musical notation question

poekoelan

Member
I was watching a youtube vid the other day and a guy was describing a concept that I don't believe I know how notate ( write down in music form ). He was talking about playing a basic 6/8 blues beat and then going into a fill consisting of 16th notes. If I was writing out something like this, would it be proper to change the time signature to 2/4 for the 16th note fill or just leave the time signature in 6/8 and write the fill in 16th notes? Or maybe even something else?

Thanks
 
In 6/8, there are six 16th notes per beat (assuming you're counting it correctly in 2):

68eighths.png


I guess you mean that he's playing a fill with four notes per beat? If that's right, you could notate them as dotted 16ths (four of them beamed together per beat), or you could write them as a tuplet-- four 8th notes beamed together with a numeral 4 or 4:3 written above them, like ex. 1 or 2 here:

quadruplets-piano-music.jpg


It's technically possible to write them as 16th notes in 2/4 by including a metric modulation indication of "dotted quarter = quarter note" (like at the beginning of the 4/4 measure below), but that's a extremely ugly way of doing it. It's wrong, even if it's mathematically correct.

meter1-a.jpg
 
Yes, thank you. I was wondering about the number 4 over them, just as you would notate triplets with the number 3 above them when playing in 4/4. It looks like you wrote them as 8th notes. Maybe the guy just meant that it had a 16th note feel to it.

He was explaining something that Bonham would do in his early days when playing a blues tune. Don't remember the song that he cited as an example. But thanks for clearing it up!
 
I was watching a youtube vid the other day and a guy was describing a concept that I don't believe I know how notate ( write down in music form ). He was talking about playing a basic 6/8 blues beat and then going into a fill consisting of 16th notes. If I was writing out something like this, would it be proper to change the time signature to 2/4 for the 16th note fill or just leave the time signature in 6/8 and write the fill in 16th notes? Or maybe even something else?

Thanks

I'm not at all sure what a 6/8 basic blues beat means. Are you sure it isn't 12/8? Anyway, going on what you've written here, why not just write it in 16th notes? Why change the time signature? You're in 6/8, you've got 8 beats in the measure, each beat has two 16th notes so what could be straighter than that?
 
I'm not at all sure what a 6/8 basic blues beat means. Are you sure it isn't 12/8? Anyway, going on what you've written here, why not just write it in 16th notes? Why change the time signature? You're in 6/8, you've got 8 beats in the measure, each beat has two 16th notes so what could be straighter than that?

6 beats in the measure.
 
And 6/8 (or 12/8) is a triplet feel counted in two and there is no natural way to write a 4-note 16th pattern in the beat.

So, I would write it as four 16th notes with a 4 over it. I haven't written music in forever, but I think I used to use an arc'd line below the 4 to indicate the start and finish of the odd note grouping.

6 beats in the measure.
 
If I remember correctly it wasn't just a matter of doubling up the 8th notes into 16th notes because the whole feel changed during the fill. It kind of had a 16th note feel to it because it suddenly seemed to shift to a quarter note feel instead of a dotted quarter note feel. I think I was hearing the example toddbishop gave. Four 8th notes crammed into the space that was occupied by three 8th notes during the groove.

Thanks guys
 
That's exactly it. The feel/time is going 1-2-3, 1-2-3, 1-2-3, 1-2-3 with a lovely triplet feel and you're going to stuff 4 notes into a space where musically they do not belong. Rhythmically it can work just fine but musically it doesn't.

If I remember correctly it wasn't just a matter of doubling up the 8th notes into 16th notes because the whole feel changed during the fill. It kind of had a 16th note feel to it because it suddenly seemed to shift to a quarter note feel instead of a dotted quarter note feel. I think I was hearing the example toddbishop gave. Four 8th notes crammed into the space that was occupied by three 8th notes during the groove.

Thanks guys
 
I'm not as concerned with how it sounds so such as how to write it out. But it did sound interesting. How many times have we heard a song in 4/4 with an 8th note grove then for a fill the drummer plays 8th note triplets? It kind of reminded me of that only the other way around.
 
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