More time signature nonsense

Yesterday, I covered how I approach certain compound time signatures. However, the ones covered were not all that rare. 10/8 is used in occasional Tool songs (The Patient, and Vicarious come to mind), and 8/8 is also rather common - although I can't readily think of any songs in that time.

Ultimately, I believe compound time signatures can be thought of as a kind of Waltz; a stress on certain beat divisions, followed by unstressed units.

Today, I'd like to cover another, much less common time signature.

7/4



So far, I have used 7/4 in two songs; Desmodus's The Vicious Prayer (which we never got a decent recording of, so I won't link to it), and my current band's Theory of Mind. 

"TVP" as we call it, is almost entirely in this time signature, while ToM uses it only in the chorus, meaning that there's a rapid change to and from it into 4/4.

In both cases, there's some hardcore counting going on, and again, I rely on my classical composition background to ensure I know what's going on, and when.

Here's the main riff to TVP:

Hey look, I count up to five! Who said musicians can't count past four?

An interesting thing about this riff in particular is that again, we're looking at a compound time signature, even though it's not a /8 denominator. yes, the song could be interpreted as being in 7/8 instead of 7/4, but it's very clearly not, and if you play it for yourself, you'll hear why that is.

Another interesting thing is that I'm only stressing three notes in the bar. Yes, they're on the beat, so to speak, but they're not the ones you'd typically expect to be stressed. Effectively, there are only three beats in this riff. You could count them in a different manner, but the above is what's going through my head as I play it.

In theory, this riff should actually start on the pinch-harmonic bent-B (labelled 5 in the above example), and the previous four notes should form an anacrusis such as in the below example:

...and that may be more technically correct...

...but it doesn't work in the context of this song, since everything changes once we hit the chorus:

Whoa. Whoa whoa whoa! What in the name of all that's holy is going on here? Suddenly we've gone from an effective three beats per bar, to a janky four beats per bar, all without changing what time we're playing in!

Again, you could make this work with an anacrusis at the very start of the song, but near the end, the song changes to a standard 4/4 for a few bars before blasting back into 7/4 for two final bars. The technically correct way of doing things here would only make things more complicated than they already are. Counting the beats as above makes the song so much easier to play!

This song really isn't hard on guitar or bass. In fact, it's quite easy - the 4/4 section is so simple I won't even bother to explain it here, as it's a complete no-brainer of a riff. As I said yesterday, I'm no virtuoso guitarist, and I sure don't expect anybody else I play with to understand notation, as I'm well aware that my musical background is quite uncommon... but I find it helps greatly for me to write stuff down in notation in order to understand it better.

Theory of Mind though, is another matter. In its current form, it's a sprawling ten minute epic of atmospheric pads, heavy riffing, finger tapping, and good old chord strumming.

With the heavy riffing, I make a rapid change from 4/4 to 7/4 to go from the verse to chorus:

Yeah, sorry. Music nerds will notice I've unnecessarily committed the cardinal sins of using augmented seconds, diminished fourths, double sharps, and B-sharps. Using the enharmonic equivalents though, is aesthetically unpleasing, IMO. Plus, I'm the one writing it, so you'll just have to deal with it.

So what's going on here? As you can see, the tail end of the 4/4 verse is pretty standard counting. In fact, I don't even bother counting it in my head, I just think "dadadun da da, dadadun da da"

In the 7/4 section, we have completely different beat grouping again to the previous two examples. Honestly, sometimes I wonder just what drugs I'm on to come up with this stuff.

Anyway, it's really, really tempting to break this riff up into two bars of 5/8 and one of 4/8. After all, that's what the beat grouping looks like, right? But again, we run into my weird habit of not stressing the first beat. Breaking the riff into smaller chunks like above and playing with the obvious stresses results in an awkward sounding riff. I mean, it's janky and angular enough as it is without having to remember that the obvious 2-3-2-3-2-2 grouping isn't how the beats are accented at all. Counting in the fashion of the example picture is the only way I have found to make the riff work consistently.

This particular song is easy. Except for the above chorus. Of all the bizarre-timing riffs I've written, this one may well be the hardest.

I hope I've explained the way I think about these riffs clearly enough, If you don't think I have, or if you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment.

Next up on Blogfunk, I'll be explaining how I count the thousand different time signatures in another sprawling epic song.