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.