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
It may help to hear the same melody in two different times.
[Here’s a piece in 3-time](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWWr64r7JgY). Hear how it goes DA-da-da DA-da-d DA-da-da? You might feel some instinct to sort of sway to it. The string line here is playing almost exactly straight quarter notes, one per beat (this is in 3/4 time, so each beat is a quarter note). Like a lot of 3-time pieces, the strings have a different note on beat 1 and two of the same note on beats 2 and 3 – it’s very common for 3-time pieces to have that sort of unevenness between the first beat and the second and third, in part because if you wanted evenness you might as well just use 4-time.
[Here’s the same basic melody, but played in 4-time](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KvQm6e_NsKM). It’s more like DA-da-daaa-da DA-da-daaa-da or DA-DA-da-da DA-DA-da-da depending on the part of the track. The main melody is mostly eighth notes, so you’ll hear two notes for each of these beats (since it’s in 4/4 time, each beat is a quarter note). You’re more likely to tap your foot to a melody like this, because it has a more even kind of feel, and you’ll hear a lot more subdivisions of each bar into two halves.
(Both these tracks have some syncopation – breaks from the normal rhythm – in their baselines and percussion sections, so you can’t just listen to those in this case.)
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