I’ve been listening to a lot of prog rock recently and since I’m a guitarist, I also want to learn the songs I listen to. Now, I have a good ear for melody, but where I always fall short is getting the correct rhythm down. I cannot for the life of me figure out how to count time signatures, and believe me, I’m trying.
In: 4
Indian music has a lot of legitimate odd cyclic patterns, for example, 7 beat or 9 beat, (not 7/8 or 9/8).
They are counted typically as:
7 = 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 1, 2
9 = 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 1, 2, 1, 2
The high tempo 7 beat [1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 1, 2] count is one of the easier ones to intuit. Keep humming the [phrase] long enough and you can *feel* the rhythm and can even squeeze poetry into it. Try it!
In this form of music, you break the odd into a summation of odd and even, and you use the even to indicate the end of a beat cycle and the start of a new one. I’m sure western music has similar tricks.
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