How to actually play odd time signatures
Вставка
- Опубліковано 14 тра 2024
- Check out my time signatures topic on Haby Academy: haby-academy.onelink.me/9KMC/...
🎼😎
Playing in odd time signatures can be intimidating, so today I aim to give you a key rhythm that you can latch onto when you're playing in these odd meters to make it easier to stay within the timing!
Here are all my other time signature videos: • Time signatures 🎶
And, an extra special thanks goes to Peter Keller, Douglas Lind, Vidad Flowers, Ivan Pang, Waylon Fairbanks, Jon Dye, Austin Russell, Christopher Ryan, Toot & Paul Peijzel, the channel’s Patreon saints! 😇
SUPPORT ME ON PATREON: / davidbennettpiano 🎹
0:00 5/4
2:30 7/8
3:21 9/8
4:11 11/8
5:15 Haby Academy
6:05 13/8
8:06 15/8
9:27 17/8
11:40 Guess the time signature!
Check out my time signatures topic on Haby Academy: haby-academy.onelink.me/9KMC/DavidBennett
Also, I've heard people count 15/8 as if it were like 5/4 time, but for these examples, it's probably better to show it the way you brought it up
I appreciate that you need to a make a living so no hate for accepting a sponsor: but …… I knew as soon as i heard that phrase “free to “””download”””” it was gonna be some hot garbage. Yes, free to “download” (what app isn’t?) but not to use, overly woke-y, topics, and your time signatures ciurse is nowhere to be found.
What time is "Schisim" by Tool? I always assumed it was a 5/8 and 7/8 alternating back and forth.... what do you think?
I tend to add the leftover quavers into a 'skip', usually in the middle. Would like to 'blame' Joe Morello, but am not altogether certain he's solely responsible. :) Thanks for alternative ways to read them!
As a prog musician, I absolutely love odd time signatures. One of my old band's songs had a main riff in 11/8. It was essentially 7/8 (as shown in this video) followed by 2/4.
The piece at the end is in 13/8.
7/8 is one of my favourites and it can groove too
I didn't know about the Morse code bit in Mission Impossible. What a clever little device that also makes the piece so recognizable.
How about a video about finding upbeats and downbeats in such time signatures?
For me, the key is to understanding and mentally "accepting" the odd time signatures is that every other measure is syncopated to the previous measure. So since the first measure starts on the downbeat of 1, the second measure is syncopated, and starts on the relative upbeat. The measures alternate in syncopation throughout. Measure 1 downbeat. Measure 2 upbeat. Measure 3 downbeat. Measure 4 upbeat, and so-on. Makes it feel more normal.
The piece at the end is in 13/8!
I think my favorite odd meters are 7/4 and 7/8, especially when the pattern is 4+3. Our brains love 4/4 so much that it can be unexpected and jarring when a measure of what we thought was 4/4 ends prematurely, and this can be used to great effect. I currently have a video game idea where the plot revolves around a group of middle schoolers mourning and processing the premature death of a classmate, and have the idea of said classmate's theme being in 7/4. The way our ears find the 4+3 version of 7/4 "cut short" reflects the untimely end to a young life.
As a guitarist I love how much more freeing the piano can be to create songs on the fly, by thinking of melodies at the same time as you figure out chords, voicing, rhythms, etc. The guitar can also be used for that, of course, but not so effortlessly.
This is the reason I bought a piano.
Yeah, I agree with everything you’ve said. I have played guitar exclusively for a long time, and it’s a bad instrument for writing music hahah. Things like modal interchange are much easier to make sound natural than guitar. You also learn scales and chords better on piano (notes) than is the standard on guitar (shapes).
This video virtually single handedly taught me time signatures.
There's a thing at the beginning of this video that you don't mention in words, but which shows how well you've practiced the skill you're trying to teach here: you speak in a normal voice while playing the 5-beat rhythm. This would be quite impossible to do if you weren't feeling the pulse of the rhythm rather than counting it in your head.
Got my attention. This is exactly the kind of ease I always want in my own playing.
11/8 sounds so beautiful
Thanks for a brilliant explanation! Actually 5/4, 7/8 and 9/8 are very common in Greek music, so they are easy to grasp here even for non-musicians.
Thank you thank you thank you. I've been playing music for thirty years and this is the first time someone has explained these in a way I can understand. Turns out I've been using them already without realising, but now I can do so deliberately. Amazing video, well presented, simply explained, great examples. 10/10
I think the point is: Feel the rhythm instead of analyzing it intellectually!
As an example, although the song "Getting Better" by The Beatles is (as I think) in a simple 4/4 beat, Ringo has added a tricky cymbal beat in the verses:
If you count "one | two | three, and | four", it comes on the "and". Quite easy thing doing it this way - but try and tell at which position the beat comes if you divide the bar into 16th!
I think it is the 11th, but I am still not sure. - I just tried to reproduce the drum beat using MuseScore; at first I thought that is rather the 12th of 16/16th; but listening to thee original again, I am back at the 11th of 16 /16th ... or you could also say the 6th of 8/8th.
That's probably why "Feel" players mostly play in 4/4, play pentatonic scales and jam over cowboy chords. "Feel" is an excuse. If you know how to fret a chord or play in key you already have analyzed music and know some sort of theory. I don't understand this pushback against learning the language of music. It's like painting strictly in black and white and never learning about color.
Yes, I've only recently realized that rhythm is very similar to harmony in this way: the theory is method of analyzing and educating, but it is not necessarily the natural language when playing or creating. I've seen instances of world music described as 17/8 (or some such) but that is just a "code" of sorts, acting as a shorthand for a more natural scheme.
@@alexanderwilliamson7431So true. I was fortunate enough to know a member of the Wrecking Crew, and am still in touch with his widow due to my friendship with her nephew. The only musician I'm aware of in the Wrecking Crew who was not a trained musician, apart from having great feel, was Glen Campbell. He had to rely a lot on Carol Kaye, bass guitarist, to know what to do.
"All music is in 4/4 unless you are a nerd"
-A wise man
@@avijatsinharoy8944 “Life would be dull with only 4/4 to listen to”- a nerd
I think the piece at the end is in 13/8
That’s my guess too, I’m counting 3 groups of 3 and a final group of 4.
I agree.
7/8 is really cool, because of how you can group it. You have, obviously, seven 8th notes in a bar.
We can group it like:
1/4, 1/4, three 1/8s;
1/4, three 1/8s, 1/4;
Three 1/8s, two 1/8s, two 1/8s;
Etc.
I have a song that I wrote where the main riff is in 7/8, grouped as three 1/8s, two 1/8s, 1/4.
Regardless of how you group 7/8, it always feels like something is missing.
This kind of grouping is true of most odd time signatures.
I really love hearing how my favorite prog bands treat odd meter (Rush, Crown Lands, Genesis, etc) but then I equally love hearing simplistic renditions like Solsbury Hill by Peter Gabriel, or Eleven by Primus. I think odd meters can scare off "normal songwriters" thinking that they're for prog nerds like me :P but you can very easily make them feel and sound very regular, and honestly they can groove SUPER hard! Starting off with anything over 4 is a great way to internalize the sense of odd meter, then you can run all the way down the rabbit hole of writing anything over 8 or 16. Thanks for making this video, it's really refreshing to see a simpler take on what can seem to be a mammoth subject.
Solsbury Hill is one of my very favorite "odd meter" songs because of how well the sense of urgency of the beat matches the moment of the song. It's a song that grooves, but doesn't have time to wait around for the formality of the eighth beat.
Simple, but so effective.
A couple people have mentioned doing 9/8 as 3 triples. A classic example is "Beautiful Dreamer," which could have been done in 6/8, but the song would've felt hurried. It's like waltz within a waltz.
Also, for an adventure in odd meters: "Tarkus" (ELP).
I think of it as, 2/4 is to 6/8 like 3/4 is to 9/8
As a church musician, when I think of 9/8 the first song I think of is Blessed Assurance, which also plays it as three sets of triples.
The 7/8 break towards the end of Zappa’s “Inca Roads” is some of the best shit ever. But is VERY hard to bob your head to.
One of my favorite things to do with odd time signatures is count the amount of ways you can divide it into a combination of simple and compound beats. For example, 11/8 has 9 ways it divides:
5 where there’s 1 compound beat
3 - 2 - 2 - 2 - 2
2 - 3 - 2 - 2 - 2
2 - 2 - 3 - 2 - 2
2 - 2 - 2 - 3 - 2
2 - 2 - 2 - 2 - 3
and 4 where there’s 1 simple beat
3 - 3 - 3 - 2
3 - 3 - 2 - 3
3 - 2 - 3 - 3
2 - 3 - 3 - 3
13/8 has 16 ways it divides, which I won’t write down here. It’s a really fascinating mathematical problem to calculate how many ways you can divide meters this way. There’s a sequence in the OEIS, A182097, that documents the number of these ways. It’s a fun exercise to write out all the ways you can divide these meters these ways.
I love the 123 123 123 12 12 from skimbleshanks the railway cat, very catchy
It would interesting to take a drummer’s view on this, i.e. where he would be placing the snare backbeats - this helps to break down the subdivisions.
I think the optimal usage of odd meter is when you can't tell that the song is in an odd meter, so that there are no weird extra beats in the bar, more like that long long short approach you took on the 5/8 beat
Exactly! I love Pink Floyd's Money for this reason. You really need to count it to realize that it's in 7:4.
or river man by nick drake
11/8 with slow tempo is just absolute mood
❤love from the UK. Really helpful
Thank you!
Lovely as always, David.
11/8 is my favorite signature, and I’m the furthest possible thing from a skilled musician. Not only do I sometimes hear it as 3-3-3-2 as you demonstrated (which reminds me of “Right in Two” by Tool), but often I just cheat by alternating bars of 6/8 and 5/8 in rhythms I already know. Eventually, 11/8 began to feel “normal” to me.
My next goal is to figure out how to treat time signatures with large “numerators” _without_ using my usual cheat of smashing together two smaller rhythms (something more akin to your “if 12/8 was an odd time signature” video!).
Cheers for all the inspiration.
Thanks for breaking these down into a digestible form. I was playing along with most of these.
I'm all in odd meters. Out of 4/4. Out of equal temperament. Cheers Maestro!
Make a video about tritone substitutions
It’s been on my list for a while! It will definitely happen eventually!
Playing with note value groupings in top heavy time signatures is very creative and quite fun. Love the video! Much gratitude to you.
This video actually inspired me to finish off a song the other day - thanks so much for this David!!
just thank you i love odd time signatures for a living and i rly rly rly am looking forward to this video, love from austria
Thank you for the easily understandable lesson. You are a great teacher and you are helping me to develop my ear. These rhythms very much had a circle, or infinity sound to them, something to calm your mind.
I love odd time signatures and would love to see more videos on them. I think King Gizzard is doing some really interesting things with timing. Also with polyrhythm and polymeter. I'd love to see you do more videos on polymeter and polyrhythm, as well as odd time signatures.
9/8 sounds hipnotizing
Good heavens, I love your original compositions.
I really liked the way how You played/grouped that 9/8 time signature,it sounded very nicely progessive, something that firmly, steadily moves on and on😊😊
Love your videos mate! Short, to the point, and easy to follow. Please keep on going with this sensational lessons. You're awesome 👍😎
absolutely brilliant!
Great Lesson! Thank You!
13/4.
Absolutely brilliant video . Thank you David, for being so helpful 👍👍
You are a great teacher, my friend.
Great job on the visuals. Helps a lot. I also noticed that most rhythms that are one short feel better than one extra. Well at least to me.
so well described, easy to share this video!
thank you very much for this video! Respect!
David, you are a master of common practice!!
I love your piece "Study in 5/4 Time!" Thank you for reminding me to use it for an Instagram Reel today!
excellent video, thank you
I highly recommend looking at the album "Tale of a Cruel World" by DM Dokuro; they have used a wide range of time signatures in it (5/4, 11/4, 13/4 and 7/8). There's some fascinating work in their structuring too. My top pick from it is "Blood Coagulant"
(edit 1): "Octivarium" by Dream Theatre is another song that used many crazy time signatures, all compacted into a 24 minute progressive, orchestral rock piece! Also it used 7/16.
(edit 2): There's just so much I know that I can't help but talk about: The soundtrack for act II in the game "ULTRAKILL" used some odd time signatures too. Not as odd, but occasions of 5/4 and 7/8 (Dancer of the Darkness, He is the Light in my Darkness, Death Odyssey).
(edit 3): Last edit I swear: The piece "Ganondorf Battle" plays in the mind-warping 23/16 time; have fun with that!
DM Dokuro's music is tight. I think him (generally) as a cross between Jazz Fusion and Prog Metal.
Blood Coagulant's 11/4 kick beat is my beloved
13/8 at the end
Very good David.
Another nice video
Finally. Thank you
Thank you ! This made sense
13/8
Coldplay's Christmas song is in 6/8 (I think), but they make it sound like an odd time signature, by playing as if it were one bar of 4/4, and then one of 2/4.
Really nice video! It would be cool to see a similar video, but with ideas for opposite patterns in the left hand, what would work, what wouldn´t.
13/8
13/8 is sweet love your piano :)
This was a great idea. 🍻
Always brilliant videos. Thanks. Something that interests me at the moment is rhythmic palindromes. So you mirror the ostinato. It gives very interesting results.
Before this video started i got an piano course ad made by this guy. That confused the hell out of me
You can also look at 15/8 as 5 groups of 3, like 12/8 with an extra 3 on the end.
The best example of this is in the song Limo Wreck by Soundgarden.
I also think of 7/8 as like a cut short 4/4 like in the intro to Deliverance by Opeth.
Thanks for the video this is how i think about time signatures as well :)
The last composition you did was in 13/8 🎉
I like never pay attention to details like this. I just love to listen to music and point out if they sound like other songs.
That said, thanks for showing me this.
very useful tanks
A very usefull video. Thank you
Thanks 😊
11:40 Would it be 13/8 maybe?
13/4??
@@LeoDurman11 Well, here’s what I thought
ONE two three, one two three, one two three, one two three, one.
There’s these triplets on a slower time, and 4 and a third triplets in total in one whole bar.
Would be 13/8 in that sense, counting 13 beats in all of that.
@@acarminelotus noice 👍
I love writing in odd meters and when it comes to the recording, that moment where I stop trying to count and settle into a rhythm is invariably the moment where everything clicks into place. Best feeling.
But it's something I like to come up with on the fly 'cause especially with longer meters there's more than one way to write them, and one of the best parts about using these strange divisions is that you get to figure out your own "right way".
15/8 as 5 groups of 3's.
In Beyond this life by Dream Theater there's a riff in 15/8 played alternatively 4 + 4 + 4 + 3 and then 3 + 3 + 3 + 3 + 3
13/8- and at a rather fine pace too…
Most of the time I’m composing on a modular set up, and where it’s any time signature at all I like to try to mix it up. It’s very difficult to build dotted notes into the gate sequencer (not sure it’s possible at all) so these little 3-3-3-4 tricks- each beginning with a kick- are very useful. Still haven’t nailed the ‘Blue Rondo’ 9/8 yet, but to do that properly involves 36 steps…
This was really eye opening and really helpful for my own compositions thank you so much!! EDIT: For your own composition at the end my guess would be 13/8.
I thought 13/8 too.
This is basically Adam Neely's "short short long" interpretation of odd time signatures
I love 3/16 with 1 bar of 4/16 after 12 beats. Great for metal and jazz!
For 13/8, I stumbled upon a 3rd way by thinking on long long long short short, like a 3-2 clave. For an application, I wrote a piece titled "Solar Plexus" to this clave. Instead of using the 13/8 time signature, i switched between 9/8 and 2/4 to emphasise the 3 long beats vs 2 short beats grouping
I found it helps a lot if you start to shuffle the fast "3" around a bit; like 1 - 2 - 3 -123 4 - for 11/8
🎼13/8🎵😁
When I first saw that chart, I misread the last time signature as 17/18 😂 luckily I'm going to bed.
As a prog nerd, I LOVE "exotic" time signatures. The ending piece is in 13/8..
Stravinsky likes to make it trickier by changing time signature every bar, using 4, 8 and 16 on the bottom. Thankfully the 16s are all rests in my part, and I can listen to the piano soloist (its a piano and wind orchestra concerto) and just worry about 2/4, 3/8, 3/4 and 5/8 when I come back in.
I like to think of any complex rhythm as just what it is: a bunch of 3s and 2s like David explains. Often, the meter doesn’t even matter to me after that, as long as I know how to subdivide it. Because I often play music in mixed meter, I don’t even have time to latch onto a groove.
Stephen Sondheim got a popular 12/8 hit with "Send in the Clowns." Actually, the song alternates 12/8 and 9/8 phrases.
Good vid
13/8
And nice video! Keeping the grouping in 2's and 3's tends to help me personally. I hear the 4 in your 13/8 piece as two 2's.
I heard it at 3x3 and 1x4, but the conclusion is the same :)
I like the "Early Distant Warning" clave for 7/8. Ba ba baa ba ba baa ba ba baa ba ba baa
I highly recommend Take 5. It’s in 5/4.
Just feel the ‘groove’… :)
Essentially develop the repetition and get it into muscle/brain memory. For me though, it always comes down to counting the divisions into 3's and 2's. 123 123 12 12 for 5/4. It rarely fails to work.
All the music in the mode Salmon Run in Splatoon 2 and Splatoon 3 is in written in odd meters and I'm a huge fan of that. "Fishing Frenzy" for example is mostly written in 31/16, "Frothy Waters" starts in 10/8 and adds an 8th note every bar all the way up to 25/8.
Video game music in general is a great source for music written in odd meters!
Currently writing a song in 15/8 meter and the way I decided to count it is to group the notes into one bar of 8/8 and one bar of 7/8. Then, in the bar of 8/8 I play a clave of 3+3+2, and in the bar of 7/8 a clave of 3+2+2. I feel that this way the music has that stumbling effect but is quite groovy as well.
@@luke5100 I'm planning on recording a demo in a few days, super nervous about it. The counting on this is insane since the grouping of the notes is changing almost every other bar.
@@luke5100 If you are still interested, I have a video on my channel with this track now
As a classically-trained musician, I don't have any issues playing in odd meters. In fact, I've always kind of gravitated toward more complex pieces because they're typically more interesting to play (though of course, there's definitely a place for slower, more melodic music, too). The piece at the end is in 13/8.
King Crimson used to do a piece called "Thrak" where part of the group plays in five (hitting on one and three) and another part plays in seven (hitting on one, three and five). When it all comes around they end on thirty-five (the common denominator). They do this twice, so seventy. They would later bring this to "Level Five". Then, of vourse, ther's "Discipline", where the guitars play two configurations of five, followed by the rhythm in 17/8. I could go on.
That 11/8 rhythm (played at half speed and notated on sheet music as 3+3+5, not 3+3+3+2) is something Ludwig Göransson put in the theme for Book of Boba Fett!
I think you should do these time signatures but using lots of different complicated countings of each.
Very wonderful intro to odd meters; being a progressive rock fan, I hear these all the time. One song that's really interesting is Gavin Harrison's (Porcupine Tree & King Crimson) "19 Days", which is in 19/8, but broken down interestingly as 7-7-5, rather than any patterns of 2s and 3s or 3s and 4s. It has a very interesting feel as a result, but is amazing to listen to.
I listen to Tool, it’s basically these except with palm mutes.
i could just listen to you play
Nice video idea, great time to upload it for me to consume it to the bone
Wow I've never been the FIRST like on a video. Thanks for being so awesome! Ill actually listen now lol
*Edit: typo :/
Welcome!!
@@DavidBennettPianoThanks!! Been watching for an age. Very much appreciate your methodology and the way you approach pedagogical topics with such an easy-to-follow practicality. Your demonstrations are also highly interesting to hear. Keep it up, man. Fabulous!
One interesting way to get used to it is playing in 7/8 as 322 or (Greek) 223.
This IMO gives a good ground for other odd time signatures.
Out of all the compound time signatures the ones I’m most accustomed to playing are 5/4 (Gorillaz - 5/4), 7/4 (Pink Floyd - Money, Soundgarden - Outshined), 6/4 (Soundgarden - The Day I Tried to Live) and some pieces I did in high school were in signatures like 7/8, 5/8 and one was in 15/8 but I still know a bunch of prog bands like Rush, Dream Theater, Tool, Porcupine Tree, King Crimson, ELP and Opeth all use these signatures in their song in one form or another
My method is actually similar to this, except that, as a guitar player primarily, I use strumming patterns rather than ostinatos.
Makes me better appreciate bands like Radiohead & Tool for using odd time signatures ❤
For 9/8, I have made up with something like 2+2+3+2, instead of 2+2+2+3.
For 13/8, I have tried 4+3+3+3.
For 15/8, I have tried 8+7 in a group like (3+3+2)+(3+2+2).
For 17/8, I choose to go with 9+8 in a group like (2+2+3+2)+(3+3+2).
But well, there are more variations of these pattern that I have used. But sometimes, we can make the simple time sound odd. So, I like to do it this way more. Like in 4/4, I will go with 1.25+1.25+1.5 (or 2.5+2.5+3, if you choose to go with 8/8 instead of 4/4), which makes the music sounds really odd.