A thread about alternative time sigs: a practical thread

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A thread about alternative time sigs: a practical thread 2006-12-23T11:16:15+00:00 Lets get some practical advice going in regards to metering. How do you approach it? This isn't meant to be a "this is how you do it" thread, just a "this is how I do it, you may get inspired" thread. Sometimes I take a kind of modular approach to it. I'm more guitar bassed, but I guess it can work with any instrumentation. So i'll come up with a riff in common 4/4 time. (I think they even call it common time don't they?) Then I will loop certain sections of the riff to adapt its timing. You can even just change a few of the crochets to quavers, and that gives you a different feel to the riff even though you're playing the same notes. You can hear this in a lot of progressive metal. When I am composing though, I don't really refer to the notes as whatever duration they are, I'm just using the technical names to put the point across. But all I'm really doing is adapting the duration of the note to map up with a groove I have in my head. Another thing I like to do is to drop notes. I got this trick from a song by The Soft Machine called something like Tale of Talesan (I can't remember the actual name, but I have it on an awesome Psychedelia DVD I bought.) The trick is to come up with a riff, doesn't matter what metering it has. Then over a set duration, drop off the last note. This changes the timing of course, so I usually adapt all the instruments to the timing of the new bar. So you may start off with a melody in 6/4. But then it would go over a series of bars: 6/4 5/4 4/4 3/4 - as an example. Of course you can do a combination of all of these. So you could do the last "drop note" thing, and then adjust one of the bars to sound more how you imagined it - intuition plays a large role for me. So yeah, post your more practical theoretical advice here. We could all learn something and help each other come up with new interesting stuff. Amberience https://www.kvraudio.com/forum/memberlist.php?mode=viewprofile&u=6234

siriusbliss siriusbliss https://www.kvraudio.com/forum/memberlist.php?mode=viewprofile&u=90125: KVRAF; 2493 posts since 6 Dec, 2005 from Bay Area, USA

Post by siriusbliss » Wed Dec 27, 2006 12:51 am

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Everything divides by 4 eventually, right?

Greg

Don't ask me, I just play here.

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