Counting – Building Your Band

Up until now, we’ve stuck with the integers of counting. Sure, we’ve counted in 3 and 4 and 5 and 6 and 7… but those are just whole numbers. What about the stuff that goes on between those counts? Music is divided up either by 2’s or by 3’s, stated as “duples” or “triplets” respectively. So if we were to count 1 – 2 – 3 – 4, we can count between the numbers using “and” like this – 1 & 2 & 3 & 4 &. If the numbers were quarter (1/4) notes before, by adding the ands we can count eighth (1/8) notes. And we can subdivide further to sixteenth (1/16) notes by adding something between the “ands”. We count this as 1-e-&-a-2-e-&-a-3-e-&-a-4-e-&-a. Triplets subdivide the 1-2-3-4 into a “triplet 8th note” by counting 1-&-a-2-&-a-3-&-a-4-&-a. Laid out graphically this looks like:

All of this follows logically. Where it gets interesting is with an eighth note swing feel. Technically it’s still a duple, and this is how you would count it, but if you swing the count, it can begin to take on the feel of a triplet. This is where you get into the “groove”, the space between the notes. Defining how much swing, or how things feel – the human element rarely follows a perfect duple. The “groove” is one of those things you pretty much need to stick with for an entire song, and everyone needs to agree on – because if you look at the jumble of the grid below, you can see a pretty bad train wreck if you tried to mix the triplet or swing feel with the straight duple feel. The same things happens if you mix other grooves. TrainWreck

One groove per song keeps everything locked into place and feeling tight.

Once you get past the basic 4/4 and 6/8 time signatures, everything that happens next gets esoteric pretty quickly. But learning how to count and play in these odd time signatures will make working in the previous time signatures seem trivial. And it will prepare you for the occasional change-up in the basic time signatures. Here are some tunes you can practice counting with:

Dave Brubeck, Take 5 – 5/4 Radiohead, 15 step – 5/4 Seven Days, Sting – 5/4 Brought to my Senses, Sting – 7/4 (after the a tempo) Dreaming in Metaphors, Seal – 7/4 Pat Metheny, The First Circle, 11/4

The above songs were selected because they keep the meter consistent for the entire song. Whereas there are a lot more songs with change-ups that alter the time signature (or meter) throughout the song. I want to talk about one of those with a (now) simple change-up in an otherwise straight forward song. My whole reason for doing this blog post is, selfishly, because I really like the 5/8 bar in the otherwise 6/8 song halfway through the chorus of Famous One! I’ve played with more bands than not that skip that little detail, and it’s because getting the feel of that measure is pretty hard without having the shorthand of knowing how to count. Also, the band really needs to nail the 5/8 feel in the first measure break (right when they sing “Aaaalll the Earth”), so that the 6/8 measure in the break can reset everyone to find the entrance of the second half of the chorus. Bands that get sloppy, that can’t nail that down, end up transmitting a hesitancy to the congregation. At that point the producer is right to kill the 5/8 measure and play it all in 6/8. But with it in there, man it adds that extra little freshness and urgency. To me, it just elevates that song to one of my all-time favorites.

Here are some other songs with meter changes:

Creation Sings by Keith Getty – Verses in 5/4, Choruses in 3/4 Little Town by Amy Grant – Mostly 4/4, with some 2/4, 3/4 and 5/4 bars

Can anyone suggest any other favorites in odd or changing meters?

Subdividing

Odd Time Signatures