24
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Do you play the upbeat when beginning to play a series of notes, and then after?
The upbeat is where the song starts.
Imagine starting the song "Happy birthday to you" without the upbeat; then you would start singing "birthday to you".
When you reach the end you don't play the ...
- 4,012
22
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Music Theory behind build ups
There are a couple of techniques here:
If you are gradually ramping up the speed, then you would use an increase in tempo. This gives a growing sense of urgency, but can be very difficult to manage, ...
- 36.3k
20
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How do you know if a song has triplets in 4/4 or if the tempo is 3/4?
Technically speaking, you can't ever say for certain until you see the composer's original score (if there even is one); a piece could literally be written in an infinite number of time signatures. As ...
- 78.7k
20
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Is it hopeless in terms of becoming decent musicians, if they can't count beats?
It's not hopeless, but may take more time than others would.
A couple of ideas. While listening to music, start tapping, singing, nodding, whatever, and turn down the sound, initially so it's still ...
- 173k
19
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Do musicians count the meter all the time?
Counting is an absolutely necessary step when learning a new piece.It is the rhythmic framework of any piece. Without it, you may well be playing a different tune. 'All the right notes, but not in the ...
- 173k
18
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How to develop rhythmic sophistication in writing music?
Several things.
First and foremost -- I cannot stress this enough -- we express ourselves in the idioms of the music we listen to. If you want to start having more rhythmically interesting ...
- 3,947
18
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Why are measures (aka "bars") important?
Please count 1-2-3-4,1-2-3-4, then at the same tempo (speed/ bpm) count 1-2-3-1-2-3.
If you can't feel or tell the difference, then, you're right, there's no need for bars. If you can, then how will ...
- 173k
16
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Do you play the upbeat when beginning to play a series of notes, and then after?
This is also called pickup note, pickup measure or anacrusis. You can read about it here: Wiki
You can find them in a lot of songs, like Happy Birthday for example:
Of course you don't have to use ...
- 2,881
15
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Is it hopeless in terms of becoming decent musicians, if they can't count beats?
One of my mantras as a teacher is to tell my students to play things "painfully slow." In other words, so slow it hurts. I would say you are practicing too fast. When playing an instrument, there are ...
- 5,484
14
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Intended shift of meter in certain songs?
Mark Butler has written a scholarly book on Electronic Dance Music called Unlocking the Groove. In it, he proposes calling these moments "turning the beat around", and abbreviated it TBA. As in, "...
- 17.9k
12
votes
Accepted
What time signature has 3 out of 8 beats accented?
1 2 3, 1 2 3, 1 2 is Calypso rhythm.
Although it appears it often has a 4/4 or 8/8 time signature, I have seen it 3+3+2/8. Even with a more regular time signature, you may find it notated with two ...
- 881
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Proper way to count beats
In 4/4, if the shortest note is an 8th, your basic counting matrix is:
one-and-two-and-three-and-four-and
In this example the notes come on:
ONE-(and)-TWO-AND-(three)-AND-(four)-AND
An alternative ...
- 77.8k
12
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Why are measures (aka "bars") important?
One bar tends to be the smallest time after which there is some repetition in multiple voices. This is quite a bit of an oversimplification, but it is often observable, in approximate form, in many ...
- 33.4k
12
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How are beats divided in simple/compound/odd meters supposed to sound different?
The underlying principle at work here is: Notated music "doesn't show everything."
Compare, say, the sheet music of the Moonlight Sonata to a midi file capturing a performance of it.* The ...
- 7,414
11
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Do musicians count the meter all the time?
As you beginner, I strongly suggest you keep doing that. What I did when I first begun, was to count everything with my foot. After a while, I didn't really need to count every single thing with the ...
- 30.6k
11
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Why are measures (aka "bars") important?
To offer a different perspective from the other excellent answers here, I'll draw an analogy between a piece of music and a piece of prose.
Barlines are separators, just like paragraphs and chapters. ...
- 241
10
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What this is, and how can it be put into Sibelius?
The three eighth notes (not 16th notes) with the "3" above the beam are a "triplet": three notes in the space of one beat. There are exactly four beats in the measure.
For ...
- 55k
9
votes
How to develop rhythmic sophistication in writing music?
When I studied music composition, one of our basic exercises was to compose rhythms without melody. This forces you to develop rhythms that are interesting in their own right. You can then develop the ...
- 6,567
9
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Do musicians count the meter all the time?
This is much like: when you drive a car, do you think about the steering all the time?
When you learn to drive, you will be consciously thinking about your steering. Similarly, an experienced driver ...
- 818
9
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How do you know if a song has triplets in 4/4 or if the tempo is 3/4?
I'd put it in 6/8, due to the triplets feel, but the phrasing kind of repeats every two bars, thus two lots of 3/8, making 6/8. Why /8? Well, it's fairly quick, so I'd write it as quavers instead of ...
- 173k
8
votes
Gnossiennes and Free Time
Satie often does dispense with barlines. In Vexations he does so for 18 hours or so! I agree with Andy Bonner that the effect is to suppress the metric emphases we might otherwise apply. But Satie's ...
- 4,948
7
votes
Accepted
Stress in music
There are several different kinds of stress in music.
Meter (lyrical) is the stress added by accents (real or implied) in the lyric. It's important to remember that meter, as it was used in writing, ...
- 3,707
7
votes
Accepted
Electronic music beats: Sample or Synthesis?
There is no blanket answer to your question. It depends. "It depends" isn't very useful though, so let's try to dive a little more into it.
Advantages and disadvantages
Generally speaking:
Sample: ...
- 15.9k
7
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Does 4/8 Have a Faster Tempo Than 4/4 at 60 BPM?
First of all tempo is not affected by time signature, however what gets the beat does change as the time signature changes so this is the source of much of the confusion.
It depends on how you are ...
Dom♦
- 46.1k
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