Time signatures

Can you guys listen to a tune and work out its time signature quite easily. Ive been trying with almost everyone song I hear recently and sometimes I cant work it out. Not really important for anything that productive, but can for example hear a snares song and work out its abstract freakish time signature?

It's very easy to work out a time signature, and usually they don't stray from 4/4, 3/4, 6/8, the snares puts basically everything in 7/4.

To put it very simply a time signature denotes

a) the number of beats in a bar

B) the length of these beats

a piece in 4/4 simply has 4 beats in every bar and each of these beats is a crotchet (quarter note if you will but i wont because it's spastic terminology)

the number on the top can be virtually anything, although if you're going to have 43 beats in a bar you're probably missing the point of time sigs.

You also have simple and compound times, i.e. 4/4 is simple, 6/8, 9/8 etc. are compound because the quaver beats are intended to be counted in groups of three.

Basically if you listen to a tune you know well you shouldn't have any significant trouble discerning between time signatures as long as you keep the pulse of the music in mind.

  blutac said:

Can you guys listen to a tune and work out its time signature quite easily. Ive been trying with almost everyone song I hear recently and sometimes I cant work it out. Not really important for anything that productive, but can for example hear a snares song and work out its abstract freakish time signature?

it gets easier and easier the more you listen.

  blutac said:

Can you guys listen to a tune and work out its time signature quite easily. Ive been trying with almost everyone song I hear recently and sometimes I cant work it out. Not really important for anything that productive, but can for example hear a snares song and work out its abstract freakish time signature?

eh, listening? especially with relatively straightforward stuff like vsnares (btw vsnares doesn't use 7/4 THAT often.. he did stuff in 11/4, 5/4 and lots of other time sigs.. and ofcourse, last step is just awesome non-linear groove... constantly switching time sigs..) its pretty easy to notice the groove and the way it flows.. more abstract and complex stuff needs more attention if you really want to figure out the rhytmic structure.. it can help to count then, yes... :grin:

(and hurray for spastic terminology, caekface... crotchets rule..)

I can figure out a signature really easily if it's steady. A good example of a tune I couldn't figure out until I read up what it was, is Lateralus by tool. Main chorus in it is three measures. 7/8-8/8-9/8

Sometimes easy stuff like the difference between 3/4 and 6/8 can be hard to distinguish for me if i cant figure out whether they are counting quarter notes or 8th notes. cause if a song does both 3/4 and 6/8 and alternates it can be tricky to count on first listen

Supposedly, the second number written on a time signature will ALWAYS be a number that can be divided by 4, cos people's brains can't really figure out increments of 3 or 5 or 7 or whatever, so for a (normal) human drummer, playing a beat in 4/3 would be pretty much impossible.

Correct me if I'm wrong... I never studied music so all I know is based on what people have told me...

somebody try this one :arrr:

  SpringymcGriff said:

Supposedly, the second number written on a time signature will ALWAYS be a number that can be divided by 4, cos people's brains can't really figure out increments of 3 or 5 or 7 or whatever, so for a (normal) human drummer, playing a beat in 4/3 would be pretty much impossible.

 

Correct me if I'm wrong... I never studied music so all I know is based on what people have told me...

Dont you get beats in 3/3 though like Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.

Time signatures aren't really hard to figure out. Just hear the pulse in quarter or eigth notes. 4/4 will have 4 quarter notes, 6/8 will have 6 eigth notes. 6/8, 9/8, 12/8 or basically subdivisions of 3/4 [or in the case of 12/8, it sounds like 4/4 with a triplet feel].

  blutac said:

  SpringymcGriff said:

Supposedly, the second number written on a time signature will ALWAYS be a number that can be divided by 4, cos people's brains can't really figure out increments of 3 or 5 or 7 or whatever, so for a (normal) human drummer, playing a beat in 4/3 would be pretty much impossible.

 

Correct me if I'm wrong... I never studied music so all I know is based on what people have told me...

 

Dont you get beats in 3/3 though like Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.

Yes. You basically get one pulse per measure.

i took a theory class at university but quit cause i just couldn't stand it... time signatures... rests note duration... made me dizzy

i should have perserveered and waited till we learnt about scales and melody and shit but after a while i just didn't want to wait and i had stopped going to class for such a long time it would have been wierd going back

You should have stuck around. YOU NEVER EVEN GOT INTO SUBSTITUTE DOMINANT CHORDS AND THEORETICAL HARMONY YOU'LL NEVER USE.

:::pulls trigger:::

  william s. braintree said:

You should have stuck around. YOU NEVER EVEN GOT INTO SUBSTITUTE DOMINANT CHORDS AND THEORETICAL HARMONY YOU'LL NEVER USE.

 

:::pulls trigger:::

yeah no doubt eh... i need to apprentice for some piano jazz musician... someone with knowledge that can teach me one on one

maybe i'll get a private teacher some day i think that would work for me

  taxman said:

somebody try this one :arrr:

 

song

5/4 with a triplet feel. Really it's relative to the reader. That's really only why time signatures are handy. You can write any rhythm in 4/4, but writing it in 5/4 might be more logical.

  william s. braintree said:

You should have stuck around. YOU NEVER EVEN GOT INTO SUBSTITUTE DOMINANT CHORDS AND THEORETICAL HARMONY YOU'LL NEVER USE.

 

:::pulls trigger:::

don't ignore it... it is tedious crap right now, but someday you'll find a use for it.

better to learn a lot of stuff, and not use it, then to not learn much, and feel like you have no where to go.

yeah the beauty in learning stuff is that you can say 'ah im doing this, well fuck that, i'll bend those rules'.

a lot of tunes with difficult time sigs can be counted as 4/4 + tail, or 3/4 + tail. we can't actually comprehend a rhythm with more then 4 (or 5?) beats in a bar (it sort of relates to our inability to imagine something 4-dimensional).

what happens is that we automatically start to subdivide the rhythm into multiple parts. for example: 1-2-3-4 1-2-3. that's also how most composers use time sigs bigger then 4. it's like that song by will smith, switch, you know???

oh, and 4/3 or 3/3 don't make any sense. it's 3/4 or 4/4. if your not writing scores you can forget about the second number, it only deals with the resolution you're writing in.

yeah 4/3 in say 120 bpm would just be 4/4 in some other bpm. I just makes it confusing, stick to 4 or 8. The real reason for time sigs in my opinion is notation and crappy ways of reperesenting things. Like say you want polyrhythems of 4 against 5. You cant really do that with most computers notaion systems but you can geta round it using a time signiature or by phrasing things differnently. Anyways, im off on a tangent.

The easiest way to think of it is how it was explained to me by my first violin teacher...

The first number is beats per measure (or bar if you want to call it that). The second number is what type of note gets the beat.

2 = half note (get it? /2 aka divided by two aka half note?)

4 = quarter note

8 = 8th note...

These numbers are used because they're what you write out in musical notation (quarter notes, eigth notes, half notes, whole notes). Also, yes, there are sixteenth and thiry second notes.. and there are also dotted notes (a dotted note gets is value plus 1/2, so a dotted whole note is a whole note plus a half note and so forth), but they generally are not used in time signatures.

Esentially though, as far as Venetial Snares and that sort of thing is concerned, the second number is meaningless. It could be anything because it doesn't matter. It's only usefull in the conext of reading it on sheet music. You might as well just say "7 count" or "11 count", referreing to the beats per measure.

  Forlon said:

oh, and 4/3 or 3/3 don't make any sense. it's 3/4 or 4/4. if your not writing scores you can forget about the second number, it only deals with the resolution you're writing in.

No, it makes sense. I've played some classical pieces with parts in 8/3 and 3/1 before. Look up the sheet music for the song "Time Piece." That song is ridiculously complicated. There's a part in 12/16.

  ten fingers ten toes said:

Esentially though, as far as Venetial Snares and that sort of thing is concerned, the second number is meaningless. It could be anything because it doesn't matter. It's only usefull in the conext of reading it on sheet music. You might as well just say "7 count" or "11 count", referreing to the beats per measure.

There's a use for it because it tells you what the pulse is. 6/8 and 6/4 sound a bit different. 6/4 sounds more rigid whereas 6/8 is comprised of more flowing triplets. Same thing with 7/8 and 7/4.

  Kcinsu said:

  william s. braintree said:

You should have stuck around. YOU NEVER EVEN GOT INTO SUBSTITUTE DOMINANT CHORDS AND THEORETICAL HARMONY YOU'LL NEVER USE.

 

:::pulls trigger:::

 

don't ignore it... it is tedious crap right now, but someday you'll find a use for it.

 

better to learn a lot of stuff, and not use it, then to not learn much, and feel like you have no where to go.

Yeah, it CAN be useful, but I never use any chords unless I'm building pads/string parts. It's just annoying how a lot of our curriculum is based on jazz music. And yes, it makes complete sense in a jazz context, but not for the type of music I do.

But you're absolutely right, it's better to learn it anyway.

  william s. braintree said:

  Forlon said:

oh, and 4/3 or 3/3 don't make any sense. it's 3/4 or 4/4. if your not writing scores you can forget about the second number, it only deals with the resolution you're writing in.

 

No, it makes sense. I've played some classical pieces with parts in 8/3 and 3/1 before. Look up the sheet music for the song "Time Piece." That song is ridiculously complicated. There's a part in 12/16.

 

the 3/1 makes sense... it would be 3 whole notes in a bar.

but 3/3 doesnt make sense. the 3, would be a dotted quarter note, so its the same as 9/8, and you would just mark that a dotted quarter note = the bpm/pulse. I mean, maybe it's possible, but certainly not tradition, and it would confuse most players. just calling it 9/8 is easier, and the same thing. I can't even chooose x/3 as an option in my notation program.

yeah, x/3 doesn't exist to my knowledge, x/1 is perfectly feasible though uncommon and 12/16 isn't really that complex at all. Regarding william s braintrees alleged 8/3, i would imagine you're simply confusing it with 3/8 because it would serve no purpose other than to illustrate that the pulse is to be felt in dotted crotchets and, as i explained above, the nature of compound time is that the groups of quavers (in the case of /8) are counted in groups of three thus rendering any time signature with 3 on the bottom pretty much redundant. I would be perfectly happy to be proved wrong though, if you have the score of this piece then please do post a pic.

If I have a sixteen step drum machine is that automatically creating 4count (4/4?) beats, or am I still misunderstaning. Im reaching this conclusion by thinking that 16 is only divisible by 4

  william s. braintree said:

  Forlon said:

oh, and 4/3 or 3/3 don't make any sense. it's 3/4 or 4/4. if your not writing scores you can forget about the second number, it only deals with the resolution you're writing in.

 

No, it makes sense. I've played some classical pieces with parts in 8/3 and 3/1 before. Look up the sheet music for the song "Time Piece." That song is ridiculously complicated. There's a part in 12/16.

ahhh nice, right. so how would you write that? i'm not very familiar with that stuff really..

edit: neverminiinnind, kcinsu got it already.

  Kcinsu said:

  william s. braintree said:

  Forlon said:

oh, and 4/3 or 3/3 don't make any sense. it's 3/4 or 4/4. if your not writing scores you can forget about the second number, it only deals with the resolution you're writing in.

 

No, it makes sense. I've played some classical pieces with parts in 8/3 and 3/1 before. Look up the sheet music for the song "Time Piece." That song is ridiculously complicated. There's a part in 12/16.

 

 

the 3/1 makes sense... it would be 3 whole notes in a bar.

 

but 3/3 doesnt make sense. the 3, would be a dotted quarter note, so its the same as 9/8, and you would just mark that a dotted quarter note = the bpm/pulse. I mean, maybe it's possible, but certainly not tradition, and it would confuse most players. just calling it 9/8 is easier, and the same thing. I can't even chooose x/3 as an option in my notation program.

Why would the 3 be a dotted quarter note?

Anyways, If a piece were in 8/3 the notation would be so confusing. Let me try to find that score, or an excerpt to understand the reasoning. It seems like it would just create a notation hassle. The only reason for it would maybe be to create a musical statement within a piece. To change only for a moment, so it would thus sound like 8/8 but in a different tempo, but a mathematically exact different tempo, not like a Latin word, but to experiment with numerical relationships. I think I believe you braintree, because I have seen far more rediculous musical notation and experimentation than something this trivial.

EDIT: I couldn't find any examples.

  Bubba69 said:

  Kcinsu said:

  william s. braintree said:

  Forlon said:

oh, and 4/3 or 3/3 don't make any sense. it's 3/4 or 4/4. if your not writing scores you can forget about the second number, it only deals with the resolution you're writing in.

 

No, it makes sense. I've played some classical pieces with parts in 8/3 and 3/1 before. Look up the sheet music for the song "Time Piece." That song is ridiculously complicated. There's a part in 12/16.

 

 

the 3/1 makes sense... it would be 3 whole notes in a bar.

 

but 3/3 doesnt make sense. the 3, would be a dotted quarter note, so its the same as 9/8, and you would just mark that a dotted quarter note = the bpm/pulse. I mean, maybe it's possible, but certainly not tradition, and it would confuse most players. just calling it 9/8 is easier, and the same thing. I can't even chooose x/3 as an option in my notation program.

 

Why would the 3 be a dotted quarter note?

 

Anyways, If a piece were in 8/3 the notation would be so confusing. Let me try to find that score, or an excerpt to understand the reasoning. It seems like it would just create a notation hassle. The only reason for it would maybe be to create a musical statement within a piece. To change only for a moment, so it would thus sound like 8/8 but in a different tempo, but a mathematically exact different tempo, not like a Latin word, but to experiment with numerical relationships. I think I believe you braintree, because I have seen far more rediculous musical notation and experimentation than something this trivial.

 

EDIT: I couldn't find any examples.

Yeah, usually the more exotic time signatures are only for a measure or two so that notating a long phrase doesn't get confusing for a single rhythm. I can't remember exactly what piece was 8/3 ["The Texans"?]. I played four years of orchestra during highschool, and we did college and professional level stuff [samuel Barber - "Violin Concerto, Op. 14- Presto in moto perpe", "Die Muldau," etc]. The conductor was pretty eccentric, so he selected many challenging pieces.

But I'm not saying there would be a full piece written in 8/3 or 3/1. Usually only smaller parts within a piece. I usually see them at the end.

oh wait, my mistake... it would be a dotted half note. but still its just kind of pointless