all!) – was involved in a bit of a sidetrack discussion during my guru stint last week with magic and a few others on this very topic, inspired by a friend of mine who teaches ballet – she was commenting on how hard it was to find recent pop songs in unusual time signatures – I pointed her in the direction of Sufjan Stevens and his propensity for all kinds of crazy time signatures – take his “Concering the UFO Sighting Near Highland Illinoise”
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p_mwUEjuz3Q&w=420&h=315%5D
I actually got hold of the sheet music to this and the time sigs shift on virtually everybar, and pretty much every bar has an additional half beat – so the intro goes (by bar):
9/8+1/16, 8/8+1/16 x 2, 6/8+1/16, 9/8+1/16, 8/8+1/16 x 2, 6/8+1/16th
It’s just impossible to actually count it, you have to play it by intuition really, but the weird thing is, is that you listen to it, and it doesn’t sound at all disjointed, just beautifully ethereal….
Hi Bandit! I was hoping you’d drop in. Yes, I saw your exchange. I’d thought about doing this post a while ago and never completed it, so you gave me a nudge.
To put a video in, just paste the url link. Forget the ‘[youtube’ bit.
Cheers mate, got it in the end, nice to use a site that just works rather than that mess over at the mother ship!
ok, I clearly need a lesson in how to embed vids properly – in my post above I just pasted the embed code from youtube but obviously got that wrong – any advice gratefully received.
Or let’s just try again – the other excellent Sufjan Stevens song in a bonkers time signature is “Too Much” which is in a funky 7/8
Copy the video URL & slap that baby into the post (works for me).
Great to see you here on the dark/angel side of the RRverse.
Cheers – nice to be here!
No, that didn’t work, what about this
Sufjan Stevens – Too Much
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OLyq0xlAa-Y?rel=0&w=560&h=315%5D
Last attempt:
yay, got it, sorry to have blundered in so late at night and made a mess of the place
No apologies necessary. That’s great. I wonder if it made it to any dancefloors. I hope so.
But don’t forget folks, that if we post links the way we do on the Mothership (and using their comment box to do it) rather than direct YouTube links it makes the thread less cumbersome and easier for those with slow connections to load!
Chris: What do you make of this one?
It’s good. And it’s in 4/4.
I thought it was but it seems to change sporadically plus the handclaps add a different beat?
As with Ali, up above, you’re making it too complicated, gf. Where individual handclaps and drumbeats actually occur isn’t that relevant: it’s the underlying count cycle that’s important here. Even though the ‘groove’ changes significantly, the underlying 4-beat repetition doesn’t.
Chris: If it’s not the drumbeats and handclaps that are creating the ‘underlying count cycle’, what is?
Ah, the difficulty of using words to explain music!
Yes, you’re right of course, gf, some of the handclaps and drumbeats are significant. I should have said that altering the location of individual handclaps and drumbeats doesn’t affect the underlying count cycle.
If you repeatedly count to four, starting on the very first note played and at such a pace that ‘one’ is always on that same note, you can continue the same count throughout the song, irrespective of a change in rhythm pattern.
Am I making this clearer or muddier?!
Found a good article on the subject (which I still don’t get – being a musical doofus (punk)). Loving the chosen examples though – give whoever wrote it a Nobel Prize for footnotes:
http://www.mp3.fm/Time_signature.htm
Good to see Tool in that article as I know they do odd time signatures; “Lateralus” being the obvious one, for me. No musical knowledge required.
Chris, I know it’s not your thing but lots of artists that sample do unusual TSs: Burial, Venetian Snares and DJ Shadow. Checks and finds out Burial definitely has “Ashtray Wasp” moving through TSs and the ace “Spaceape,” Venetian Snares’s “Szamár Madár” is easy listening enough to be recommended to all and DJ Shadow’s “Changeling” seems to be noted everwhere for its TS (I like all of those a lot).
And revisiting Simple Minds, I read that the Real to Real Cacophony album apparently does the odd TS thing every now and then.
Nice subject.
Cheers.
Fuel
Slint, and the bands that came after them, surely they do unusual TSs as well?
It’s when you start to think about this stuff that you start to realise how inherently mathematical music is (well ok, that’s probably only true if you are mathematically inclined or a bit sad, and as I am both, this applies heavily to me), but also and how all sorts of neat patterns can emerge.
Take for example, ” We Can Work it Out” by the Beatles – the “Life is very short, and there’s no time, for pushing and fighting my friends” bit is made up of 4 bars of 4/4 followed by 4 bars of 3/4 – but 4*3=12, so you can, if so inclined, write it as 7 bars of 4/4, as my Beatles sheet music rather strangely does.
A more unusual one is the opening bit of The Stranglers Golden Brown (also used in the instrumental breaks between versus) which really speaking is in 13/4 – though again, you can break as 3/4,3/4,3/4.4/4, and it makes just as much sense
Being similarly mathematically inclined or a bit sad, I’m right with you. Its a pity about the terminology we have to use to describe what is basically a question of counting.
“Trouble is, it’s helpful if the drummer CAN count up to four”
Great topic for a post, Chris. Don’t pay sufficient attention to the technical stuff (my appreciation tends not to extend much beyond “ooh I love this!”), so nothing much to add. But interesting to read others’ contributions nonetheless.
Chris; I’ve always been intrigued with the time signatures in Bach’s music but often I’m not clear on what I’m hearing, check this at 2min 50 sec, it’s the 4th variation, what’s he playing?
That section is in 3/4 (probably written as 6/8, as it’s a 6-beat cycle in which the low notes are played on beats 1 and 5). It seems strange because the previous section is in 4/4.
The bit at 2m50 is actually only the first variation and it’s written in 3/4 – great thing about classical stuff is the sheet music is often freely available online – you can view the sheet music for this here:
http://musopen.org/sheetmusic/sheet/81
If you can see it, (2nd line of 2nd page) you can see why 3/4 is the logical choice as the bass part is mostly a repeating 3 beat/7 note phrase.
The vid above is the 1981 Glen Gould recording which I don’t really like – far too much of his weird “sing-along” stuff – look at the section between about 5:30 and 6:30 to see what I mean, it’s like he’s speaking in tongues or something whilst playing, he’s clearly on another planet.. His tempi are all over the place too – the opening theme is so damn slow. Much prefer his 1955 recording
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p7Nbx0Lv7zE
Only if you have time, Chris.
I remember when I was at school I used to listen to thIrate Caterpillar by Hugh Cornwell a fair bit and had a mate who was studying music (he went on to be first violin in the National Youth Orchestra so I imagine he knew his stuff) who couldn’t work out what the time signature was. Is it really that complicated?
If you can hear a repeating pattern and are able to count up to eight, I don’t think it’s complicated. My ears say that from 1:05 to 1:44 it’s in 5/4, then it stays in 7/4 until 3:06, from whence it’s in 4/4.
Thanks very much Chris. I’ll listen carefully and do my best to get that!
Definitely agree with the 1:05 to 1:44 section as 5/4 – Maki, one clue is to listen for the noise in that section that sounds like a metal pole being struck – count that as the first beat, then each between in between until the next clang – it goes: Clang,2,3,4,5, Clang,2,3,4,5 etc.
Struggling with the rest – the bit from 2.18 on is deff 7/4 and easy to count as each stanza fits into one bar – just struggling a bit with the 1.44 to 2.18 bit – think it may have some bars with alternating sigs, it’s hard as the vocals aren’t following any time and distract a bit Need to listen again when I’m less tired….
We should tip our hats to Led Zep in this thread. From Led Zep IV, Four Sticks is five in a bar with the the odd six thrown in; and Black Dog has John Bonham beating a massive 5/4 under Jimmy Page’s syncopated riffing. My favourite is The Ocean from Houses of the Holy, alternate 4/4 and 7/8 in the opening riff, and the way it loosens up at the end into a danceable boogie-woogie shuffle thing in groovy 4/4 is a brilliant contrast.
LG: You’re right of course, I was as usual confused. I was listening to the 4th on my iTunes and I picked the wrong one on Youtube. It is indeed the ’81 Gould Variations first, like millions of others I started out with the’ 55 version and had some problems adapting to the later versions though I did overcome those and now I move between both comfortably. Actually the sing along piece that you reference was what I’d intended to find at youtube, the 4th variation. Sing along doesn’t bother me and he’s off mic enough that it doesn’t intrude, if you don’t like that you should definitely avoid jazz, there’s lots of artists who indulge, notably Hamp and Slam Stewart. Doesn’t bother me.
One thing this youtube/iTunes comparison revealed is how bad MP3′s sound compared to AIFF, we’re so conditioned to accept MP3′s for their file size and convenience.
Saw the Scorsese documentary on George Harrison the other day – lovely stuff, lovely man – and they were talking about the influence of Indian music on his music after he got involved with Ravi Shankar, which involved using unusual (for the West) time signatures. Would I be right in saying Within You/Without You is in 5/4? According to Wikipedia, the Mission Impossible theme is 5/4.
Wasn’t TP sweet in that?
Oh, you’re talking about time signatures – sorry.
Hello whoever-you-are (and TP-addict tfd!): no, Within You/Without You is in 4/4. Listen to the two high tabla (drum) notes; they sit in a four-beat loop.
Indian and many other non-European music traditions have a different approach which is probably much closer to Sovay (see tfd’s post at the top), where the rhythm is a longer pattern, related to the melody.
MI is in 5/4, though.
It was me, TF. And TP was sweet in the movie with lots of nice things to say about GH.
They loved each other, I think.