search: pop songs with weird time signatures and metric shifts

If somebody is capable of accurately counting out to large prime numbers in their head, I say more power to 'em.

my favorite time signature joke goes something like, "yeah, I got this hot beat in 7, check it out -- [while playing normal rock beat] ONE, TWO, THREE , FOUR, FIVE, SIX, SEV-, -VEN!"

I don't find it at all useful to think "oh, it's in 19/8, cool"

No one does except for tubbies filling out the Mars Volta entry on wikipedia.

i was gonna say rush fans, but i guess either/or.

This Rush fan couldn't care less about the goddamn time sig.

I just had a vision of Bela Fleck covering "Nineteenth Nervous Breakdown" and changing the time signature.

Or Muddy Waters singing "She's Nineteen" in a slow 19/8.

Well...

I count one...

two...

three...

four...

five...

...

...nineteen!

Too bad Scorsese left it on The Last Waltz cutting room floor.

Or "Hey Nineteen," where they really can't dance together.

To say nothing of "19/99"

21/12

"In the time signature 25/25 ..."

31/21

25/41
Big beats so dancers have fun

Chronic 200/1

19/77
And we are going mad

18/7 on a motherfuckin' cop

Ram Jam's 'Black Betty' has got some weird timing/shifting going on. Or maybe the CD was skipping when I heard it last...

3/6 Mafia

blink 1/82

0.041666666666666666666666666666667

0.81818181818181818181818181818181818181

peep this groove in π/8, yo

roffles roffles roffles LOCK THREAD

Ha, yeah, if you're going to count partial measures and such as part of the overall time signature (which you shouldn't), then "Walk the Line" would be in something like 42/4, and "Ring of Fire" would be the best-known song to be alternating between 11/4 and 6/4 and whatever else -- but they are not, they just have truncated measures and whatnot.

(I think "Walk the Line" just has a half-measure going into each verse section, to loop back to the vocal faster. If I'm remembering right, "Ring of Fire" has three-beat bars that could probably trip you up if you were asked to, like, play the bass part unrehearsed, and couldn't remember exactly how they worked -- but still a conventional signature.)

Ha, wait -- just call those cut time 2/2 and you're good (except "Ring" would have a few 3/2 bars when the horns are involved)

Yup. This happened to me on a gig with "All You Need Is Love", because I am the only person on earth who doesn't really listen to the Beatles and I didn't know where the dropped beats were on that tune.

xp

0/9

867/5309

tipsy mothra, if you ever do one of those "Music Together" classes with your kid, watch out for this tricky clapping exercise they throw at you near the end which is a couple bars of kind of syncopated 9/8 followed by a turnaround bar of 4/8.

What about Battles? Aren't "weird time signatures" and abrupt shift changes what they're known for?

God that 29/8 thing still makes me angry. WHY DON'T YOU JUST ADD UP ALL THE BEATS IN THE SONG AND MAKE THE WHOLE SONG ONE MEASURE OF 1568/8

re: Beatles. Yes, there's a link upthread to another thread called John Lennon and his penchant for silly half-time changes in almost every song.

And, of course, nabisco otm.

xpost re: all you need is love

Aww! It's the last beat that drops, which is presumably why someone on Wikipedia is saying it'd be 7/4 (ha, and 4/4 + 3/4 would look like something else entirely) -- but I think it's actually in 3s (like a 6/8), and not just shuffled, which would make it ... slightly out of my depth. How would you denote that? Consulting the song via YouTube has not helped, but I like how Lennon was apparently chewing gum while singing this on their global broadcast.

4/4 : 6/8 :: 7/4 : ?/?

(Middle-school math suggests "10/8," but that doesn't help at all.)

I mean 9/8, actually

Isn't there some theory that Lennon chewed gum before, and apparently during, singing to mucify his vocal chords to rectify the damage that started with "Twist and Shout"?

I'd check Allan Pollack for the "All You Need Is Love" time signature.

nabisco: 6/8 + 6/8 + 9/8

OR LIKE 21/8 GOD THE BEATLES ARE PROG LOL, I'M GONNA GO PLAY HOT BASSLICKS TO MY TOOL ALBUMS GUYS

xpost - yes, W, I was just coming around

(I just wound up doing exactly what I was bitching about upthread -- like "would that be 21/8, then?" when putting it in 6/8 makes the half-measure not weird anymore)