Time Signatures, part 3

Miss Jane, as it's currently entitled is possibly the most complex song I've written. It changes time signatures frequently, which seems to confront everybody I show it to. However, there's a basic, constant pulse to the riffs, regardless of the strange timings.


The song opens with a riff in 12/8, which is heavily influenced by a riff from Meshuggah's Dancers to a Discordant System. As I keep saying, I'm no virtuoso, so I'm not pulling off any bizarre 27:32 tuplets, or "Free Jazz" soloing, I'm just going for a heavy, great sounding riff. There is no recording of this song that I'm willing to show off just yet, as it's still being worked on by my current band.

Again, I believe notation is king. Even if you can't read the pitches, you can get the rhythm values from them, which is really handy.

So, 12/8. That's really hard to explain. You could look at it as a half-time 3/4, or even just a regular 6/4. I've been debating myself about it for ages, because 6/4 definitely comes back into the song later on, with a completely different interpretation.

I've gone with 12/8 because well, I count it funny.
Traditionally, it's a 4x3 counting, but that's no fun. If I'm going to count it like that, I may as well just play in 6/8.

Here's the intro riff:

Oh dear lord, I don't make things easy, do I? I never seem to stress the first note of any of these compound time signatures, and I use strange beat groupings. True, you could group this as 4x3, but the first note of the first and second groups would be unstressed, leaving only the fourth one stressed 'normally'. I don't do normal, though.

So, once we've done though that a few times, we then switch to 10/8. We've already covered that, back in part 1, but this time I change things up a little. I play it backwards, almost.
Again, because this song has a consistent pulse, regardless of what the hell I'm doing, you could interpret this as being 5/4... but again, my beat grouping and stressing doesn't fit that.

Here:

Seriously, that's how I count this stuff in my head. Yes, I know it's convoluted and probably quite wrong, but it's how I keep track of where I'm at.

I'm also aware that suing an anacrusis at the start of the damn song will solve the odd beat stressings, but because the song changes time signature quite frequently, that just won't work in the long run.

So, as I mentioned, there's a consistent pulse going on here. To demonstrate that, here's an example with some basic drums added in:

The crash cymbals are the pulse, and the snares are the stressed beats. The kick is just, well, kicking away there to keep things moving. The point being, even though the guitar isn't keeping a constant pulse, the drums do. In fact, the drummer can play in 4/4 for almost the whole song and nothing would be amiss, as the number of bars in the song divide evenly into four.

So that's the basics of the intro, and how I count it. We go from 12/8 to 10/8, back to the 12/8 riff, and then into the 4/4 verse. This is again, so basic I just won't cover it here. Suffice to say that structurally, this song is very similar to Metallica's Master of Puppets. But I don't solo, and the intro riffs come back into things quite frequently. Hence the need for keeping a constant pulse, and rapidly counting away in my head.

After all this, there's a big lead up to the central 4/4 melodic section, in 6/4. As I mentioned before, it's wildly different to the into timing:

....it's so basic I don't even count it.

I'm not going to go into the rest of the song because quite frankly, it's rather long, and everything else is in 4/4. Everybody knows how to count that, right?