Oh now I see.
6/8, in typical musical theory fashion, is an awful name for something like (3/4)/2
It is technically precise and in practice misses the point completely.
(And don't get me started on mode names. Just don't)
Using John Varney's rhythm wheel to differentiate 3/4 and 6/8 time signatures
61–70 of 92 posts
Re: Using John Varney's rhythm wheel to differentiate 3/4 and 6/8 time signatures
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
The full time signature is arbitrary, and partially related to how the notes are written. It's wrong to put too much weight on "6/8" vs "3/4" per se. There are conventions that have developed in western music as to which time signature matches which natural beat pattern, but there's nothing _inherent_ in the time signatures that's important. Instead, I find it useful to think about combinations and layers of twos and…
Can you explain what the difference between /4 and /8 are? like for example, what is the difference between 9/8 and 9/4? I've made something up that has an 11 time signature, 2-3-3-3(or 3-3-2-3), but how do I know if it's 11/8 or 11/4?
You don't. However, in general faster tempo has a lower denominator (in classical music at least, and more rarely in jazz).
For example, a 2/2 tempo with 100 BPM is easier to "manage" than a 4/4 tempo with 200 BPM, and they are the same as each 2/2 beat corresponds to two 4/4 beats. So a "Presto" or "Prestissimo" will often be written as 2/2, with half the BPM that it would have in 4/4. Likewise, a 6/4 is usually faster than a 6/8 or 12/8.
Re: Using John Varney's rhythm wheel to differentiate 3/4 and 6/8 time signatures
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
You may be a professional drummer, but you are of some sort of mindset that has you in denial of the concept of convention . You also certainly feel rhythm but do not intellectually understand it. Rhythm is a cognitive/perceptual/psychological process whereby we relate events to one another. It is not mere timing. When you impose in your mind a structure on a timing by giving extra attention to certain events, then y…
You write, I'm not sure why, as if you are an imposing genius addressing someone with grave intellectual disabilities. It's unfathomable to me by what process you decided our drummer friend is in denial of, has no intellectual understanding of, the bleeding obvious. What you say is mostly the exceedingly basic needlessly expressed in a long-winded way. But perhaps I don't 'intellectually understand' it either.
> addressing someone with grave intellectual disabilities.
Well, I did say I was a drummer!
Re: Using John Varney's rhythm wheel to differentiate 3/4 and 6/8 time signatures
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
You write, I'm not sure why, as if you are an imposing genius addressing someone with grave intellectual disabilities. It's unfathomable to me by what process you decided our drummer friend is in denial of, has no intellectual understanding of, the bleeding obvious. What you say is mostly the exceedingly basic needlessly expressed in a long-winded way. But perhaps I don't 'intellectually understand' it either.
> addressing someone with grave intellectual disabilities. Well, I did say I was a drummer!
Haha! I originally in fact had the sentence "Drummer jokes are just jokes!" but edited it out. (disclosure: musician/composer)
Re: Using John Varney's rhythm wheel to differentiate 3/4 and 6/8 time signatures
#65I'm a pretty non-musical person, and time signatures have always confused me. Unfortunately, this explanation left me just as confused. I can hear the difference between the two sample beats but I cannot figure out how to generalize this to other time signatures beyond the 3/4 and 6/8 described here.
It's not a math thing. It's more about feel than counting. 3/4 is ONE two three, with a foot stomp on the ONE. It's a dance beat - STOMP skip skip. 4/4 is so common it appears in a lot of variations, from the bass drum beat of EDM to all the different rock and pop variations. The usual - not infallible, but strongly suggestive - tell is how often the chords change. Failing which, there's often a unique rhythm marker…
> 6/8 is skiddledeediddledee - often used in folk and/or ethnic music. It's a much lighter, more skittery feel.
There are two common forms of 6/8 (jigs) at least in the kinds of traditional music I'm used to: single jigs and double jigs. A double jig is "skiddledeediddledee" as you said, like the song "99 bottles of beer on the wall", while a single jig is more like "humpty dumpty".
Re: Using John Varney's rhythm wheel to differentiate 3/4 and 6/8 time signatures
#66It would have been nice with a negative example, e.g being able to play the 6/8th on top of the 3/4th piece, in a suitable tempo.
Re: Using John Varney's rhythm wheel to differentiate 3/4 and 6/8 time signatures
#67Bug: rapid calls to 3/4 get parsed as 6/8 1. Take the 3/4 example and convince yourself you fully understand the difference between 3/4 time and 6/8 time. 2. Let your ostensible understanding lead you to listen to a waltz. 3. Get familiar enough with the waltz that you can sing along with the melody. 4. Now ask yourself: does the melody sound like it divide up into groups of measures, or is the melody just freely mov…
I don't think genre literacy counts as a workaround: I think it's really the definition of what is or is not 6/8. The 6/8 time wheel gives a heavy bass drum on the four count. I don't notice such a thing in the waltz every other measure.
I'm more familiar with 4/4 time due to the genres I know well, but it's a similar thing there. I used to think that the 1 and the 2 beats were indistinguishable - you can start off by one and it still repeats with period 4. But now I can reliably pick up the difference, generally by listening to where the bass drum lands versus the high hat. However I'm not as good at telling the 1 and 3 counts apart or the first measure in a phrase from the second. These are just more subtle conventions on longer scale.
6/8 and all time signatures are just notations, just ways to encode information about the song. There's a correct answer but yes, it depends upon conventions. You can call it 1/1 time if you want, but it's not going to help you play your part or dance along if the conductor tells you that.
Re: Using John Varney's rhythm wheel to differentiate 3/4 and 6/8 time signatures
#68There is no difference between 3/4 and 6/8 unless you are trying to decide on which one makes your score easier to read. It's just different ways of conceptualizing the phrase. Mathematically (and therefore rhythmically) they are the same, of course. Maybe the site is trying to make some other differentiation but it didn't work at all in Firefox. (Source: I am a professional drummer)
As a musician, the reactions to almost every post on hacker news involving music ends up both cracking me up and serving as a healthy reminder of the arrogance and hubris around here. In all my time I've never met another musician/composer who tried to convince me that there is some kind of fundamental rythmic difference between 2/3 and 6/8 time, yet here we have scores of people who are fighting for the idea as if it were part of their identity or something... At least it's a healthy reminder that the eloquence and apparent confidence with which a statement is delivered really isn't indicative of it's truthfulness at all haha...
Re: Using John Varney's rhythm wheel to differentiate 3/4 and 6/8 time signatures
#69Oh now I see. 6/8, in typical musical theory fashion , is an awful name for something like (3/4)/2 It is technically precise and in practice misses the point completely. (And don't get me started on mode names. Just don't)
More like 6/4 = 2×(3/8) but 3/8 is not a scalar because it also carries division and subdivision information, and × is a new operator that is barely similar to multiplication.
________
A time signature N/B is actually a tuple...:
(division-of-N, subdivision-of-N, B)
(beats/measure, base_notes/beat, base_notes/whole_note)
E.g. 3/4 is actually a tuple:
(3 beats/measure, 2 base_notes/beat, 4 base_notes/whole_note).The × operator works like...:
A × (N/B) =
= A × (D, S, B) =
= (A * 1 division, D * 1 subdivision/division, B / 2)
E.g.
2×(3/8) =
= 2×([division-of-N-3, subdivision-of-N-3, 8 base_notes/whole_note]) =
= 2×([3 beats/measure, 2 base_notes/beat, 8 base_notes/whole_note]) =
= [2 beats/measure, 3 base_notes/beat, 8 base_notes/whole_note / 2] =
= [2 beats/measure, 3 base_notes/beat, 4 base_notes/whole_note]
= [division-of-N-6, subdivision-of-N-6, 4 base_notes/whole_note]
= 6/4_UNINTENTIONALLY BURIED THE LEDE, IT'S HERE_
But honestly this just works only with traditional time signatures which follow this neat table-simple-compound-duple-triple-quadruple nonsense; for other compound N like 5/4, 7/4 etc. it won't work.
E.g. 5/4 is either (2/4 + 3/4) or (3/4 + 2/4) depending on the song (can't think any of the former off the top of my head, but Mission:Impossible's theme and Take Five are representatives of the latter). It can even be (1/4 + 3/4 + 1/4).
Or, like Gorillaz's 5/4 which sounds like (2.5/4 + 2.5/4) (which I'd argue is actually not 5/4 but 10/8 and the guitar definitely sounds like it). Also the lyrics+drums are actually in 4/4 so it's just a polyrhythm and both rhythms synchronize every LCM(5, 4) = 20 beats (4 guitar bars, 5 lyrics+drums bars) and in fact the macro song structure changes every 20 beats instead of 16 like in traditional 4/4 so maybe it is 5/4... or 10/8. Or 4/4 with 5 measures per hypermeasure? Or both? Or neither?
It's all just implicit. It's on your ears. Listen for the subdivisions.
This IMHO is the right way to look at time signatures.
[0] https://www.musictheory.net/lessons/15
[1]
- N=2 simple duple - 2 beats/measure * 2 base_notes/beat = 4 base_notes/measure
- N=3 simple triple - 3 beats/measure * 2 base_notes/beat = 6 base_notes/measure
- N=4 simple quadruple - 4 beats/measure * 2 base_notes/beat = 8 base_notes/measure
- N=6 compound duple - 2 beats/measure * 3 base_notes/beat = 6 base_notes/measure
- N=9 compound triple - 3 beats/measure * 3 base_notes/beat = 9 base_notes/measure
- N=12 compound quadruple - 4 beats/measure * 3 base_notes/beat = 12 base_notes/measure
Re: Using John Varney's rhythm wheel to differentiate 3/4 and 6/8 time signatures
#70I'm a pretty non-musical person, and time signatures have always confused me. Unfortunately, this explanation left me just as confused. I can hear the difference between the two sample beats but I cannot figure out how to generalize this to other time signatures beyond the 3/4 and 6/8 described here.
Time signatures are about writing and reading music. A beat being in 3 or 6 is independent from the time signature, which is whatever the transcriber thought best (you can always count a song in 6 in 3.) A piece in 4 might have pervasive use of triplets, so it would make it more readable to notate in 12/8 rather than 4/4, but there is no triplet-pervasiveness threshold for when to prefer one over the other. Likewise,…
> you can always count a song in 6 in 3.
You would lose something by doing so; when a song is written in 6 it's because (unless someone is playing silly buggers) it has some kind of 1-2 pattern. For a lot of songs in 6, if you want to count something smaller you're better off counting it in 2s (with some level of triplet-pervasiveness).