RE: We all make music
09-07-2015, 12:17 AM
(This post was last modified: 09-07-2015, 12:31 AM by ☆ C.H.W.O.K.A ☆.)
I most definitely don't have the expertise in proper, formal music knowledge to contribute to this amazing thread, but in my opinion rhythm is absolutely critical to music and usually criminally under-emphasized when teaching music theory! (I could say it reeks of implicit Western value judgements or whatever, but I'm not that type of douche and we're all just here to learn and have a good time.) Syncopation is vital: it just don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing. I'll lean on using a TON of examples to do my explaining work for me. Here's a high-class artsy-fartsy example I picked up watching a series on music theory that covered rhythm. This is the song they use for coronation in Britain:
Every single note throughout the whole piece hits on the beat, divided evenly into equal intervals. One instrument hits just the quarters, another hits just the eighths, another is responsible for sixteenths, and the choir is responsible for the whole notes. There's not much emphasis on any note in particular, but where there is, it's on the first beat of the measure. In every way it is a perfect illustration of these standard ways of breaking down rhythms without getting into triplets or any of that. It's pretty boring, though!
A couple hundred years later, Philip Glass, a great minimalist composer, created an opera about a disliked, monotheistic ancient Egyptian pharaoh, Akhenaten. Here's how he opened it:
Notice how it begins exactly the same, but with alternative instrumentation — horns, and a deep bass instead of an uplifting choir — and (I think?) transposed into a minor key to create a more menacing or at least ominous atmosphere. Then, after 4 measures or about 13 seconds, the rhythm suddenly seems to slip out from underneath you, like your blinker falling in and out-of-sync with the blinker of the car in front of you. All that's happened is he's changed which note he's emphasizing. The whole song — his whole career — proceeds in this fashion, repeating itself and slowly mutating, with only occasional actual note changes. Indeed, it's hard to tell much has changed at all since 13 seconds in, but all the while it has, in ways far too subtle for me to really explain or even comprehend, as emphasized when it abruptly switches back to the original theme lifted from Zadok The Priest at about 1 minute, 52 seconds in. Then it leaps into some arpeggios (a quick succession that runs up and then right back down the same notes symmetrically — usually just someone playing a scale in the key the song is in) because it's Philip Glass, and that's what Philip Glass does. The whole thing is gripping and magical, and every time I listen to it I can't help but want to listen to the whole thing. Actually, there's not much syncopation in this song at all, and where there is it's not obvious — it's kinda a wild goose chase to have lead you down this road, but hopefully it demonstrates the power of rhythm and you like the song as much as I do.
But then, I'm not exactly known for listening to classical music, and classical music isn't very well-known for its rhythmic virtuosity, either. No, if you want to explore rhythm, you're best served looking into the genre of music closest to my heart: hip-hop. Here's a good example of a super-early disco rap cut:
A rapper is a fundamentally monophonic instrument, like a triangle, cowbell, or most other percussive instruments, only able to emphasize notes by rhyming the note with another note's attached word (or, later, by omission) or by raising or slightly modulating their voice in some way. A genre where the lead instrument is percussive is bound to lead to interesting and complicated rhythmic arrangements, but not yet. Below is part of the first verse of The Breaks, very roughly transcribed by yours truly. I'll use a | for the downbeat and a . for the upbeat (which in this song is where the claps are,) though the real backbeat is more complicated than this and my transcription will be irregular because of the lengths of words:
It's extremely simplistic, like a childhood playground rhyme. "Car/star", "lose/shoes", all placed at the end of the line. ("Break/make" appears to be wholly accidental.) The only time Kurtis Blow doesn't hit either the backbeat or upbeat is when he uses the clap after "superstar" as a pause to take a breath. Most rap through 1986 was almost exactly like this, with only small, incremental changes and like 3 guys who did anything more advanced (see the spoiler below,) until:
Luckily I don't have to rely on my own sloppy ASCII transcription for this, because some enterprising nerd took it upon himself to put the whole thing to sheet music. Look at it! He doesn't wholly disregard the 1, 2, 3, 4 of the metronome, but he flits around it and doesn't seem to care exactly where his rhymes and all his syllables and the ends of his sentences fall in relationship to it. He's drawing on a long, rich tradition of syncopation, from funk, to jazz, winding all the way back to ragtime and Cuba, and from there, Africa.
One simple form of syncopation is the latin Bossa Nova clave, which is sorta a simplified rumba to fit 4/4. It's like playing a triplet, but then you just... keep going for another measure, keeping the equal intervals for two more taps. It wouldn't be fair, then, to call the notes in this half of the pattern triplets or quarter notes or eighths or anything at all — they are syncopated, off the beat and yet somehow "on" it, not just randomly placed. Here's a drummer playing it:
Another popular 4/4 variation on the rumba is the Bo Diddley beat, the lead guitar rhythm from this song:
Syncopation can place beats "ahead" of or "behind" the up- and downbeat, where they "ought" to be, and thus either drive you inexorably ahead or jerk you back. I regret that I can not explain it in more detail than this. Listen to this dusty song come alive as it wildly improvises patterns of syncopation so fast you hardly know what happens:
And I don't think any discussion of syncopation can be truly complete without touching on the king, Fela Kuti. Every song of his is a delicately-woven funky tapestry of different syncopated rhythms that would seem to have nothing to do with each other until you placed them together, repeated ad nauseum. This strategy is called "polyrhythm," and it can even include parts of the song played in an entirely different time signature from the rest! Here's one of my favorites, and once again a nerd who transcribed the whole shebang into sheet music:
And... that's pretty much all I know about music theory, unless you want to talk about my sampling technique, but I don't think anyone does. Plus this thread's ostensibly supposed to be helping Kitet learn to use Famitracker, hence the chiptune digression, and rhythms that don't fall on the 1-and-2-and-3-and-etc are an ABSOLUTE NIGHTMARE to put into a tracker!
Also, I wouldn't call 120 BPM mid-tempo at all. Mid-tempo is like, 70-90 BPM. 120 BPM is downright fast, unless you're secretly talking half-time and it's really 60 BPM, which you appear to be doing in your tindeck, in which case it's a little slow.
Every single note throughout the whole piece hits on the beat, divided evenly into equal intervals. One instrument hits just the quarters, another hits just the eighths, another is responsible for sixteenths, and the choir is responsible for the whole notes. There's not much emphasis on any note in particular, but where there is, it's on the first beat of the measure. In every way it is a perfect illustration of these standard ways of breaking down rhythms without getting into triplets or any of that. It's pretty boring, though!
A couple hundred years later, Philip Glass, a great minimalist composer, created an opera about a disliked, monotheistic ancient Egyptian pharaoh, Akhenaten. Here's how he opened it:
Notice how it begins exactly the same, but with alternative instrumentation — horns, and a deep bass instead of an uplifting choir — and (I think?) transposed into a minor key to create a more menacing or at least ominous atmosphere. Then, after 4 measures or about 13 seconds, the rhythm suddenly seems to slip out from underneath you, like your blinker falling in and out-of-sync with the blinker of the car in front of you. All that's happened is he's changed which note he's emphasizing. The whole song — his whole career — proceeds in this fashion, repeating itself and slowly mutating, with only occasional actual note changes. Indeed, it's hard to tell much has changed at all since 13 seconds in, but all the while it has, in ways far too subtle for me to really explain or even comprehend, as emphasized when it abruptly switches back to the original theme lifted from Zadok The Priest at about 1 minute, 52 seconds in. Then it leaps into some arpeggios (a quick succession that runs up and then right back down the same notes symmetrically — usually just someone playing a scale in the key the song is in) because it's Philip Glass, and that's what Philip Glass does. The whole thing is gripping and magical, and every time I listen to it I can't help but want to listen to the whole thing. Actually, there's not much syncopation in this song at all, and where there is it's not obvious — it's kinda a wild goose chase to have lead you down this road, but hopefully it demonstrates the power of rhythm and you like the song as much as I do.
But then, I'm not exactly known for listening to classical music, and classical music isn't very well-known for its rhythmic virtuosity, either. No, if you want to explore rhythm, you're best served looking into the genre of music closest to my heart: hip-hop. Here's a good example of a super-early disco rap cut:
A rapper is a fundamentally monophonic instrument, like a triangle, cowbell, or most other percussive instruments, only able to emphasize notes by rhyming the note with another note's attached word (or, later, by omission) or by raising or slightly modulating their voice in some way. A genre where the lead instrument is percussive is bound to lead to interesting and complicated rhythmic arrangements, but not yet. Below is part of the first verse of The Breaks, very roughly transcribed by yours truly. I'll use a | for the downbeat and a . for the upbeat (which in this song is where the claps are,) though the real backbeat is more complicated than this and my transcription will be irregular because of the lengths of words:
Code:
| . | .
Breaks on a bus, breaks on the CAR,
| . | .
breaks to make you aSUPERSTAR.
| . | .
Breaks to WIN, and breaks to LOSE.
| . | .
These here breaks will ROCK your shoes, and
| . | .
THESE ARE the BREAKS.It's extremely simplistic, like a childhood playground rhyme. "Car/star", "lose/shoes", all placed at the end of the line. ("Break/make" appears to be wholly accidental.) The only time Kurtis Blow doesn't hit either the backbeat or upbeat is when he uses the clap after "superstar" as a pause to take a breath. Most rap through 1986 was almost exactly like this, with only small, incremental changes and like 3 guys who did anything more advanced (see the spoiler below,) until:
Luckily I don't have to rely on my own sloppy ASCII transcription for this, because some enterprising nerd took it upon himself to put the whole thing to sheet music. Look at it! He doesn't wholly disregard the 1, 2, 3, 4 of the metronome, but he flits around it and doesn't seem to care exactly where his rhymes and all his syllables and the ends of his sentences fall in relationship to it. He's drawing on a long, rich tradition of syncopation, from funk, to jazz, winding all the way back to ragtime and Cuba, and from there, Africa.
One simple form of syncopation is the latin Bossa Nova clave, which is sorta a simplified rumba to fit 4/4. It's like playing a triplet, but then you just... keep going for another measure, keeping the equal intervals for two more taps. It wouldn't be fair, then, to call the notes in this half of the pattern triplets or quarter notes or eighths or anything at all — they are syncopated, off the beat and yet somehow "on" it, not just randomly placed. Here's a drummer playing it:
Another popular 4/4 variation on the rumba is the Bo Diddley beat, the lead guitar rhythm from this song:
Syncopation can place beats "ahead" of or "behind" the up- and downbeat, where they "ought" to be, and thus either drive you inexorably ahead or jerk you back. I regret that I can not explain it in more detail than this. Listen to this dusty song come alive as it wildly improvises patterns of syncopation so fast you hardly know what happens:
And I don't think any discussion of syncopation can be truly complete without touching on the king, Fela Kuti. Every song of his is a delicately-woven funky tapestry of different syncopated rhythms that would seem to have nothing to do with each other until you placed them together, repeated ad nauseum. This strategy is called "polyrhythm," and it can even include parts of the song played in an entirely different time signature from the rest! Here's one of my favorites, and once again a nerd who transcribed the whole shebang into sheet music:
And... that's pretty much all I know about music theory, unless you want to talk about my sampling technique, but I don't think anyone does. Plus this thread's ostensibly supposed to be helping Kitet learn to use Famitracker, hence the chiptune digression, and rhythms that don't fall on the 1-and-2-and-3-and-etc are an ABSOLUTE NIGHTMARE to put into a tracker!
Also, I wouldn't call 120 BPM mid-tempo at all. Mid-tempo is like, 70-90 BPM. 120 BPM is downright fast, unless you're secretly talking half-time and it's really 60 BPM, which you appear to be doing in your tindeck, in which case it's a little slow.