I know, it’s hard to hear it but it’s true and I’m sorry that you had to learn about it this way.   What’s worse in this scenario you just played that bad note and you still have six measures of a solo left!!!  ALL IS LOST!!! ALL IS LOST!!!!

Is it really though?  Of course not.  Let me explain …

This, is a fretboard

There is one truth:  You are NEVER more than two frets away from a serviceable note.  So if a quick correction is what you’re looking for,  it’s just a quick slide and you’re back on track.

Let me ask you this:  do you want to run from the note? Or do you want to make things spicey and lean into it?

You may wonder “it’s a bad note, why would I ever want to play or again?”

Let’s use these sentences for an example:

Pastries from our bakiry are the best!  Our bakery is so much better than the other bakiry in the grocery store.

So what happened?  I misspelled the word “bakery” twice and spelled it correctly once.

When an accident happens once that’s all it is and all it will ever be.  But if you do it again and tie it back to a good note (the correctly spelled bakery in this case) you will have turned a disaster into a “I meant to do that” option.

Put simply by Adam Neely, “repetition legitimizes”

Adam Neely’s video

I can guarentee that if people are really listening to what you’re playing they will think the first note was a mistake but as soon as they hear you play it again you’ll trick them and make them realize that it wasn’t a mistake at all.

So, to sum up,.  Mistakes happen once but in this case, two wrongs most certainly makes a right. And always, ALWAYS use your ears while you’re playing and don’t worry about what scale you should be playing. Listening has priority

Thank you for reading to my humble advise
Till the next time!
Mike

Ba da ba da ba da da
Ba da ba da ba da da

This onamonapia-ish moment is brought to you by every person that ever tried to sing a 7/8 groove to a drummer. But are playing in odd times really as much of a hard-mode thing as we’ve been let on?

Put simply, No. They are difficult to feel when you first start playing them because our western brains are so attuned to hearing music in 4, 3, or 6 that bars that end anywhere else feel wrong. If you were to travel east and stopped at various cities between where you’re at and Mumbai you would hear a sharp increase in odd time usage the further east you traveled.

But … why? Well the answer takes us all the way back to the medieval church. Yes, 4/4 was adopted as the standard time with 2/4 being accepted and 3/4 was considered the most holy. Anybody want to guess why? Anyone? Because 3 beats represented the father, son, and Holy Spirit and that’s pretty much it. Considering the church comissioned a lot of music back then it would make sense that those time signatures would be used the most. Areas of the world that didn’t feel the same influence of the Christian church weren’t as compelled to stick to the same conventions.

What does that mean for us? We have some catching up to do and if you’ve read my posts before you’ve already started (gold star for you!)

Ready to have your noodle throughly baked? You use complex odd times, irregular groupings, and shifting times and tempos every single day of your life. Some of you do A LOT more than others, some people do it so much we wish they would stop for a little bit. If you haven’t guessed what I am mean, let me ask you this: Have you ever paid attention to the way you talk? The rhythms that happen when you talk in a regular conversation would have a music theorist pulling their hair out if they had to transcribe it to paper. I know what you’re thinking “yeah but I’m just talking and that’s not music.”

Allow me to retort with question then: What IS music? And no, I’m not going to transcribe your conversation; I happen to like my hair.

Now, let’s break down some of the more commonly found odd times in music. We are going to look at 5 and 7 and really for this the bottom number really isn’t important, our main focus is the number of beats not what each beat is worth.

In the past I broke down rhythms using four letter words to reflect the 4 16th notes that make for 1 quarter note. I used the words “kick” and “snap” because they sounded a little bit like a drum beat.

To recap:
Kick = 1 beat (which would either be 1/4, 2/8, 4/16, 8/32. 16/64, 32/128, or 64/256 – See why we aren’t going to mess with the bottom number now? But for funsies these will all either be 1/4 or 2/8 if you absolutely HAVE to know)
Kick | Snap = 2 beats
Kick | Snap | Kick = 3 beats
Kick | Snap | Kick | Snap = 4 beats

Kick | Snap | Kick | Snap is a prime example of exactly what a bar of 4/4 sounds like, if you just listened to a song on the radio 90% of the time it’s in 4/4. Peole tend to “feel” 4/4 time from the 2 and the 4 which is often where the snare hits. If you’ve been to a concert and the crowd started clapping, they were clapping on the 2 and the 4 (unless you were at a concert full of unholy hethens who clap on 1 and 3, please don’t do that). The easiest way to tell that you are dealing with a song in any kind of odd meter is by tapping your foot, if your tapping magically changes from 2 and 4 to 1 and 3 odd things are afoot! No … pun … intended. We are going to use the foot tapping technique for the majority of this because your body will naturally detect the tempo and the rest is just tapping your foot to the beat.

Get your foot ready, we’re going to start tapping.

I’m sure everyone has heard this. I want you to listen to it, tap your foot and pay attention what happens to your foot tap.

Sorry if you’re not a horror movie fan. If you noticed, your foot absolutely switched from 2,4 to 1,3 but let’s get weirder! This time tap your foot twice as fast, yes now instead of 2,4 we are just going to tap out ALL the beats. Ready? Give it another go, believe it or not this is going to be harder because you are going to have to find 1 and that is can be a bigger challenge than you realize.

Foot ready? Here we go. This time I want you to give it a few times and count how many times you tapped your foot.

How did you do? Were you able to find 1? How many times did you tap your foot?

If you said 5 you win! The Halloween theme is in 5, good job! And you doubted yourself, I told you that you’ve got this.

Okay, lets get out of the soundtrack world and into Seattle in the 90s. Submitted for your approval is “Them Bones” by Alice in Chains

Arm your foot!!

And go ..

How did you do? Did your foot make the switch again? You know what we have to do. Check it out again and tap your foot twice as fast again and give try counting again. I will let you in on a trick to counting, every number aside from one can be counted in 2s and 3s. So if you were counting 5 it is much easier to count 1 2 1 2 3 instead of 1 2 3 4 5. The 1s you are counting gives you a landing zone and helps to keep you from losing count. If you still haven’t gotten it, try it again doing that.

How did you do? Did you make it to 7? If you did you are 100% correct Them Bones is in 7. You are officially counting meters at this point and that is a legitimate skill and I can almost promise that the person sitting next to you cannot do that. Is it really necessary to be able to do this? It depends to be completely honest. Some people are just happy to hear something and that’s enough but there are some people out there who want to peel the layers back and find what it is that they like and don’t like in the songs they are listening to. Either way it’s fun to do for people and everyone will think you are a musical genius and that’s just fun.

Your homework: Find more songs, count along and see what you find. You never know, you may surprise yourself and find that you want to hear music that is more complex. Just like when we were kids and hated the foods you now enjoy, you’re palate can only become better the more you introduce to it. Now go be geniuses.

Want to challenge yourself? Below is a link to one of my own songs At the Gates and this part is all over the place musically. Get your foot ready to tap really fast and tell me how you do (don’t worry the link is queued up to the exact place). I’ll even post the drum groove so you can follow along so you can see where things go. Have fun and good luck!

Until the next time!
Mike

Let’s face it, I talk about time a lot.  One day I promise to move on to other topics like harmony, chord voicings, modes, the modes of those modes, and all the things that do not involve a number over another number. 

First, we are going to dive into the world of cramming extra notes in where they were not intended.

and how they take everything you ever learned about time (including everything I’ve told you) and warps it.  Time? Warps?

Sorry about that.  No I’m not.  Anyway, traditionally time keeping is not unlike setting the table for dinner.  Most songs (not all songs) are in 4/4 time which means that at the dinner table there are 4 equal sized spots for each of the 4 people.  I don’t know why but for some reason I’ve decided that everyone coming to dinner is named Doug.

Which means that you’re in 5/4 time and you’ll have to put the extender thing in the table and set a 5th equally sized place. At this point, the table is exactly one setting longer or the measure is one beat longer.

There’s a problem!  Aunt Velma borrowed your table extender, broke her glasses, can’t see, and won’t be able to find your table thing! 

Aside from not lending out random furniture pieces to your weird aunt that talks to dogs and wears alarmingly short skirts, what are you going to do? 

Oh great, all the Dougs are extraordinarily picky and require equal space too; as if you didn’t have enough to worry about right now. Seriously, who invited the Dougs?

Now we’ve got 5 Dougs on their way and only 4 Doug spots!  Well, we need to just make room for all of the Dougs. 

Making room for an extra thing is a scenario that plays out in life and music all the time. If you’ve ever played any music at all you’ve more than likely played a triplet. Which looks like this:

Side note here metal heads: A common mistake happens when you think a herta is a triplet. A triplet is 3 evenly spaced notes in the place of 2. A herta is more than likely what you’ve been hearing and they look like this:

Or this:

For what is worth, i think hertas should better in metal.

A triplet is playing 3 notes in the space of 2. In other words, there are 3 Dougs at a table for 2. Knowing that you should know what to expect from the dinner scenario. We have 5 Dougs and room for 4 with means we have a quintuplet.

All that explanation for a basic 16th note bracket with a 5 over it. Let me ask you this: is it still a 16th note? No, no it isn’t. If this piece was in 4/4 time, these would be 20th notes. If you want to be even more specific, if you had a measure of 4 quintuplets you could (but really never should) say that the time signature is 20/20.

Come back next time send we’ll go even deeper into tuplets and irrational time signatures.

Thanks for stopping by! This blog isn’t really meant for anything besides giving me the ability to add more pictures and visual aides to what I’m talking about. Have a great rest of your day!

– Mike

Let’s get nerdy

It is the pervading law of all things organic and inorganic, of all things physical and metaphysical, of all things human and all things superhuman, of all true manifestations of the head, of the heart, of the soul, that the life is recognizable in its expression, that form ever follows function. This is the law.
–Louis Sullivan