Some Bad Timing
What Kind Of Blues?
Last week’s Bonus Round: “Glad You’re Here” by Colette Deveaux - couldn’t find a Wikipedia entry, but I really like the song:
On yesterday’s “links” post I was whining around about how last week’s post got kinda funky because I was trying to illustrate how to arrange (or rearrange) a song so that not every line comes in on the downbeat (1 beat). All of the spaces I put in last week’s post to show the timing, which were there just before I hit the “Publish” button, sorta disappeared right after I clicked that button, leaving a confusing mess. So, I’m over it now and in the end it may be a good thing, because I had to work a bit to recreate the chord chart so it would be more or less intelligible. Meh.
For reference, we were discussing Mr. Clay Mills article on the Songtown website (in the Thursday December 29, 2022 post and Friday December 30, 2022 post) about making your songs more interesting by changing the beat of the “vocal entrance” - a much cooler way of saying “when you start singing a line”. See Archive here if you want to read both posts if you missed them.
Because the article is behind the Songtown member paywall, I couldn’t link to it, but here’s the synopsis from last Friday:
“Next is some really important songwriting advice from the folks at Songtown, and a bit technical. I realize now even though the link worked fine for me yesterday, it’s likely behind the paywall for members of Songtown. So, a brief description if you don’t have a membership there: The video is a part of the “Music Lab” series. This one is from Mr. Clay Mills and relates to “vocal entrances”. That phrase “vocal entrance” relates to the beat on which the vocal phrase begins. Mr. Mills says, rightly so, that most vocal entrances of a lot of commercial songs begin on the “downbeat” or the one beat of the phrase. He criticizes the overuse of this technique because it lessens the interesting aspects of songs, and then he encourages songwriters to use the idea of changing up the vocal entrances within sections (verse, chorus, bridge) by coming in on the 2 beat of the measure, or even 3 or 4 beat of the measure prior to the measure that contains most of the phrase.” Credit: me
From there, I used our recurring “silly song” from awhile ago to attempt an illustration of what he was discussing. The origins of that, the “Bad Timing” song, can be found here if some of this isn’t making a lot of sense (stick with me, drummers!):
At the time we were talking about some music theory and writing chord charts to put music to lyrics and such. Here’s what we came up with back then:
Every “vocal entrance” in this is written to come in on the 1 (the “one”, or downbeat), even though there may be chord changes later in the line or phrase. So, I rearranged the song from the above chord chart to change the timing. Some important notes about that process: In the original, I had started out with a tempo of 90 Beats Per Minute (BPM), a kind of somewhat faster than ballad tempo. Realizing that wasn’t going to work for the song, I crossed it out and went to a 120 BPM tempo as seen above. Important note here - don’t get locked into fitting lyrics into a tempo. Timing is easy (or easier, anyway) to change, and often necessary to adjust, but changing lyrics to fit a tempo should be a last resort, not only because you can change the meaning you were trying to create, but also introduce some unwieldy syllable counts, and that can often make the whole thing messier than it was.
So I played around with the tempo a LOT. I originally started with a fingerpick, and it just didn’t fit the timing at all, though I was stubborn about that for far too long, cuz fingerpicking, yeah! No secret, I prefer fingerpicking to strumming or flatpicking with a pick. For me it fits the Americana/country types of songs I like to write. But, sadly in this case, fingerpicking creates a rhythmic tempo of its own, and doesn’t always fit (sad trombone here…).
After many Very Bad Words were spoken (some loudly even), I relented and just strummed a basic up-down 4 count strum. With a pick. Which, annoyingly, worked just fine, though not without it’s own frustrations:
This entailed some work (left side version in the pic) to come up with something that didn’t lead me to break things (a near thing once or twice…) in the right hand final version. Enjoy, or whatever…
A couple of notes (get it?) on tempo. I often use a metronome or (“click”) to set tempo, and that works middling well. A tip from my guitar instructor helped immensely: use a drum loop from Garageband or Logic Pro to play to, and adjust tempo as necessary so you’re hitting every beat count closely. Easy to change tempos up or down a few beats at a time to zero in on to the beat you need. I also like the visual the loop drummer gives in G-band or Logic - it’s like a little clock that goes around to tempo: Downbeat at 12, 2 at 3 o’clock, 3 beat at 6 , and 4 beat at 9 o’clock and back to the top for the next downbeat. I hear my Android/Windows readers screaming or sighing right about now - I get it, and there’s probably an app that may give you something that works the same, I just don’t know what that is. Help your fellow poors out in the comments if you do (ok, that was a bit snarky, I’ll admit…🤣).
And probably enough for today!
Bonus Round: I just look outside….
What I’m listening to:
Cheers and keep playing!!
Michael Acoustic