Fun Stuff > BAND
humans and time signatures
KharBevNor:
Because 4/4 is the most common time signature in western music, and the simplest to play in with our system of music theory, it is the one we are most exposed to, especially in, say, nursery rhymes, and thus its our default metre. Entirely cultural. Look at African music for an example of how different things can be.
Various people also claim it synchs in to the heartbeat, which may be true, but I remain unconvinced.
Rebourne:
Yeah, I think David was right, it is because it's a constant even 1:1 beat.
I always record myself playing guitar so I can listen back to it later and then I take the good ideas and tab them out so I won't forget. The thing I've notice about myself is even within the same passage I allways have strange time signitures and sometime alternating ones, also between parts of the songs like chorus and intros or what have you my tempo will also change.
I used to mash them up till they would fit in a more acceptable notation, but they never ended up sounding like me. So I just leave the weirdness intact, if you write 4/4 great, but if you don't that's okay to just be yourself.
Thrillho:
The fact that most popular music is in 4/4 is the reason why most of mine is in 6/8 or 5/4, or even 8/8 just for different accentuations.
IronOxide:
I personally find music bizarre if it is not written in 17/8.
ALoveSupreme:
--- Quote from: DynamiteKid on 05 Oct 2006, 12:55 ---The fact that most popular music is in 4/4 is the reason why most of mine is in 6/8 or 5/4, or even 8/8 just for different accentuations.
--- End quote ---
A lot of pop music is in 6/8 as well.
Maybe it just became trendy for a while, but a bunch of bands I heard a bit back were frequently using 7/4 and other weird stuff (I know it's not the particular bag of this forum, but the band The Junior Varsity uses some pretty weird stuff, i.e. Demo Car City, If You Could Paint Your Own Vacation, and some more that I don't really remember). I'm still not really sure what the meter was for a song an older band of mine wrote. The "feel" of it was two bars of 3, one of 4 and then one bar of 3.
Anyways, the same question could be asked of why Western music only uses 12 tones in it's scale. A lot of eastern music uses pleanty of quarter tones that I'm guessing is never heard 'round these parts.
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