4.5 beats per bar? please analyze rhythm of my song!

[someone called simon]

So i did this song ages ago. It has some odd time signatures in the verse, and something in the chorus that has always intrigued me from a rhythm theory viewpoint. that being a bar of 4.5 beats.

i would analyze the verse, from where the vocal comes in, quite syncopated, with this number of beats per bar

3 3 2
3 3 2
3 3 3 4

repeat for 2nd verse

this is with a slow count of about 90 bpm

but when it gets to the chorus ("the breeze brushes your hair of golden silk"), following this tempo, you get this:

3 4.5
3 3 2
3 4.5
3 4

if you count like this:

1 and 2 and 3 and 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and...... the last 'and' becomes the first beat of the next line.. and you end up counting on the off-beat. so thats 4.5 beats, or 7.5 beats if you count the whole line as one bar.

Its actually quite syncopated so it might be more like '3.5 4', rather than '3 4.5', but either way there is a tricky half bar in there.

So I'm assuming you can't have half beats in a bar, therefore I have to double the tempo to around 180bpm, which sounds crazy coz its a slow song, and count it as a bar of 6 and a bar of 7 or whatever?

This is a song that doesnt sound to me like it has odd time signatures, it just turned out this way...

here's the song, about a morning spent with my young daughter...

coffee and chocolate milk

I would be interested in any feedback, thanks

[KLS]

Well, I couldn't get the song to download and play, but 4.5 beats per bar could be translated as 9/8, which is a perfectly acceptable time signature. So you certainly can have 4.5 beats per bar if you count it in eighth notes. This is done all the time in jazzier pieces. It makes things interesting and keeps the musicians on their toes!

[someone called simon]

yeh but then you have to count twice as fast which seems weird...

I think I've fixed the link now. maybe...

coffee and chocolate milk

it's working for me, but then so did the earlier one.

[james0tucson]

yeh but then you have to count twice as fast which seems weird...

I think I've fixed the link now. maybe...

coffee and chocolate milk

it's working for me, but then so did the earlier one.

I really like your song. I think you're counting it one way because it helps you with the strumming pattern. I don't have the brain power to be specific, but I don't hear it in the time signature you described. If you're looking for a way to write this so that other musicians can work without killing you, I'm pretty sure what you're doing will look like a straight measure, a duple measure, a straight measure in another signature, and another duple measure against that time. Something like that.

Is that Cameleon in the intro?

How long have you been playing guitar?

[someone called simon]

unfortunately I've been playing guitar for about 30 years i guess! maybe 25 when i did that song... thanks for the compliments though!

I don't need to communicate the music to anyone else, its just part of an album i did, that sits there gathering digital dust...

but I've always been kinda intrigued, because its a slow song, and when I was recording it i was surprised that my metronome click went from being on the 'on' beat to the 'off' beat after the first line of the chorus... then I realized there was like a half beat in there. So to counteract that instead of calling it maybe 90bpm, you have to define the song as being 180/190 bpm which just sounds crazy! And I'm just kinda interested in the theory of that. Is it allowable in standard theory to have a 4.5 beat bar? or do I have to double the tempo to get rid of it.

its quite hard to hear due to the syncopation, but if you count "1 and 2 and" etc over the chorus, the 'ands' start falling on the beat when you get to the second line. and the 1s and 2s are on the offbeat.

thanks for listening!

[someone called simon]

whoops, re camelion, no. Sounds like it tho... i think all the sounds were from reason (2.5 or 3), so the pad at the beginning was probably a mix of subtractor and maelstrom maybe?... and then theres a bit of reverse reverb on the guitar before it comes in.

[runagate]

I think it's just that the definition of the bottom number in time signatures seems to imply tempo but only just tells you what note value to "count" in a bar, and it's actually relative to writing the music, not playing it, even though we instinctually think that's how it should be taken.

I always keep this in mind because during the only year of music lessons I ever took when I was 7 I really, really kept on my teacher for a whole lesson to explain it to me and she actually came to this realization herself in having to describe it to me.

We did not, however, come to a consensus on what is to me the insanely arbitrary use of sharps and flats, which are the same thing just made confusing for no good reason except being "grandfathered in" from different protocols of music media across a continent with slow communications...

Kinda like midi.

I recall John McLaughlin saying that he wasn't much of a musician compared to the reast of the cats in Shakti, who were prone to jamming in 150/4 time and in two-and-two-thirds/4 time. But being fractions you can always find the common denominator much like in your case where you multiply the 4.5 x 2 to get 9.

But the important thing is that 4.5 feel, just like sycompation gives a certain feel without changing the time sig.

I am quite fond of both listening to and making things in 4/4 that feel as though they couldn't possibly be until you actually count it, or things in uneven meters that feel normal til you're bobbing your head along and catch the 1/2 step so your head doesn't match the downbeat

Even though it's just provisional and relative theory b.s. it does matter nowadays if you're using a sequencer cuz it can't play along by memorizing a weird riff without counting like a good musician. You gotta tell it the sig for a lot of functions to work right.

[Nystul]

Back in high school, I played drum set for a school production of Godspell. There is a rhythmic nightmare of a song in that musical called "Alas For You". The actual pulse of the song is always shifting, but the eighth notes remain steady and those are what the sheet music is based on. But the eighth notes in that song are quite fast... the poor student teacher trying to conduct it had no chance.

Anyway, it would be the same with your song. Sometimes the beat feels like 3 eighth notes, and sometimes 2, and possibly occasionally only one (that "half beat" feeling), but in all cases the eighth is steady and if you had to ask someone to sight read it this is what they would rely on. I think the first couple measures of each phrase have a 6/8 feel, and then it shifts into more of a straight beat with weird time signatures.

[zerocrossing]

It was hard for me to get though much of your song, but it sounded to me like you're simply going back and forth between 3/4 and 4/4. I've got a song that bounces between 7/4 and 4/4 and it has a similar type of "bounce."

[someone called simon]

thanks for those thoughts everyone.