PLaying in 5/4

Coolnama, I'm impressed with your serious efforts to advance in music. But walking around with a metronome? :shock:
That's a bit over the top and I can't think of any benefits you would gain from it.

I suggest that you don't take it on dates, especially to a movie. Funerals would also be a bad idea, especially if the mourners are elderly. And switch it off immediately, if you see any armed military personnel.

Better still, just leave it at home. For the small amount of music that you'll play in 5/4, it's just not worth the risk :D

I suppose you could internalize 5/4, but you'll have to do it twice :)

5/4 and other odd time signatures are "mixed meter" - it's like you've got one set of 2/4 and one set of 3/4 in each measure. One or the other comes first... so there are two different pulses you can have with 5/4.

Standard notation usually helps you out. Sometimes there are accent marks, but when there aren't, publishers usually beam the notes in metric units - so look for where the eighth note beams break: if you have a measure with ten eighth notes, you'll probably have a set of four and a set of six.

Hmmm so if its 2/5 then 3/5 , then you should be accenting the 1 of the 2/5, then the 1 of the 3/5 and the 3 of the 3/5 ?

:P Im only walking around with it in my house and I weird out my parents because every time I hit the wrong 1st beat, I make funny faces xD.

My life is moving at 100 bpm, it is weird as heck, but once I internalize 5/4 I will be able to make cool rhythms I am going with 2/5, 3/5. in 3/5 2/5 we would accent the 1 and 3 of the 3/5 and the 1 of the 2/5 ?

lol the Metronome has got a little headphone jack so nobody an hear... but I can :shock:

Its driving me insane this 5/4....... lol I always get it wrong, 4/4 is so ingrained into my soul!

Hmmm so if its 2/5 then 3/5 , then you should be accenting the 1 of the 2/5, then the 1 of the 3/5 and the 3 of the 3/5 ?

Its driving me insane this 5/4....... lol I always get it wrong, 4/4 is so ingrained into my soul!

(You mean 4 not 5)

And no - you would accent the 1 of the 2/4 and the 1 of the 3/4 - that's all

Oh, whoops 2/5 xD, I dont want to complicate things any more than they are.

Ok, thanks ^^.

Coolnama, I'm impressed with your serious efforts to advance in music. But walking around with a metronome? :shock:
That's a bit over the top and I can't think of any benefits you would gain from it.

I suggest that you don't take it on dates, especially to a movie. Funerals would also be a bad idea, especially if the mourners are elderly. And switch it off immediately, if you see any armed military personnel.

Better still, just leave it at home. For the small amount of music that you'll play in 5/4, it's just not worth the risk :D

lmaooo

Get Brubeck's tune Time Out - it's in 5/4. It was also covered on guitar by George Benson (and sounds pretty damn hot, imnsho), so you might want that version too. Listen to the groove and get it locked in. Then rinse and repeat with lots of other music in 5/4 time.

Although, tbh, I find I can play in odd time signatures fairly easily and I don't really think in 'time signatures' but in general feel for whatever the tune is. Like NoteBoat said, 5/4 can have different feels depending on how you group the notes. And, theoretically, a piece in 5/4 could be rewritten in 4/4 but with accents on odd beats (or shifting accents from bar to bar). Then there's the realms of changing time signatures and superimposed time signatures to contend with. My 'way of doing things' creates problems in rhythmic variation esp when improvising (not that I improvise much in odd time signatures anyway....), but sometimes it can be a lot easier to just find the groove and lock in to that, than trying to count bars accurately. If that makes sense. Also, with tunes like Miles Davis' All Blues and Shorter's Footprints, it is debatable what time signature they use - 6/8 or 6/4 - its all about the feel. I don't need to know what the time sig is for All Blues to jam along to it, I just need to know general feel and where the chords change. To my ears, the Rolling Stones' cover of Love In Vain made a blues tune 3/4 time, but David Hodge pointed out on here last year that it was because it was in 12/8 but really slow.

Get Brubeck's tune Time Out

You mean Take Five? :)

Uh, yeah.....that. My bad, recently got the album (long overdue) which is called Time Out. :oops:

if nobody minds i am going to hijack this thread with another question.

how important is it that guitarists understand time signatures?
The other week we played a gig and somebody came up afterwards and congratulated the drummer on his playing in the "riverboat song" in 6/4 time.

i have no idea what 6/4 time is (or even if the riverboat song is indeed in 6/4 time) - but anybody who has heard the riverboat song knows it is not difficult to play for a guitarist - the compliment was aimed fully at the drummer. So is time signatures the drummers hurdle alone?

I have always thought - if i can hum a rhythm, i can play it, so why do i need to know the time signature?

am i actually very wrong - and if so, why?

When playing a song (but not sight reading it) you don't need to know what the time signature is called as long as you can feel, and follow, the regular accented beat pattern, called the meter (which is the top number of the time signature).

The bottom number is just a notational convenience for writing, so we can make the beat equal to a chosen note-length and write all the note-lengths relative to it. So, if we decide to choose a quarter note to represent a single beat, then a note lasting 2 beats will be written as a half note, a note lasting half a beat will be written as an eighth note, etc. And that's shown by writing the bottom number of the time signature as 4.
As this is just a choice in how to notate it, this bottom number, unlike the top number, can't be heard. A song in 3/4 sounds exactly the same if played in 3/8, provided the tempo is exactly the same in both cases.
The guy who paid your drummer the compliment, could hear the top number and assumed the bottom number, (4 being by far the most common choice) or else he's seen the sheet music.

Six-four time is an example of a compound time signature. Compound time signatures are special in that, within each beat, we can hear 3 sub-beats. There are two main beats in six-four, but each one subdivides into 3 smaller beats giving a total of 6 (the top number). so you get ONE--TWO--, if you count the main beats and "ONE two three FOUR five six" if you count the sub-beats.

Slow blues has many similar examples. You can hear the 4 slow beats but also the 3 sub beats within each main beat, i.e., the familiar long-short long short bluesy sound that you can count 1-2-3 to for every beat.

The exact same effect can be heard with normal time signatures but using triplets for each beat. Again it's just a notational choice of which one you want to use.

thanks fretsource - a very helpful post :D
much appreciated :D

I only have a basic understanding of time signatures.

But i'll tell you now. Having that basic understanding has helped me to no end.

I want to get more knowhow on it. And i would advise everyone else to do the same. It has made my playing much tighter and rhythmic. The only problem is, i used to play what i feel the rhythm to be, inventing my own rhythms for time signatures. But now i learned the theory behind them, the natural thing to do is play set rhythm :( i want some spontenaty back