Time Signatures

[sparqee]

Originally Posted by Progressionmusic

I have to disagree with you on the 11/8 time signature (yet i can't tell if it's the hardest to read as I don't read alot of music). It's as easy to play as any time signature (I don't play a lot of piano/keyboard, being mainly a bass guitarist and rythm guitarist); tempo (beats per minute) and technical-melodic complexity (where to put your hands/fingers, and the rythm/groove) is what makes it hard to play.

And since you're into progressive music: Take Tool's "Right in Two" for example. It has a 11/8 (or 11/4 depending on your choise of bpm) time signature. The rythm is quite playable and the chords are easy (yet lovely in my ears). And yet some other parts of this song might make you feel like you're breaking your fingers (at least on a guitar)

Yeah, to me 11 is a lot like 7. You just gotta let go and feel it. I wrote a number in 11 and it pretty much shakes down to a 1-2-3, 1-2-3, 1-2-3, 1-2 kind'a feel.

[ExSaint1379]

Originally Posted by Progressionmusic

I have to disagree with you on the 11/8 time signature (yet i can't tell if it's the hardest to read as I don't read alot of music). It's as easy to play as any time signature (I don't play a lot of piano/keyboard, being mainly a bass guitarist and rythm guitarist); tempo (beats per minute) and technical-melodic complexity (where to put your hands/fingers, and the rythm/groove) is what makes it hard to play.

And since you're into progressive music: Take Tool's "Right in Two" for example. It has a 11/8 (or 11/4 depending on your choise of bpm) time signature. The rythm is quite playable and the chords are easy (yet lovely in my ears). And yet some other parts of this song might make you feel like you're breaking your fingers (at least on a guitar)

Hmm, see this is two different worlds. I define hard to play as counting. It's hard to count. If I could hear something in 11/8 before I had to play it, it wouldn't be that difficult. It's just I read music and when you encounter it in music literature it becomes technically difficult to play. The only real thing that's harder is triplets over duplets, but this is a known extremely difficult thing and I never had to seriously play triplets over duplets (this is one hand doing one and the other hand doing another). I play both the guitar and the piano and I have never encountered anything by Tool that was incredibly difficult, but I haven't tried playing many of there things (I hesitate to call them songs as the band might be angry with a statement like that). Rhythmically rock and metal are not imeasurably hard to play. I'm sure there are Yes songs and Meshuggah songs that would make me eat my words, but those are the exceptions not the rule.

[ExSaint1379]

Originally Posted by sparqee

Yeah, to me 11 is a lot like 7. You just gotta let go and feel it. I wrote a number in 11 and it pretty much shakes down to a 1-2-3, 1-2-3, 1-2-3, 1-2 kind'a feel.

Thats odd usually I think of it like 1 2 3 4, 1 2 3, 1 2 3 4

[sparqee]

Originally Posted by ExSaint1379

Thats odd usually I think of it like 1 2 3 4, 1 2 3, 1 2 3 4

Which is the cool thing about odd meters. You can think of them (and therefore play them) as different compound meters. I once played (but did not write) a number that was in 7. Through part of the song we played it as 1-2-3, 1-2-3, 1 (ala Peter Gabriel) and through another part of the song as 1-2-3-4, 1-2-3. It was subtle but cool.

[Cailyn]

I don't count. It messes me up. If I can hear it once, I usually have it and play by feel. Counting adds some anxiety (did I miss one?) to the process so I prefer to just feel the count. If I encounter something in written notation that I can't feel by reading, I program the piece into my DAW on a piano and listen to it that way.

[engelbach]

In early music notation there were no bar lines and no time signatures. And the only kind of music that was written down — church music, as opposed to folk or dance music — was rhythmically very loose.

Bar lines divide the music up into (usually) even measures of information, to facilitate keeping track of where you are.

The time signature further divides the music within the measure in order to (1) even further keep track of where you are and (2) indicate where the beats fall.

It's easier to keep track of where you are by counting "One, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, etc." than "One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine ... one hundred and ten, one hundred and eleven, etc."

In much 4/4 time music the emphasize is on 1 and 3. In 2/4 time the emphasis is on 1. In a genre like reggae it's just the opposite. And much Latin music puts strong emphasis between beats.

For the most part, one measure in 4/4 won't sound much different from two measures in 2/4 time. Composers choose one or the other probably because of where they want the emphasized beats to fall. The idea is that in straight ahead music the top of the the measure is often the strongest beat, although in practice it may not be possible to tell just by listening whether a song is in 4/4 or 2/4.

[wakefresh]

the time signature doesn't control where you can accent beats. reggae uses 4/4 time but accents the upbeats (eg.1 <b>and</b> 2 <b>and</>). part of your job as a composer is being selective about what beats you want to accent.

[Xplora]

Originally Posted by richiebee

What a load of bollocks.

Well, for me, as an artist, I don't like being chained to a mechanical, artificial structure that judges how I should time my accents.

I don't sightread well, and for a person that comes onto a forum wanting help on time signatures, I figure that they probably don't read that well either.

Just play. Your instrument doesn't know what the time signature is!

[richiebee]

Originally Posted by Xplora

Well, for me, as an artist, I don't like being chained to a mechanical, artificial structure that judges how I should time my accents.

If you think a time signature does that, you just don't understand them. And just because you don't understand them, doesn't mean they are irrelevant to your music. Whether you are aware of it or not, you do internalize them. The biggest benefit to understanding them is when you communicate with other musicians. If you don't need to do that, or are happy making that communication some other way, good for you.

For so many musicians of all genres, time signatures are a real time saver in communicating a musical idea and for helping to understand them. I can't even tell you how many hours I've saved in studio recording sessions by bands who understand theory and can communicate their vision with session musicians.

To put this into some perspective. I've recorded as a session horn player on several commercial recordings that were handled in very different ways.

On one, we spent hours working out horn lines based on the writers description of what he wanted, him playing lines on his guitar, us figuring out the right harmonies and the actual recording. So just the horn lines took 3 very long sessions to record on just 4 tracks with the whole section (3 of us) playing simultaneously.

On another, parts were written for us by the songwriter using standard music notation. We performed all 5 tracks in an afternoon, tracking separately with a 4 piece horn section. This album incidentally won the band three awards at Canada's East Coast Music Awards last weekend.

The difference in cost to the band was huge, for roughly the same amount of finished music.

[Xplora]

But you are talking about sheet music in general, not time signatures. Someone asking about time signatures often has been listening to a lot of Dream Theater and has been told by their friends how awesome DT is because they can use so many different time sigs... so therefore if you understand time signatures you understand how to create great prog music

You don't need to understand time signatures to write a four piece horn section; I don't disagree that sheet music can improve communication between musicians, and I am actually working hard at improving my music reading at the moment. But 99.999% of music is 4/4 or 3/4 and we don't need any training to feel that. A waltz and a back beat covers almost everything you'll ever do.

Which is why I made my comment. Some people just come up with 11/8 parts.