Odd Meter Out
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- Опубліковано 7 кві 2016
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I'm from Balkan region, and I have to disappoint you, almost none of today's Balkan music is in odd meters. Most of it is in 4/4, but there are awesome traditional tunes that appear in all kinds of different meters. If you are interested in this kind of thing, you should check out a band called Farmers Market. They fused jazz, bulgarian traditional music and sometimes rock, and it sounds brilliant.
Aw... That's too bad, but not super surprising. Western practices have invaded pretty much every pop music tradition in the world at this point. I'll definitely check that band out, though, that sounds awesome!
That's not strictly true. Traditional music is played a whole lot, and the bands that play it don't shy away from odd meters when writing their own stuff either. It may not be considered pop, but it's a real stretch to say that there is almost none of this music today.
Not sure about all "Balkan" but Bulgarian folk has all those meters all over and they are as natural as standard meters, as a matter of fact there is the corresponding dance (horo) for those rhythms.
I am from the Balkans and, actually, I'm more familiar to odd meters like 7/8, 9/8 and 11/8 than to even meters. By the way, people in the Balkans consider different subdivisions of the three meters mentioned above as different meters. So there is 9/8a, with a longer 4th time, 9/8b with a longer 2nd time, 11/8a with 5 times and a longer 3rd time, 11/8b with 4 times, a shorter 1st time and longer 2nd, 3rd and 4th times, 7/8a with 3 times and a longer 3rd time, and 7/8b with a longer 1st time.
That makes sense to me. I once wrote an entire piece exploring the idea that 6/8 divided into two dotted quarters is somehow different from 6/8 divided into three quarter notes, so I get it.
@@Pablo360able West Side Story's "America" juxtaposes both against each other.
I think the origin of really odd meter in prog rock and jazz fusion was through 20th Century Classical, which got it from Balkan folk music because composers like Bartok were from that part of the world and introduced them. I don't know how the Balkan folk music started going in that direction, but it did.
That'd make sense! I'm not much of a historian, to be honest, so I can't say for sure, but that matches my understanding pretty well.
I would recommend to search strong one (masked one) if you want to really be puzzled by odd signatures
Ah, I see you're a man of culture as well
The guide to odd meters aka how to understand Dream Theater.
Heh, yeah...
An example of complex time signatures that I think more younger people might know is one of the main themes from Mass Effect 2. The Suicide mission theme is done in 7/8 with sort of 3/4 + 1 quaver kind of feel to it.
Interesting! I haven't played the Mass Effect series, so I'm not familiar with that particular piece, but I'll have to look it up!
Very interesting! I actually hear that more as 7/4 with the back half of the bar syncopated on upbeats, but either way it's a great example, thanks!
I've seen it notated both ways. It depends on what you take as the pulse. For me the little synth motif at the start really sets it as 7/8, but if you take the brass melody that comes in later then it is more of a 7/4 feel.
There's this one piece that I'm playing for a band, and It's called "Vesuvius" by Frank Tichelli. There are plenty of odd meters in that. It is quite interesting and fun to play (especially on euphonium)!
Eyyyy fellow euph! I played Vesuvius back in high school as well lol
DAMN STRAIGHT, FELLOW EUPH PLAYER OF VESUVIUS
I'd love to see a future video on Balkan folk music, that sounds super interesting
Shawn Sousa it is!
To me, an (almost) beginner indie/alternative rock songwriter, a lot of odd time signatures up to 17/8 have become quite essential actually because just as different scales they all have their very own feeling:
5/8 = the easiest way of going crazy and confuse people
7/8 = probably my all time favourite time signture. It really has a huge variety of possibilities because of its "missing" last 8th, I guess it's kind of the rythmical equivalent of 7th chords.
9/8 = As I use it mostly as a shuffled 3/4, or more exactly a 9/4 as 6/8 with shuffled 16thes, it feels incredibly melancholic and heavy.
11/8 = similar to 7/8, just with the difference that it's based on a 12/8 instead of a 4/4
13/8 = dunno, never actually used this.
15/8 = lazy 7/8 because only every second 4/4 measure is missing an 8th. Can get really messy and interesting though.
17/8 = legitimacy of going as crazy as you want. used it in one of my latest songs as a 7/8+7/8+3/8 which ended up absolutely ridiculous but really interesting and a lot more straight than expected.
I once tried to write something in a slow 17/16 where I treated it like 4/4 but with an extra sixteenth note at the end of each measure - by which I literally placed an extra sixteenth note at the end of each measure as a sort of pedal. I say “tried to” because it didn't have the effect I wanted and then the project I was writing it for got cut down severely.
I've always used 13/8 like 4/4+5/8 and 15/8 like 3 beats each broken evenly into five eighths
15/8: 5/4 with a triplet feel
@@_cynth_wave What about 3/8+3/8+4/8+3/8- almost like a 4-bar loop of 3/4 with a bonus "hiccup" quarter note every time the 3rd comes, which keeps you on your toes?
I wrote part of a piece where each measure alternated between 3/4 and 5/8. It sounded really cool. I never finished it, though. Maybe I should work on that. It would be more metrically interesting than other things I've written.
I highly recommend the band +/- for accessible uses of odd meters
9/8 in Balkan music is usually like 7/8 + 2, usually shows up as 2+2+2+3 or 2+3+2+2 so it is an odd time signature.
2+2+2+3 is also used in Blue Rondo a la Turk, probably not coincidentally
I recall hearing something in 29/16.
Chicken Tendie Only thing that comes to mind is the Strong one (masked man) theme from Mother 3. It's essentially 4/4+7/8 but the last 16th is chopped off to mess with players and make rhythm combos really hard.
@@vharmi. it’s actually a irrational time signature because the quintuplet is cut off at the end but can be approximated by either a tempo change within the bar or writing it as 29/16
For some good examples of odd meter, I would suggest Dave Brubeck's Take Five (in 5/4) and the original Mission Impossible theme (also in 5/4). Though it isn't specifically odd meter, Dave Brubeck's Blue Rondo A La Turk is a good example of how groupings work in 9/8 and how they can really feel different based on the groupings.
+Michael Astarb Yeah! I considered referencing Take Five in the video but wound up cutting it for time. It's a great example, though! One of my favorites for 7/8 is Pushing Forward Back by Temple of the Dog, if people want to hear what that one sounds like.
+12tone I'll have to look that up. It's been recommended to me before but it always slips my mind. Love the show by the way!
Michael Astarb аааапрр
There's also Dance of Eternity by Dream Theatre...it's a little whack
Someone has to mention "Mars" in the Planet Suite, so I will mention it.
The middle section of King Crimson's "Starless" is 13/8 with a division of 3+3+2+2+3
the power of my stand, king crimson, erased one beat from each of the third and fourth divisions of the bar
Ehh it’s so slow it’s more like 13/4
Love stumbling on this older stuff.
You should listen to Synaptic Plasticity by Blotted Science. That song has some of the strangest time signatures and changes I've ever heard.
Neat, I'll check it out!
There are a few Took songs I keep going back and forth on. Sometimes I feel they're in 11/8. Sometimes I feel they use 4/4 with the 11 hitting every 3rd 8th note. And then dropping beat 33 so the rhythms can weave back in at beat 32. I've stopped trying and just accept it now.
Conlon Nancarrow for the oddest meter you'll ever see
Are you guys going to talk about irrational meters at some point? Great video!
+Musicombo Honestly, we probably wouldn't do a whole video on it because I'm not really sure how much there is to say, but we have plans for videos on both Metric Modulation and Polyrhythms, both of which can be thought of in terms of irrational meters, so we'll make sure to talk about it in one of those!
Awesome! :)
Thank you for sharing another entertaining and educational clip. Odd meter is one of my favourite things. It tends to make me laugh when a live band really nails it especially if it has a timing change in it somewhere. It is in many different styles of music from pop,
I like Sting's 'Seven Days' as an example of (curiously) 5/4.
ua-cam.com/video/pG7_gceIFL4/v-deo.html
to flamenco which uses odd meter at times, with the short/long phrase combinations being improvised in different combinations.
In Australia a friend called Lindsey Pollock (who is famous for building clarinets out of carrots) is a Balkan music enthusiast who has a great festival band that has workshops and teaches odd meter Balkan music beautifully showing even kids can get odd meter. That band is called The Unusual Suspects. I don't know how you would count this track. It sounds a bit polyrhythmic to me so I doubt my skills to count it well enough to write or decide on a firm meter. How do you write polyrhythms? Do you just write out two lines of staves with the different meter?
It is a fun band to watch and brings Lindsey's passion for the genre to life.
ua-cam.com/video/Mt2midkLyQU/v-deo.html
9/8 has many traditional songs in Irish folk music with slip jigs and they can be fun to play at a session to sort the wheat from the chaff.
Myriad3 is a terrific Toronto band that loves odd meters too. I met them while traveling and love this tune inspired by the laundry drier rhythms. They are masters of odd meter.
ua-cam.com/video/ZDS1fT5kquk/v-deo.html
Soundgarden's Spoonman is a classic odd meter too.
ua-cam.com/video/T0_zzCLLRvE/v-deo.html&list=LLTQJYfbNlq0EtADhnkIX1HA&index=298
Thanks again for an inspiring clip.
Will you guys ever do a video on nested tuplets and fragmentary tuplets?
Great idea, I'll add it to the list! I've been trying to figure out more good rhythmic topics, we haven't really done much with them recently. Thanks!
No problem! Keep up the awesome videos!
I always knew that King Crimson was a Balkan brass band.
I was playing around with things on this program that I was making and found that after a certain point like 49 48 (It was really just 4 4+1/48th note) the slight extension to the last note just sounds even more normal than just 4 4 and not jarring and unnatural like 17 16. I am not sure if a human musician could actually play 49 48 time purposely though.
Yeah, I doubt most people could actually differentiate that all that effectively. Even the best human drummers have slight fluctuations in their tempos, and those tiny gaps would probably get covered up in those. Still an interesting idea for electronic music, though!
Adam Neely did a video called "the fastest music humanly possible", or something like that. There he quotes some research that shows how 20ms or something is the low threshold at which humans can perceive separate attacks for notes.
I imagine that if your tempo doesn't leave a larger interval than that, it's not playable.
@@martinkrauser4029 Close- it was about 600 bpm, or 100 ms.
So what's your opinion on this: I was playing in someone's show at college last semester and we were playing some of his original film score stuff. When I looked over the music and listened to the demos he sent there was one part that was constantly changing between 5/8 and 7/8 (and I mean one bar of 5/8, directly followed by a bar of 7/8). The figures in this section were easy enough but I internally questioned the logic of needing to change every bar. Would you prefer to see a 1 or 2 VERY syncopated bars of 12/8 (possibly using the additive meter depending on the skill level of the players) , or more bars of the constantly changing meter?
It really depends how strong the downbeats are, as well as what the overall rhythmic pulse is. Notation is about communication, and different time signatures say different things. 12/8, specifically, says triple meter to me, so if it was notated like that I'd expect it to be based on groups of three. It's hard to lay down strict rules: I've used 14/16 in pieces where I probably could've used 7/8, but using that name would've been misleading and wouldn't have fit as well with the surrounding music, so without context I don't really have a strong answer. Depends what's going on.
9/8 is an oddmeter. It's just that it's isochronal
3+2+4 9/8 is certainly odd time :)
no triplet, all in duple meter.
I know it's just two measures of 4/4, but what would you call a 1.5+1.5+1.5+1+1+1+.5 beat? It's like the 1.5+1.5+1 thing (don't know what it's called) glued to a syncopated (.5)+1+1+1+.5.
Oh, I really should have watched the "Odd Accents" video before posting this comment. (And there's no technical name for the 'fake triplets'? Really? But they're everywhere!)
(Oh, "tresillo." Or "3-3-2 rhythm," that's essentially what I've been calling it :P )
Let Tool play in the background while you do some everyday task.
Woooo Balkan 11/8
Bulgarian Bulge
More videos like these and less song analyses!
Interestingly odd meters are not unique to the Balkans in terms of folk music. Värttinä, a Finnish folk band that led the revival of Karelian folk music, plays a lot in mixed meter as well: in this song they actually switch between different mixed meters!: ua-cam.com/video/S9XhWt7ts08/v-deo.html
Wow you didn't go as fast as you normally do so I was actually able to focus. Lol. You should talk slower more often.
I've seen 12/8, which... why not just say 6/8
Good question! It depends on the use, but the difference between 12/8 and 6/8 is a lot like the difference between 4/4 and 2/4. In 4/4 and 12/8, you have a primary accented beat (the 1) at the beginning, a secondary accented beat (the 3) in the middle, and then two more semi-accented beats (the 2 and the 4) in between those. in 2/4 and 6/8, you just alternate between the primary and semi-accented beats. So converting a bar of 12/8 into two bars of 6/8 means sacrificing some of that rhythmic hierarchy, because you're promoting the secondary accent to primary status.
oh right, even if there's no explicit secondary accent you'll start hearing them, and those -uh- and -a- beats would have to be really weak to keep that energy across the same number of bars