Yeh i know i prolly butchered the title with spelling buttttt... does anyone else notice how western white music is really bland. I guess pop music from the U.S. and europe. Like in any other kind of music i can feel movement and swing i guess u would call it. Swing? yeh i think. but anything modern sounds so horrible... like a metronome has more feel to it. And yes im a white person, but im attracted to anything with flavor... i.e. jazz blues... alotta latin stuff is cool, especially bass lines. of course white people can play blues and jazz but they werent responsible for inventing it. Is this cause white people naturally have no rythm? so they have to play like robots, lol...
Western music writes in 4:4 or 3:4 time or some variant thereon. West African rhythm if I remember correctly is some weird thing like 13:12 or 16:12 Some of the most interesting musics happen when people try to read the sheet music of another culture and put their own musical experience on it. This is going to sound lame, but try and follow. Ska - is what happened when Jamaicans tried to read rhythm and blues. You can hear the R+B rhythm in your head - think Rock this Town by the Stray Cats - doomp, (2,3) ba dooda dooda doomp, (2, 3) ba dooda dooda. So they read the music and did it rather staccato boomp a chacka -(pause) ka (pause)- ka boomp a chacka -(pause) ka - (pause) ka. Totally wrong, but totally cool. Bob Marley basically can owe his musical legacy to someone counting off R+B in entirely the wrong cadence. Appalacian dance music - swing : Think o dem hillbillys sawin' away. What happened there is that Africans were hauled out of cotton fields, handed violins and told to work it out or else. So they read Irish jigs and reels (think: Riverdance music - robotic tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap - metronomic precise rhythm) with their own organic feel (listen to Riverdance and then some fiddle music from bluegrass etc.) - a, ONE two three a ONE two three a ONE two three a ONE two three --- Totally changed the nature of it but made it danceable albeit in a different form. At the same time they were handed waltzes (3;4 time) which is counted out ONE -- two, three ONE -- two, three and emphasised a different syllable- one two THREE, one two THREE and there you had swing.
haha funny stuff, makes so much sense but i never woulda thought of that... What happens when u play motzart with a didgeredoo?
No, that info is TRUE I just felt lame trying to write out the feel of an instrument. If I'd been there with a guitar I'd have played it. RE: What happens when u play motzart with a didgeredoo? Dude.
Disco, your gut feeling is right. The difference is "swing". Literally. I'm not sure what the official definition of swing is, but it's basically when you lag the upbeat ever so slightly. Instead of: 1 - & - 2 - & - 3 - & - 4 it's: 1 - - & 2 - - & 3 - - & 4 The time signature is usually irrelevant. For example, Rush uses some crazy 7/8 & 9/8 time signatures, but it's still pretty "white guy" sounding, because Neil Peart don't swing. Whereas jazz is usually in 4/4 (the most braindead of all signatures), but it swings, so it's got that groove to it. If we're talking rock, check out some of the Zeppelin rhythms ("Fool in the Rain") or even Black Sabbath ("Who are you"). It's wild, because you've got these whiteguy guitar riffs played overtop a swing beat. Trippy stuff! P.S. "It don't mean a thing if you ain't got that swing" - Duke Ellington
Bizarre time signatures does not soul endow, but it at least gives an alien cadence to music. Vide infra, Sting.
4/4 time can have a massive chunky butt-shaking swing or shuffle to it, just that as you say modern pop music generally does sterilise it a lot as a result of electronic equipment and lots of production in the studio. Old blues is good for interesting rhythms. John Lee Hooker's "Boogie Chillun" which the main rhythm from has been taken over and slightly modified by countless songs in the modern era like ZZ Top's "La Grange", or that Chris Isaak "Baby did a bad thing". Banjos which originally came from Africa had been played with some very complex rhythms and even polyrhythms where there's more than one time signature going at a given time, they ended up being taken over by white guys in America. They gave the instrument up largely, as slaves, as the white folk caught on to this instrument and they didn't want to be associated with their captors. Black people played more on guitars later on as they were more modern and 'cool' but of course gave their own musical slant, and vice versa with banjo. On banjo, the fast bluegrass style of playing started up and that's a total straight rhythm, not much swing, but it still can really knock your ears off a bit! The deliverance theme is one well known example.
You aint kiddin. Unfortunately prog blew it, because bands started doing these contrived time signatures just for the sake of contrived time signatures. Totally soulless, almost mechanical crap. I'd much rather have a 4/4 smeared around a bit than a 63/64 played like a drum machine. Man my dad used to have this Ravi Shankar album where the entire side two was Ravi SINGING these insane drumbeats, you need a friggin calculator to keep up. But at the same time, there was an authentic feel to it. Alien cadence with a soul. Take me to your leader. Ever notice how all great swing drummers have a massive chunky butt? Even John Bonham had a pretty big caboose down there. Hm... I sense a theory coming on
I loved Ravi's album, and my father's response. "Forget everyting you know about music. Indian music does not concern itself with melody, counterpoint, harmony, etc. etc." and my father, walking by says "yeah, you can tell."
swing is when you take two eighth notes, and turn them into a dotted eighth note and a sixteenth note.
