Songs not in 4/4 time

Post Reply New Topic

Gabriel's Solsbury Hill 7/4

Tool have some ludicrous time signatures in their stuff, check Schism out for example

Actually the main Harpsichord riff for" Golden brown" is in 13/8, only when he starts to sing it changes to 3/4.

Edit: BTW Coleslaw is my favorite salad (off topic).

Дяволска Щерка (Devil's Daughter)

I'm not sure what time signature this is. Balkandji (Балканджи) do a lot of songs with unusual time signatures because they're influenced by Bulgarian folk music.

This is a polska, a Swedish dance with three beats in a bar. The second beat is often lengthened at the expense of the first (how much depends on the player), but they're usually written in 3/4. In this example, all the beats are the same length.


This one is mostly in 3/4 but some bars have an extra beat.


Here's one where the second beat is twice as long as the first. It could be written in 9/8.


North and east european folk music often uses complex rhythms.
Yes, it is one of my special interests.

I give you the king of songs not in 4/4 time.

Coming from the hip year of 1908, Prelude in the Lydian Mode is in 21/16 time.

Some of this is 4/4, but most is not. The bridge just after the two minute mark gets particularly crazy. These guys are a bit grating on the ears and pretentious as hell, but they definitely know how to rock.

listen to THIS!

Pop and rock do sometimes feel like an unending desert of 4/4 time. There's a bit more variety than that, though even without getting into irregular rhythms.

Slow 6/8 time is reasonably common, and even surfaces in the charts occasionally. Things like "Kiss From a Rose" by Seal, "I'm With You" by Avril Lavigne and "Nights in White Satin" by the Moody Blues.

Leonard Cohen's early albums are full of what I think of as waltz (3/4) time, like "Master Song" and "Last Year's Man". Other waltzes: "The Last Waltz" (well, duh) and "It's Oh, So Quiet."

5/4: my favourite is "Animals" by Muse.

...and if you want to be pedantic, a lot of swung 4/4 can be considered to be 12/8 "really".

I write songs, and try to be a bit more varied, though more and more now I drift back to 4/4. I use 3/4 a lot, as coming from a classical background it feels natural to me. Also slow 3, which I think of as 3/2. One-offs: 7/8 and irregular 9/8; a 7/8+7/8+2/4 groove (18/8?) and a couple of different 5-beat rhythms. One of which was very slow with swung quarter-beats, so I could claim it as 30/16...

What would you consider this...



It is written out in 4/4, but if you listen it isn't easy to count. It's a sequence of short beats interspersed with single longer beats that are 3/2 the length of the shorter beats. The music itself is pretty simple, but the off-length of some of the beats gives it a really eerie feeling. It has a feeling of being "too slow" as well.

I'd consider it confusing!

I couldn't work it out by ear, try as I might, so I found the sheet music. (http://www.onlinesheetmusic.com/pyramid ... 90128.aspx) It's 4/4 but so riddled with cross-rhythm that the piano chords only coincide with one beat in eight! The off-beat cross-rhythm is slow and stays the same, which is why we want to hear it as the beat. I reckon if Bartok had written this, he'd have called it "3+3+4+3+3/8", but that's before you find out it's /swung/ as well. (9+9+12+9+9/16?! Not so useful.) How they played this together, I don't know. Still, 4/4 is probably the clearest way to write it. A nice reminder that there are other ways of creating rhythmic complexity.

Some modern classical composers are guilty of using "precise" notation (like my 9+9+12+9+9/16) that fails to get the point across. I've had composer friends who seem to forget that someone actually has to READ the score. And there's a tale of a kettledrum player who sucessfully wrote out his part for the finale of "The Rite of Spring" again all in 4/4 because he got fed up of Stravinsky changing the time signature every. bloody. bar.

the cinema show | g e n e s i s | 7/8 + 4/4 time _I hope acceptable with the 7/8 time, throughout the piece

luiz bonfa's "manha de carnaval" is in 6/4 time-

I got the ratio's wrong. The long beat is actually 2 fourth notes combined, i.e. 4 eighth beats, while the short notes are 3 eighth beats). When I listen to it the piano melody, it comes across as having 6 beats with the third beat slowed down and the last beat overlapping the first beat of the next melodic line. The melody "tessellates" in a way. The time is filled with overlapping melodic structures.

Actually lot of 5/8 (5/4) signatures sound like this to me, like overlapping melodies. 5/8 (5/4) sounds like 6/8 (6/4) with overlap in the last/first beat. The time signature isn't always relevant to the melody I hear in my ears. 5/8 (5/4) will often sound kind-of "waltzy". Of course, the rhythm in Pyramid song has the additional complication of the third not being slowed by a 4:3 ratio.

River Man | Nick Drake | 10/4 time

Piano Sonata No. 32 in C minor, Op. 111 | Beethoven | 12/32