Yesterday I mentioned Outkast’s use of an ‘extra’ 2/4 bar in ‘Hey Ya’.

I’d definitely advocate cutting out or putting in extra beats when necessary. A song needs to convey the words, and sometimes you have extra syllables that don’t quite scan in a 4/4 bar. Sometimes it’s possble to stretch or shrink the words to fit, but often the best option is to say ‘hang the bar line’ and do something different.

‘Say a little Prayer’ by Burt Bacharach and Hal David is a more sophisticated and interesting example of this idea.

Time signatures in the verse:
Three bars of 4/4
One of 2/4
Three of 4/4

Time signatures in the chorus:
One of 7/4
One of 4/4
One of 7/4
One of 4/4
One of 7/4
Four of of 4/4

Listening to the song, it’s quite clear that this unusual time signature changing fits perfectly with the lyrics. It’s also a technique that really stands out in Bacharach and David’s work, just one of the things that makes them such a unique and interesting songwriting duo (I could write a whole series about the songwriting ideas you could steal from these two. Perhaps I will at some point…)

If it’s good enough for Bacharach and David (and Outkast) surely it’s an idea worth trying yourself?

Oh, and when listening to Bacharach songs, I would advise searching for the Dione Warwick recording. the songs were often written with her voice in mind (and anything is better than Aretha Franklin in my opinion!). 

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Even the silliest pop song can have an idea worth stealing.

In this case I’d like to point out the time signatures at use in this song. Three bars 0f 4/4, one of 2/4, another two of 4/4, looped over and over for the whole song.

Adding in the occasional half bar is quite a common technique, Outkast certainly didn’t invent it, and clearly it wasn’t enough to make this song listenable for more than about thirty seconds.

However, it can be effective, and it’s certainly an idea worth trying out yourself.

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I’ve written and demoed two more songs for Fawm which puts me up to four. Technically this means I’m ahead of schedule, but I’m sure things will happen in the rest of the month to balance this out.

Spinning the Compass 

[audio=http://www.wellwrite.co.uk/songwright/tomslatter_spinningthecompass.mp3]

 To The Empty Sky

[audio=http://www.wellwrite.co.uk/songwright/tomslatter_totheemptysky.mp3]

Ideas to steal:

• Fourths and fifths. Both songs have harmonies that emphasise fourths or fifths. The guitar chords of To The Empty Sky are built using collections parallel fifths, the vox harmonies in Spinning the Compass are sometimes parallel fourths
•  Build up to something. To the Empty Sky is a big build up to the final line. It sticks with the same two chords until that point.
• Move from Major to Minor. To the Empty Sky also move from A minor to a Major frequently
• Change time signature if you need to. Spinning the compass does so frequently.

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This is a great post, as it shows you time signatures that are relatively unusual being played by a band who really THINK about their music. I take the bloggers point about the guitarist’s so-so lead parts, though not every solo he has played has been a waste of time. Yes, it’s a post about guitar playing, but the explanations and links should be enough to illustrate the ideas.

Go Read!

Even if Prog Metal isn’t your usual cup of tea, there are some interesting ideas here that you might want to steal for your own songwriting.

 And I wouldn’t want to talk about prog in any way without mentioning King Crimson, the very talented Robert Fripp and the gentlemen from Dream Theater:

[youtube=http://youtube.com/watch?v=ieRFnlcsZ0g]

 For several reasons.

1. My own personal bias. I like progressive rock and I’m a bit of a music nerd.
2. Doing music-nerdy stuff really appeals to certain types of music fan.
3. Its a great way of adding contrast, which is an absolute must if you’re to avoid boring your audience
4. A lot of the time we don’t think about rhythm and meter as much as chords and melody. Changing time signature forces you to pay attention to these sometimes overlooked aspects of music.

What is a time signature, and how do you change it?

If you listen to Episode 7 of the songwright podcast you’ll hear a few ideas about how to change time signature, and this previous post talks about the basics of what they are.

In a nutshell, the time signature is the number of beats you have in a bar. You might have four beats in each bar, six, or seven. You could change every bar, change once in a song, or, like most songs, stick with one time signature all the time.

All of those options are creatively viable of course, I’d only urge you to think about it, rather than always composing in 4/4 like everybody else.

It means a little more.The first 4 tells you that there are four beats in a bar, and the second four tells you what kind of beat they are.

They’re crotchets, or if you’re American, quarter notes. That’s what generally gets referred to as a ‘one beat’ note.

So a 4/4 bar contains four of these:

If you change the first number you just get a different number of these crotchets, eg 5/4. Here’s a famous song with five crotchets in a bar. Count along and you’ll see what I mean

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DDOgYw5-pNs]

What if we change the second number?

The second number represents the kind of note we’re counting, so 4/4 is four crotchets, whereas 4/8 would be four quavers (or, for the Americans, eighth notes). Quavers look like this, and they’re ‘worth’ half a crotchet:

We generally use these in time signatures when we’ve got a song that has lots of quicker notes. Often they’re arranged in groups of three. For example in this next song you can clearly hear four little groups of three being picked out by the guitar. Four times three is twelve, so this song is in 12/8. Get it?

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mYgLng4qbe4]

This episode of the songwright podcast looks at three ways of changing time signature within a song. They are:

1. Cutting the occasional beat but mostly staying in one time signature

2. Changing time signature for a whole section, but keeping the same pulse

3. Changing time signature for a whole section and choosing a different tempo.

To illustrate these ideas I played a little snippet from a couple of old We’ll Write songs, including Would you call that Love?
[audio http://www.wellwrite.co.uk/wouldyoucallthatlove.mp3]

I also used a section of Perfect Cruelty by Stryngs which I have mentioned before.

I finished with the song ‘The Gilded Bay,’ by the quite lovely Owen Nicholas.