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4/4 just shifted 1 but nothing crazy either.
It’s 4x4. The snare is hitting on beats 2 and 4, which I guess you could call syncopation. The bass line is playing 8th notes, but it’s doing a combination of syncopation as well as a few carefully chosen accented “pickups”. That’s what you’d call it. 8X8 is the same as 4X4 in theory. So the snare and singer establish that it’s 4x4 and the bass is dancing around with 8th notes, straight 8th notes, nothing fancy, just syncopation and accented pickups.
That’s probably why I like it so much. It’s really simple but it’s got that slight offset that changes the whole vibe without making it hard to listen to.
So it’s just syncopation then?. I suck at music theory and had only applied that term to drums.
Dancing like Jamiroquai 🕺 I just love it. Without that it’d be just another boring song. Love the subtlety. Syncopation it is 👍thanks.
Now that we’re here... is there a name for songs that are 4x4 but the chord progressions happen in sets of 3 (or 5, 6)?. My beloved Pixies do it in 3’s all the time. I do it a lot and I don’t know if it’s got a name,
in both cases it’s about the “pickup” to the beat. Syncopation is a more loosely applied term like when something is on the off beats. To get more technical, a time signature has “strong” beats and “weak” beats. So in 4x4 strong is 1 and 3 and weak is 2 and 4. But if you accent the 4th beat it becomes a “pickup” to beat one, or if you subdivide the 4th beat into two eight notes then the last 8th note becomes the pickup to beat 1.
Look at 3/4 signature. You can count it out as one-two-three-one-two-three, or you can go one-two-and a-one-two-and a-one two-and a... so the “a” of “and a” is the pickup to beat one. In the pixies bassline it’s not about it being in sets of 3, it’s that the first note of the bass is the pickup to the beat. And then you work in accents which makes it more obvious or less obvious. A pickup can be accented or non accented but it’s still a pickup, because it’s on the weak beat leading to the strong beat.
All this to say that it’s syncopation in a broad sense, but use of pickups and accents in a specific sense.
Often in classical music a piece will actually start with a pickup, especially if it’s in 3/4, there will be a quick pickup lick on beat 3 to go to beat 1, and will usually go V-I. In rock music or pop you will almost always start on beat 1, or someone live will count it in and do a “pickup” up strum or down strum before the song officially starts. Then it becomes a matter of pickups and accents, but they don’t change the inherent beat of the song. An accented pickup is very common all over a song, or an accented off beat. Unaccented pickups and off beats are common too, so that’s what confuses people, the accent of a beat, because as I mentioned there are weak beats and strong beats in every time signature, but part of the fun is moving the accents around.
A perfect example of this set of 3 is the bass line in the song My Girl. The bass starts the song off on the beat with two notes, and the next iteration is three notes with the first note an accented pickup, second note being the accented beat one, the third note has an unaccented pickup. Imagine that set of three having the first note accented but the second one unaccented, for a real mind game. But if you imagine the first note of three unaccented and the second accented, that’s the actual beat of the song.
It’s easy to think of My Girl starting as a fast 4X4 but it’s actually a slow 4X4 with the guitar coming in on beat one in the actual tempo of the song. It’s the bass line that’s playing 8th notes against the 4/4, but they are syncopated with an accented pickup happening at the end of a weak beat.
Interesting @JoyceRoadStudios !.
But what I meant about the Pixies didn’t have to with accents or pickups. I meant how usually phrases come in sets of 2 or 4. Like say A-D-G-B or A-D-Gx2 but in the Pixies song it’s just a pattern of 3 like A-D-G.
Sort of like a 3x4 but on a phrase level. Does that make sense?
Do you mean bar/measure when you say “phrase”?
It is not super uncommon for songwriters/composers to create some interest by either working against the tendency to build things on 4, 8, and 12 bar structures OR to add the occasional extra beat or half-measure. (The Beatles and Burt Bacharach do that a lot and you don't even realize that they've done it until you try to play along and find yourself missing the change). I can't think of a special name (that is commonly used) for that. In the Pixies' case, those odd phrase lengths often come in pairs -- i.e. verses made of two times through a 3 measure long chord progression.
No I mean a chord progression.
@espiegel123 explains better I think
I might talking crap here, but in a way the Pixies song is like a 3x4 on a “higher level”, that is, a phrase level. Sort of like atoms and molecules.... a song can be 3x4 on the “beat” level and a 4 on the phrase structure. Or can be 4 on the beat level but 3 on the phrase structure...
in a way it’s about how/when the cycle starts again, only on different levels. And ashen it’s not the usual multiple of 4 it creates some interesting tension, at one level or the other.
A chord progression isn’t really related directly to time signature though. You could have multiple time signatures for a chord progression, and multiple chord progressions (with the same chords) for a specific time signature.
That’s true and tangential to tahiche’s observation. He was commenting on the Pixies use of using atypical numbers of bars for the structural units. In a sort of meta-sense, the groupings at a structural level (number of bars in a phrase or verse or chorus or the orders they repeat in) function like rhythm but at a different time scale.
I get that, but was pointing out that the two things aren’t directly related. Music doesn’t always use the most descriptive terms, and I understand that sometimes a term might not be applied 100% appropriately.
I think we all are used to hearing neat groupings of bars, but it just doesn’t happen sometimes (and sometimes it’s the result of a temporary change in time signature).
I like when you say it!. 🙃
Ok, let me take it a bit (stupidly) further.
What if you sped up the chord progression to make it stupidly fast?. If you sped up the 3 chord progression phrase to be 1.5 seconds that’d be 0.5 seconds per chord, like a beat at 120bpm, that’d make it a 3x4 beat. Wouldn’t it become time signature?.
I know it’s not called time signature but it’s made up of the same elements but on a different scale. Don’t you think?.
That would be tempo, but that wouldn’t change the time signature. It’s really about musical terms, and time signature is specific to each bar of music, regardless of tempo.
If you speed it up it still has the same length for each beat and the same number of beats per bar (although sometimes when things are sped up people might rethink the time signature, but only in terms of the length of each beat in the bar, and the number of beats would change proportionally).