Whats the timesig of Bowie's 'Five Years'?

[Jono-60]

And whats the best way to work out time signatures.

[VicDiesel]

Something in 3. Either 3/4 or 6/8; it doesn't matter that much. If you go by the principle that a measure should be a repeating unit, then it's 6/8 or 6/4, because the second 3 has the snare accent. If it had been 3/4 you would have the bass drum on 1 and the snare on 3.

(At first I thought you were asking about "soul love", that one has a couple of 7/2 passages.)

Victor.

[Hovmod]

Yeah, my internal meter-o-meter says 6/8...

[llatham]

And whats the best way to work out time signatures.

Really, without looking at the sheet music, it's impossible to tell. You can only make assumptions or educated guesses.

The most "common" meters are:
4/4
3/4
and maybe 2/4.

By far, most pop music today is in 4/4.

The next most common is 6/8.

9/8 and 12/8 are pretty rare, but I have seen shuffle background (triplet) songs with a 4/4 feel to be written out as 12/8 - Chuck Berry's "No Particular Place to Go" for example. That kind of thinking would make Jimi Hendrix's "Manic Depression" 9/8, but most people think of it as 3/4 with a swing background (and I think the sheet music is in fact 3/4).

Obviously as someone else pointed out, 6/8 and a fast 3/4 can be very similar.

I would say that in general, things with 2,3 and 4 in the "numerator" are most likely to have a 4 in the "denominator" - that is,

4/8, 4/16, or 4/2 are relatively uncommon (nowadays anyway - if you look through Beethoven's String Quartets you'll find a huge variety of meters).

The only relatively common one is 2/2, or what we call Cut Time (Alla Breve, March Time, etc.). Songs like "Jingle Bells" are published in 2/2 (but again, in pop music it would be far more likely to be 4/4).

For things with 6, 9, or 12, the "denominator" is most commonly 8
6/8, 9/8 and 12/8.

6/2, 6/16 and so on are relatively rare (practically non-existent in pop music, and even relatively rare in the past). 9/X and 12/X in general are less common than 6/X (especially in today's pop music).

There are certainly a few noteable exceptions:
5/4 and things like 7/4 are not uncommon in styles that use other meters. Pink Floyd's "Money" is in 7/4 (or alternating 3/4 and 4/4). Jethro Tull's "Living in the Past" is in 5/4 (as is Dave Brubek's "Take 5").

Rush were well-known in the past for doing tunes in 7/8, 5/8, 11/8, and so on (as were many "progressive" bands like Kansas, Emerson, Lake and Palmer, etc.). Bands like Dream Theater and Tool are sort of carrying on this tradition today.

Obviously, in "classical" music, there's a much wider variety of meters, especially with pre-baroque (where X/2 meters are more common) and 20th century onward works (Stravinsky, Bartok, Carter, etc.).

So basically, if it's a simple pope tune, your "default guess" should be 4/4, or 3/4 - 6/8.

Then, if it's a band or composer you know tends to be a little more experimental with meters, you can start looking at other possibilities.

HTH.
lsl

[stephenpaulharper]

Yep, lots of early 20th century composers excel at odd time sigs - Copland's more bouncey and Stravinski is more rockin'. I like a guy named Darius Milhaud myself. Anyway, "The Ocean Song" by Led Zeppelin - if you know that -- is in 15/8. Just remember that the second part of the fraction is always a type of note - quarters and eighths mostly, so you'd never have something in 7/5 or some other nonsense.

As far as Prog Rock goes, Gentle Giant is hard to beat for odd times that really groove.

Cheers.

Steve

[Tony Ostinato]

not sure how to draw a 5th note. i know quarter and half.......


im pretty good at figuring out meters fast when transcribing.

but my gf is freaky at it, shell have it in like 2 bars and ill be "no no you cant guess that fast you have to listen and....oh ....youre right....again".


she likes all the sting songs in asymetric meters and the conductor she, and i a bit many years before, worked under at the u of m, frank bencrisscutto, was a real fan of asymetrical meters. don ellis went there and was a student of his also and if you youtube don ellis youll hear every meter eventually.

i do meter detection by trying to spot the pattern and then spot the cycle and then count out the cycle. beat 1 usually you can feel, and over time you can get better at it just like with ear training.

[llatham]

not sure how to draw a 5th note. i know quarter and half.......

Henry Cowell did try to "invent" other fractional relastionships for meters.

He had "third" notes, and "fifth" notes, in addition to the normal half and quarter notes.

If you think about it, it makes sense:

2 notes per beat (let's assume 4/4) = 1/8 notes.

4 notes per beat = 1/16 notes.

So if we wanted 3 notes per beat - which would be 12 per measure - and since we name our note values (in the US anyway) for what portion of a 4/4 measure they are, these would be "twelfth notes".

So:

3 notes per beat - 1/12 notes.

We already have these - triplets! But of course we don't have a "12th" beam - we have a single beam, and a double beam for 8ths and 16ths respectively. We'd need like a half beam or something for "12ths".

So what Cowell did was change the noteheads and flags (and beams IIRC). There was no logic to it if I recall, but he used triangle shaped noteheads.

I would use an oval for something that was 2 per, a triangle for something that was 3 per, a square for 4 per, etc (Cowell may have done this and I may be remembering incorrectly).

Of course the only downside is we already use Triangle-shaped noteheads (among other shapes) in percussion (for the triangle naturally) so it could be confusing for some players.

So you can draw a "5th" note - it would be a Quarter Note with a "5" bracket over it (like a qurter note triplet, but you'd have to draw the other 4 notes/rests to be absolutely clear).

Later,
lsl