Time signatures, the heart beat of music

I just recently started getting into changing time signatures quite often as reason 4 makes it a lot easier now

7/4 is my new best friend, 5/4 is cool but harder to make sound epicly groovy but I have found its pretty neat to combine 5/4 with 3/4 at the end of a measure

how do you blend time signatures? your favorite odd time signature? any techniques you impose to transition one to the other smoothly?

ive read that in order to keep the BPM the same with a signature change you have to calculate the notes to bar ratio and shit but especially when your playing guitar along Its a lot easier to keep the same tempo during a signature change

the weirdest ive gotten down with besides combining signatures is a really chill track I made in 11/11

i love 11/8. most of the time though i tend to switch between 4/4, 5/4 and 7/8 while improvising, which often confuses anyone who's trying to play along hehe.

my favourite time signatures are basically any prime numbers, stuff that sounds a bit wonky. i consider it a challenge to write something in a very odd time signature and make it sound natural.

also 11/11 doesn't make sense as a time signature unless you're juxtaposing it with say, 4/4 or something. you might as well just write 11/8.

yah thats the real challenge is to make weird time signature's sound natural and then keeping it groovy and improvising in a complex signature takes skill

yah when I made that song in 11/11 in reason was about 3 years ago, I had nooo knowledge of how time signatures worked at all. Someone told me a radiohead song was in 11/11 and being 11 supposed to be such a powerful number my ignorant mind thought would be cool to try it.

I have yet try 9/8 which is from what I hear like a common time signature for middle eastern snake charming music

11/11 doesn't make sense. can you explain what you mean?

11/11 as far as i know means 11 eleventh notes per bar, but considering that you're using 11th notes as the basis of your timing, it won't sound different to 11 eighth notes. the notes are quicker, yes, but if you've got no eighth notes to compare them to, you might as well just bring the tempo up and call it 11/8. unless of course you've got a song in 7/8 or 4/4 or whatever, then you switch to 11/11, then that'd make sense - but would be ridiculously tricky to play.

  Kcinsu said:

11/11 doesn't make sense. can you explain what you mean?

I had nooooooo clue what i was really doing I just set the time signature in reason to 11/11 and slowly figured out how to be make really a chill loop with the chosen parameter modification hahaha. I still don't completely understand all the technical reasoning behind time signatures, but I now can effectively program out stuff really well now in 5/4 and 7/4 then slowly proceed to shred some juicy guitar riffs

description's theory like modey of 11/11 vs 11/8 just busted are quite helpful, ive tried reading about music theory but usually dont have the attention span for the way most theory is taught.

Do you guys often change the tempo in accordance to keeping the BPM the same when changing time signature's? as I was reading, which makes sense that the BPM will change if you modify the signature even while using the same tempo. do you have a methods for how you transition your signatures smoothly?

changing tempo on a dime is something I dont really understand how I could do while playing an instrument without having to setup a space for a precount

change the tempo? do you mean that you try to make the new signature's measures fit into the same amount of time that the previous ones did? that'd just be awkward!

i always keep my tempo the same when changing signatures, ie. going from 4/4 to 7/8 i play at the same tempo, i just cut an eighth note off the end of the bar. calculating how to make a 7/8 bar fit into the space of a 4/4 bar on the fly would be something only super-virtuoso musicians could do.

and as far as i know, no programs do that either, beats are usually independent of time signature.

I read a tutorial of sorts on how to calculate the tempo of a time signature to keep it at a certain BPM, the old dood who wrote it seemed very trained in music theory and was basically showing how to keep a piece steady at the same BPM while changing time signatures. It was very strange to try and comprehend, he was stating that you could change the tempo while changing time signatures to stay at in this case bpm and showed how to calculate the tempo needed to keep the same BPM for changing signatures.

I am in the same boat and dont understand how you could play like that and modify tempo so instantly or how that would sound natural.

I will have to try it sometime

just ignore the grid and drag shit around until it sounds right.

hahha I used to make music like that 7 years ago, sounded sooo chaotic, im sure that was my most electronic music sounding stuff though

I enjoy actually working for an idea instead of shit randomly working out

ive made quite a few tracks that came together really quickly that people really liked and it just doesn't seem right, I only seem to be happy with a good reaction from my music if I put in a lot of thought into it.

I've recently started working in 5/8 and layering sections of 4/4 over the top. It's confusing to say the least.

dude, the time signature has absolutely nothing to do with the tempo.

if you are switiching between time signatures, the only thing that changes is the emphasis that the beat is on.

you could create a feeling of changing the tempo while changing time signature by moving from say, 5/4 into 6/8, if you instructed the performer/computer to keep the actual beat the same tempo, even though its moving from crotchets into quavers.

bartok was the master at unsettling switches in time signature, alot of his dances will switch every bar in patterns such as / 3/4 3/4 3/8 2/4 5/8 6/8 3/4 , if you have an emphatic bang on the start of each bar it rymthmically gives the impression of a car crash.

  messiaen said:

dude, the time signature has absolutely nothing to do with the tempo.

 

if you are switiching between time signatures, the only thing that changes is the emphasis that the beat is on.

 

you could create a feeling of changing the tempo while changing time signature by moving from say, 5/4 into 6/8, if you instructed the performer/computer to keep the actual beat the same tempo, even though its moving from crotchets into quavers.

 

bartok was the master at unsettling switches in time signature, alot of his dances will switch every bar in patterns such as / 3/4 3/4 3/8 2/4 5/8 6/8 3/4 , if you have an emphatic bang on the start of each bar it rymthmically gives the impression of a car crash.

tempo no, BPM yes, 6/8 at 100 tempo will have more beats per minute than than 4/4 at 100 tempo from what I understand(which is not very much)

four to the floor let's av it!! un-tss un-tss un-tss un-tss!

eggy toast

  Blanket Fort Collapse said:

  messiaen said:

dude, the time signature has absolutely nothing to do with the tempo.

 

if you are switiching between time signatures, the only thing that changes is the emphasis that the beat is on.

 

you could create a feeling of changing the tempo while changing time signature by moving from say, 5/4 into 6/8, if you instructed the performer/computer to keep the actual beat the same tempo, even though its moving from crotchets into quavers.

 

bartok was the master at unsettling switches in time signature, alot of his dances will switch every bar in patterns such as / 3/4 3/4 3/8 2/4 5/8 6/8 3/4 , if you have an emphatic bang on the start of each bar it rymthmically gives the impression of a car crash.

 

tempo no, BPM yes, 6/8 at 100 tempo will have more beats per minute than than 4/4 at 100 tempo from what I understand(which is not very much)

EDIT:

6/8 has LESS beats per bar in comparison to 8/8 not per minute.

  Bad Influence said:

  Blanket Fort Collapse said:

  messiaen said:

dude, the time signature has absolutely nothing to do with the tempo.

 

if you are switiching between time signatures, the only thing that changes is the emphasis that the beat is on.

 

you could create a feeling of changing the tempo while changing time signature by moving from say, 5/4 into 6/8, if you instructed the performer/computer to keep the actual beat the same tempo, even though its moving from crotchets into quavers.

 

bartok was the master at unsettling switches in time signature, alot of his dances will switch every bar in patterns such as / 3/4 3/4 3/8 2/4 5/8 6/8 3/4 , if you have an emphatic bang on the start of each bar it rymthmically gives the impression of a car crash.

 

tempo no, BPM yes, 6/8 at 100 tempo will have more beats per minute than than 4/4 at 100 tempo from what I understand(which is not very much)

 

EDIT:

6/8 has LESS beats per bar in comparison to 8/8 not per minute.

I was comparing 6/8 to 4/4...... have you ever heard how much faster 6/8 sounds than 4/4? or 3/4 for instance in the same tempo?

EDIT: again i would like to remind everyone that I am really quite uneducated on this subject hence the reason I started this discussion(I.E. to feel like an idiot and or learn some shit)

No. BPM determines the speed of a piece of music. Just because beats are couple in different sized bars is not to say that they will come any faster or slower. 4/4 means there will be four quater beats in the bar. 3/4 ( or two bars of 6/8) will have 3 quarter notes. A beat is still a beat no matter what measure is used.

For example:

3 bars of 4/4 = 4 bars of 3/4.

the thing is that 6/8 wont actually have a different BPM/tempo at 100 to 4/4, because the actual beat is still going to be produced at 100.

its just that in 6/8 each actual bar is going to be one and a half times the length of 4/4, even though you are cramming more actual measured time into the 4/4 beat.

if you were to flick from 4/4 at 100 into 6/8 and still want the crotchet to stay at the same timing, then you would have to double the speed, and it would become the equivilant of 3/4 .

but at no point does changing the signature mean a different bpm, if the bpm is instructed on the computer, each actual beat will still sound at exactly the same time, its just that the emphasis, or the feel, will alter around it.

bad influence has just condensed what i said more coherently.

  messiaen said:

bad influence has just condensed what i said more coherently.

:kiss:

All this talk of polymetric and polymeters is making me want to start listening to Meshuggah again.

"What happens when you change the time signature

When you change the time signature while the music is playing you must indicate how this change will effect the tempo.

Usually you will want to change the tempo beat for beat.

Here is how you do it.

Example 1

In this example we have set the tempo to 100 beats per minute. In common time the beat is a crotchet.

When the time signature changes to cut common time, we still want 100 beats per minute. Cut common time looks the same as common time, but there are two beats to the bar in cut common time, four beats to the bar in common time.

Think of a musician tapping their foot. From common to cut common it feels as though we have doubled the tempo. Two bars of cut common time make one bar of common time.

So we say to the musician "double tempo" and "crotchet equals minim", and they know what we mean.

How long do these four bars play for?

Common time: (4 * 2 * 60)/100 = 4.8 seconds

Cut common time (2 * 2 * 60)/100 = 2.4 seconds

Total 7.2 seconds"

- says some old dood who's blabbing off right here

The key word is 'feels like'.

  Bad Influence said:

  messiaen said:

bad influence has just condensed what i said more coherently.

:kiss:

 

All this talk of polymetric and polymeters is making me want to start listening to Meshuggah again.

hahaha word! meshuggah are teh gods of crazy rhythm dood.

and yeh messiaen I guess yah its just changing the feel, but real deal or not its changing the groove, I truly am ignorant, I need to do a lot more reading on all this shit.

Anyone ever used Guitar Pro? I remeber using it years ago. It had a section to change notes into triplets but it also let you do into some crazy notations like fifths, sevenths and twelvths. Still not sure of the technical term and never seen any other program with the option.

Remeber making up some crazy meshuggah style grooves with it. And yes they are gods, and not just because it was them that got me into Autechre.

meshuggah = the autechre of metal. no?