I have watched and commented on ALL the festivids (well, I think? there are a lot of them and I still have to go back through the list and make sure I didn't miss any, and also when I have a good internet moment approach the download only vids, because I skipped those on account of bandwidth). I was gonna put together a rec list, but it would have been three pages long, so instead I implore you to go poke around the list and watch things, because there are some amazing things.
But anyway, watching vids makes me want to talk about vids, but also there is a particular confusing thing for me when I'm talking to other vidders about working with the beat that I would kinda like to explore more in depth. Or, rather, I understand what they are talking about, but the vocabulary ends up confusing me because of my history with learning how to time, and I am always looking to understand things better.
Let us go back in time for a moment, to that hazy past in which I was constantly cutting on a silent oboe in my drafts and my betas despaired of my complete lack of understanding of musical structure. Good times. But anyway, probably the most useful thing to happen to me in that time of attempting to understand was that time![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
heresluck sat down with me in a hotel room and spent several hours teaching me how to find the bassline (and, um, what a bassline even *was*). Because the thing I took away from that was that drummers gotta drum, and guitarists gotta slide, and singers gotta wail, but most (though not all) of the time your bassist is a soothing, reliable line of calming sanity and structure grooving along underneath it all and keeping everything from flying apart.
So, basically...although I do sometimes rely on the backbeat, for the most part when I'm in the process of marking out the beat in my song (and determining the math for keeping it through confusing bits), it is your friendly neighborhood bass line I turn to. And. So, I do not know if I am doing it wrong, or talking about something completely different, or just using vastly less complex music? But when people talk about the beat or even the tempo 'changing' in a song...this...almost never happens to me? Like, the music may feel faster or slower depending on what the instrumentation and vocals are doing and that has a lot of influence on the lengths of clips I use or the motion in them. But what I think of as 'the beat' rarely, rarely changes. If it is 21 frames over here, it is 21 frames over there, regardless of whether or not the drummer is suddenly channeling Animal or the singer decides to go super quiet and croon out a note that goes on forever. There have been times where the tempo has changed, but I find I'm always kinda surprised when it does, because the vast majority of the time even when it sounds on first listen like it does...it...doesn't?
And I really don't know if that's because I'm doing it wrong (though the method seems to be working for me since I implemented it so even if it is wrong, I'm not sure I care), or because I'm just using way less complex music, or because my definition of 'a beat' is some bizarre thing I made up in my head because I was confused. I suspect that last is probably the reality of the situation.
But anyway, watching vids makes me want to talk about vids, but also there is a particular confusing thing for me when I'm talking to other vidders about working with the beat that I would kinda like to explore more in depth. Or, rather, I understand what they are talking about, but the vocabulary ends up confusing me because of my history with learning how to time, and I am always looking to understand things better.
Let us go back in time for a moment, to that hazy past in which I was constantly cutting on a silent oboe in my drafts and my betas despaired of my complete lack of understanding of musical structure. Good times. But anyway, probably the most useful thing to happen to me in that time of attempting to understand was that time
heresluck sat down with me in a hotel room and spent several hours teaching me how to find the bassline (and, um, what a bassline even *was*). Because the thing I took away from that was that drummers gotta drum, and guitarists gotta slide, and singers gotta wail, but most (though not all) of the time your bassist is a soothing, reliable line of calming sanity and structure grooving along underneath it all and keeping everything from flying apart. So, basically...although I do sometimes rely on the backbeat, for the most part when I'm in the process of marking out the beat in my song (and determining the math for keeping it through confusing bits), it is your friendly neighborhood bass line I turn to. And. So, I do not know if I am doing it wrong, or talking about something completely different, or just using vastly less complex music? But when people talk about the beat or even the tempo 'changing' in a song...this...almost never happens to me? Like, the music may feel faster or slower depending on what the instrumentation and vocals are doing and that has a lot of influence on the lengths of clips I use or the motion in them. But what I think of as 'the beat' rarely, rarely changes. If it is 21 frames over here, it is 21 frames over there, regardless of whether or not the drummer is suddenly channeling Animal or the singer decides to go super quiet and croon out a note that goes on forever. There have been times where the tempo has changed, but I find I'm always kinda surprised when it does, because the vast majority of the time even when it sounds on first listen like it does...it...doesn't?
And I really don't know if that's because I'm doing it wrong (though the method seems to be working for me since I implemented it so even if it is wrong, I'm not sure I care), or because I'm just using way less complex music, or because my definition of 'a beat' is some bizarre thing I made up in my head because I was confused. I suspect that last is probably the reality of the situation.
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
Every time I hear a song where the bassist is allowed to really get their funk all on, I'm like AWWW, GOOD FOR YOU IT IS ABOUT TIME YOU GOT YOUR TURN TO BE THE FUN UNCLE.
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
The songs I use don't generally change tempo, though it does happen sometimes. I haven't paid attention to the bassline in those instances. More often than an actual tempo change, though, the drum goes from hitting once a measure to hitting twice a measure. So the beat speeds up, but the song itself doesn't. If that makes any kind of sense.
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
I like to utilize every instrument, which means paying attention to internal motion as much as--if not more than--external movement, hence the guitar wail when the head blows up, right?
Bottom line, thinking that you're doing it wrong is wrong. You're just not doing it effectively--or maybe you ARE!
From:
no subject
For me, the silent oboe was never good, because it never produced things that looked like I wanted them to, but I didn't know to fix it until I started marking up my timeline.
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
*chinhands*
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
I wanted to link to a song that I would say has a beat or tempo something change to see if you'd say the same, but I can't find it streaming, so I may comment again later if I do.
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
I'm not sure if this will be helpful or just confusing, but here's a link to Pink Floyd's Money, which starts out in a very unusual time signature -- 7/4. Give it a listen -- that's the bassline you're hearing at the beginning, picking out the 7/4 time. Stick with it... it starts to build just before 3:00, and when the guitar solo comes in, the tempo quickens, and the time signature changes to 4/4, which is the most common time signature in rock, pop, and blues.
Another example is Dave Brubeck's Blue Rondo A La Turk, which has a really interesting 9/8 time signature (varying between 2+2+2+3 and 3+3+3) to start, and then about 1:55 in, it changes to 4/4 for the sax solo.
Clearer? Muddier? Bueller?
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
I'll say it again: I'm really picky about vids, and I think your cutting is damn good. So there. :D
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
Pachelbel's Canon in D is in 4/4 and has a very steady tempo but seems to start out slow and speed up quite a bit, just by the large increase in how often a note is played. This video of it is really cool, its like the Guitar Hero version of piano, and lets you see the time/length of each note by the length of the yellow line that indicates how long to press that key.
It starts out playing once every four beats, so the yellow lines are very long and only change on the downbeat of every measure. In this diagram, the 1-2-3-4 are the beats, x is when the note is hit or starts, and __ is how long it lasts or sustains.
Around 0:35 it starts to change, now the notes can change every two beats, twice a measure. The yellow lines that hit every two beats are half as long as the other yellow lines, the others still last all four beats.
Around 0:47 the note changes speed up again, and now some notes change on every beat.
Around 1:26 there's one last change, now the notes can change in between beats, the yellow line is so short it looks square and those notes last half a beat.
The tempo this whole time, the length of time on the clock the "1-2-3-4" takes, has not changed at all, but how often the notes are hit has increased a whole ton and the song 'sounds' or 'feels' a lot faster, the piano player has to do a lot more work.
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
The kinds of popular music people use for vids almost never change time signature mid-piece, and they don't often feature anything but 4/4 anyway. (Dave Brubeck and a few prog rock bands aside.) I am hopeless at identifying time signature by listening though. All I ever know is how the music feels and what its wikipedia article claims.
From:
no subject
I was going to go into a whole thing about tempo and beat, but -- yeah, echan said it more clearly and succinctly than I would have done. Basically, when most people talk about the beat or tempo changing, they're responding to real changes in the music, but the changes are actually in the melody, the complexity of instrumentation, or the emphasis within a measure rather than the beat or tempo. (New Frontier has some good examples of that last thing.) There are certainly some songs in which the beat or tempo does change -- other people have provided examples, and I've got more if you want them -- but they are pretty rare, especially in studio-recorded tracks.