As a musician of any experience and ability level, it surely won’t have escaped your notice that the concept of time is intrinsic to all forms of music, as language is to literature and colour is to painting. However, ask yourself how much you really think about it, in a truly contemplative sense, as opposed to just figuring out where the taps of that eighth-note delayed lead synth are going to land in relation to your drum track.
With the vast majority of modern Western music being composed in 4/4 and adhering to a fairly standard set of unwritten rhythmic ‘rules’ in order to maximise its mass appeal, anything that breaks from the norm and finds its own groove can surely only be a good thing, and when it comes to bending musical time, there are many ways in which this simple goal can be achieved.
With all of this at the forefront of our mind, we invite you on a journey into the furthest reaches of the fourth dimension to explore a galaxy of techniques for bringing a touch (or an enthusiastic punch!) of temporal intrigue, spectacle and wonkiness to your tunes. We’ll cover everything from gravity-defying odd time signatures and brain-melting polyrhythms to dancefloor-igniting tempo changes and groove-shifting beat displacement, all with the aim of sparking your creativity.
We promise to keep things as ‘unacademic’ as possible – there’ll be no heavy theory or stave-based notation to negotiate, just practical DAW-based walkthroughs and tips, complete with audio examples, all designed to get you thinking more deeply about rhythm and metre, and producing more interesting tracks as a result, no matter what genre you’re working in. And remember, these timing tricks aren’t just for drum beats – they apply equally to any musical part, from basslines and synth riffs to vocals and lead guitars!
Now, time waits for no man, and the clock is already ticking, so let’s get to it!
Tempo and time signature
Central to the concept of musical time are tempo and time signature. The first of these couldn’t be more straightforward: tempo is simply speed, expressed as a number of beats per minute (BPM). While it might be easy to understand, though, the tempo of a track plays a huge part in defining its feel and character, and even placing it in a particular genre or subgenre: dubstep at 140bpm vs drum & bass at 170bpm vs 2-step at 130bpm, for example. We’ll come back to tempo shortly, but time signature warrants more of an explanation…
About time
If you’ve been producing music for a while and have never heard the term ‘time signature’ before, you’re probably making all your tracks in the DAW default of 4/4. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with this – indeed, the vast, vast majority of Western music today is in that stalwart sig – but by eschewing ‘odd’ alternatives such as 3/4, 5/4 and 6/8, you’re missing out on not only a wealth of powerful compositional possibilities, but also a whole world of time-based fun.
So, what, exactly, do those two numbers actually describe? Although unofficially standardised in text as X/Y, in musical notation, the time signature (which sits in between the clef and the key signature) is written as X on top of Y, kinda like a fraction. Requiring only the most basic understanding of music theory to get a handle on, the meanings of X and Y really aren’t as mystical or complicated as some may have led you to believe: the top numeral tells you the number of ‘beats’ in a bar, while the bottom numeral (the denominator) gives the note value of each of those beats. OK, we just made it sound more complicated than it actually is. Allow us to illustrate…
To take 4/4 as the most obvious example, the first 4 indicates that there are four beats in the bar, while the second (the denominator) tells us that the note value is a 1/4-note – also known as a quarter-note or crotchet. Thus, 4/4 means four 1/4-note beats to the bar. In exactly the same way, the time signature 9/8 sees each bar divided up into nine eighth-notes (aka 1/8-notes or quavers) for the purposes of performance, notation and – most pertinently for the computer musician – sequencing. Speaking of 9/8, time signatures that divide the beat into three (three groups of three eighth-notes each, in that particular case) rather than two are called ‘compound’ signatures, and they essentially define a track as having a triplet feel.
Simple maths
Ultimately, while most of the time you will indeed find yourself writing in
