Four on the floor. How many songs are writ­ten in 4/4 time? It’s almost uncount­able. Since an over­whelm­ing major­ity of pop­u­lar songs are writ­ten in 4/4, the casual musi­cian whose only goal is camp­fire croon­ing need not ever come to grips with the whys and where­fores of time sig­na­ture. All one must do is count “1 … 2 … 3… 4…”, and this suf­fices. Well today I want to look at alter­nate time sig­na­tures, specif­i­cally the odd ones. I’ve writ­ten a tuto­r­ial for you that is so big I had to use the ‘more’ tag. So jump right in and see how you can shake up your song­writ­ing and make your songs jump out at people.

A quick primer on time signatures

4/4, 4/2, 7/8, 8/16 … Arrrgh! What does it all mean? Let’s take a look at how metre works. Imag­ine, if you will, a sheet of music full of unin­ter­rupted notes. One note leads to the next, which leads to the next and so on until the piece is fin­ished. Makes sense right? After all that’s how we hear music, isn’t it? Well I am 100% cer­tain that 98% of musi­cians sit­ting in front of that sheet music would com­plain. Their chief con­cern would be that of los­ing their place. To aid the hap­less musi­cian, order is brought to chaos and the bar (or mea­sure if you will) is born. Yes, with the sim­ple appli­ca­tion of ver­ti­cal strokes at pre­de­ter­mined inter­vals, this whole Gor­dian knot of notes becomes sensible.

But where to draw those lines? Hmm … If we’re going to decide that we should struc­ture our music into lit­tle chunks of notes, then we need a way to deter­mine what size those chunks should be. Well lucky for us there exists a sys­tem to do just that. That frac­tion (X/Y) at the begin­ning of each stave is a con­densed way of telling you that each bar is X num­ber of Y length notes long. So in 4/4 time the bar is 4 quar­ter (1÷4) notes long. 3/4 it is 3 quar­ter notes long. 6/8 is 6 eighth (1÷8) notes long. You prob­a­bly won’t ever see Y going over 16. It just becomes too muddy to count at the res­o­lu­tion of a demisemi­qua­ver, much less a hemisemidemiquaver!

But wait! What does it matter?

If a melody has a string of say …  3 quar­ter notes, an eighth note rest, then two eighth notes fol­lowed by one half note … does it really mat­ter how we divide it? Aren’t the note lengths really what’s impor­tant? We can’t hear when one bar ends and another begins, can we? What makes one time sig­na­ture prefer­able to the other? In truth we can hear when one bar ends and the other begins. We hear it in the accent. See, not all notes are cre­ated equal. Some notes get played more force­fully, while oth­ers get a lighter touch. Accented (or stressed) notes are often played at reg­u­lar inter­vals through­out a piece. This reg­u­lar pat­tern­ing of accented notes is one com­po­nent to a piece’s rhythm and helps give that piece a cer­tain flavour. Think, for exam­ple, of waltzes. One of their defin­ing char­ac­ter­is­tics is their time sig­na­ture (3÷4).

So the whole con­cept of time sig­na­tures is a means of describ­ing the place­ment of accented notes. It is the spac­ing and con­cor­dance of accented notes that give the over­ly­ing music a spe­cific feel, and which makes music done in one time sig­na­ture sound dif­fer­ent from music done in another time signature.

How does this help me?

Since so much music is writ­ten in 4/4 time, writ­ing a piece that eschews this con­ven­tion is a way of mak­ing your song stand out. It won’t nec­es­sar­ily be some­thing the lis­tener can point out, it will affect them in more sub­tle ways.

Once you’re com­fort­able with play­ing and writ­ing music in odd time sig­na­tures, you’ll have at your dis­posal another means of expres­sion; one that is not imple­mented by a great major­ity of song­writ­ers (in West­ern music at least). You will have a song­writ­ing secret weapon to help get your music noticed.

Break the cycle

It may seem dif­fi­cult to count to an odd num­ber when so many songs are writ­ten in 4/4 time. Count­ing up to 5 may feel down­right silly. How does one get started? Well how does one get to Carnegie Hall? Prac­tice, prac­tice, prac­tice! Let’s start out with an easy one; 5/4 time is a good place to begin. Now this doesn’t seem too much of a stretch right? It’s just like 4/4 time with an extra beat right? Well if you think of it that way, you may have more dif­fi­culty in get­ting the hang of count­ing it out. I say this because count­ing to 4, then try­ing to append another beat on will not come nat­u­rally at all. Through years of expo­sure to 4/4 time, your habit is to start count­ing over once you’ve hit 4. Your brain will halt as it tries to fig­ure out if it should keep count­ing or not. Let’s not try to break that habit, but rather form new ones.

The num­ber 5 can be bro­ken down in four dif­fer­ent ways: 4 and 1, 1 and 4, 2 and 3, 3 and 2. As men­tioned before, I want you to stay away from count­ing it out the ‘4 and 1′ way. Also I want you to stay away from the ‘1 and 4′ method too. Maybe once you get a hang of odd time sig­na­tures you can go back and try it, but for now I think there is a bet­ter way to start. My rea­son­ing goes beyond what I men­tioned above. I want you to focus on count­ing out beats in groups of 2’s and 3’s because any num­ber (above 1 obvi­ously) can be decom­posed con­ve­niently into mixed group­ings of 2 and 3. More­over, we can change the feel of the time sig­na­ture by reorder­ing those groupings.

Try this, count the fol­low­ing out loud and prefer­ably with a metronome going:

1 & 2 & 3 & 1 & 2 & |1 & 2 & 3 & 1 & 2 & |1 & 2 & 3 & 1 & 2

Okay, now try this:

1 & 2 & 1 & 2 & 3 & |1 & 2 & 1 & 2 & 3 & |1 & 2 & 1 & 2 & 3

Now while these are both three mea­sures of 5/4, we’ve shifted the stressed beats around to give a dif­fer­ent rhyth­mic feel to each. The same sort of thing is accom­plished in 4/4 time when you shift between play­ing down­beat to play­ing back beat. While there are no rules as to which beats in a mea­sure are stressed, and which are unstressed, we shall try to avoid hav­ing two stressed beats occur­ring sequen­tially (although it may make and inter­est­ing piece to count 1 & 2 & 3 & 4, but mas­ter the basics first before tak­ing flights of fancy to uncom­mon rhyth­mic lands).

On to big­ger numbers

Now that we’ve stretched a bit, we can start to tackle big­ger things. Another pop­u­lar odd time sig­na­ture is 7/8. This one has a rushed feel to it which is good for tense pieces. If we were to do some fancy math, we could say that this is 3.5÷4 time. The rushed feel comes from our mind assum­ing that we’re cut­ting of nor­mal 4/4 time half a beat too early. Try count­ing it out that way:

1 & 2 & 3 & 4 |1 & 2 & 3 & 4 |1 & 2 & 3 & 4

If the tempo is not too fast you may wish to count each eighth note (lit­tle tip — Say ‘sev’ instead of ‘seven’ so that the extra syl­la­ble doesn’t foul your count):

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 |1 2 3 4 5 6 7 |1 2 3 4 5 6 7

If we were to con­sider it in our group­ings of 2’s and 3’s, since we’re deal­ing with eighth notes, there are three dis­tinct pat­terns.

You can get a feel for the rhyth­mic dif­fer­ences by count­ing in groups of 2’s and 3’s. I’ll just write out the first example:

1 2 3 1 2 1 2 |1 2 3 1 2 1 2 |1 2 3 1 2 1 2 |

Go forth and experiment

You can begin to see that once you start delv­ing into odd time sig­na­tures, a whole world of rhyth­mic expres­sion opens up to you. Also con­sider that the time sig­na­ture doesn’t have to be the same through­out the piece. Indeed it can change every bar if you want it to. The sig­na­ture is there to map where the accents are in a melody, it should be descrip­tive, not pre­scrip­tive in nature. That said, it is good to have the sta­bil­ity in a piece, and you will find that while there are plenty of songs that have changes in metre, a great major­ity do not, and very few where the metre is changed con­sis­tently. Again, this is often due to the rep­e­ti­tious nature of music itself.

You have the tools now to start mak­ing music in odd time sig­na­tures, I wish you the best in your song­writ­ing endeav­ours. Do try writ­ing at least one piece that is not 4/4 time. I think you’ll find it very reward­ing to add another vari­able to your music. Cheers!

Tags: Creativity, Music Theory, Songwriting, Timesignatures

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