Odd time signatures | Page 4 | Fab Forum | The Beatles Bible

I forget where on the forum, but we did have a discussion of this because I have the scores too, and sometimes it’s easier to cast the time signatures in a certain way to make the notation simpler. Pineapple is probably right but it doesn’t help, I still get confused 😀

Another thing they did was to use different measures to hint at a time signature that isn’t there. For example I’m Only Sleeping cuts measures in half which suggest 2/4 instead of 4/4 but its still 4/4! And ironically I Am The Walrus does a similar thing – ironic because the original base track had an extra measure but John got it wrong when he did the vocal and didn’t want to redo it!

You Know My Name (Look Up The Number) genuinely has a couple of bars of 2/4 separating the initial part with the “cabaret” part, and Within You, Without You bookends the verses with a bar of 2/4. The first verse has a bar of 5/4 within it, and the “choruses” have two separate bars of 5/4, one in the middle, one at the end. And the instrumental part is all 5/4 except for a pause of 8 bars of 4/4 at the end and the score uses a bar of 3/4 to cover that little pause (as George counts in tala) just before the verse starts again. It’s quite an interesting score to read as a Western notation equivalent of an Indian piece, the instrumental is very pretty. The Inner Light is a conventional 4/4, and Love You To only has a 3/4 bar to match the riff at the end of the “choruses”, so Within You, Without You is the most complex of the Indian-based songs.

Joe said

@ewe2, could you please elaborate on I’m Only Sleeping ? I don’t hear it as anything but 4/4, apart from maybe the “float upSTREAM” bits.
Great post BTW. Thanks so much. I’d never before noticed the complexity of Within You Without You .

@Joe if you’ve grown up with the song, you probably don’t even notice this, but I hadn’t so I still do! I think I’ve said elsewhere this is a vamp rhythm in disguise (the same as With A Little Help With My Friends and many others), and you’re right, at the float upstream part, the endings of those verses exploits that rhythm to suggest the 2/4. Now the verses are 9 measures or 2×4 measures plus 1 which is how I hear it up to the “float upstream”. And the choruses are 6 measures including the bass solo. Then you have the second verse where the bass solo doesn’t directly lead into the verse and we have 3 whole measures before the vocal comes in, and that’s why the middle-eight seems to interrupt like 4/4 after 2/4. But the middle-eight itself is like a short verse with a fake pause and the whole thing is 8 measures not 9! Then you have the sole and a shorter recap of the middle-eight of 4 bars, and then the last verse and coda.

There are pauses either explicit or suggested by rhythm all the way through which would take too long to number, but you get the idea. That just builds on the sense you have that the measures are uneven. @Beatlebug is also correct that the bass exploits that rhythm too, accenting those pauses and the triplet solos. And particularly the end of the song where the bass literally plays a triplet and the backwards guitar comes in and the whole song seems to fall asleep again, it’s a great effect.

Note: what I call “vamp rhythm” is a 4/4 rhythm with the accents on each beat and a 2/4 accent in between. Vamp is usually a term for a few bars of repeatable pattern and vamp rhythm is very self-contained! Think Your Mother Should Know or Fixing A Hole etc etc, the Beatles did heaps of them.

Matt Busby said
Too add something on-topic, the concept one or more instruments starting a half-beat (or more but < 1 measure) before the primary rhythm is not a Beatles innovation in music (and I don’t even think they brought it to modern music). I can’t think of any examples ottomh but I’m sure Woody Guthrie, or some 50’s pop writer, uses it. It occurs in classical music, so if I’m wrong about modern music at least they (or George M) surely brought it from classical.

It seems to be at least eighteenth century with the gavotte or earlier, and that the gavotte uses it is telling: it means that beginning with an intro is probably an old feature of popular/folk music, older than classical music itself. It’s interesting how many different classical forms are based on folk dance rhythms anyway, that’s a rich vein of sociology right there 😀 There’s a fascinating if expensive book called “Beating Time and Measuring Music in the Early Modern Era” (ISBN 9780199367283 if you’re interested) about all this which seems to also show that the very concept of meter and time signatures was confused right up to the eighteenth century itself when our sense of time itself became what we take for granted today. I like what I see from the Google Books snippet, I might get the ebook which is considerably cheaper than a hard copy from England

npad21 said
Would the changes in The Continuing Story Of Bungalow Bill be considered time signature or tempo changes? That’s always perplexed me.
 

Noone answered this one, so I will. The answer is they do both! The verses are definitely slowed down from the choruses, and the choruses have a bar of 2/4 just after the what did you kill, Bungalow Bill? part in the middle, but have a normal bar of 4/4 to lead into the verses. When the choruses are repeated at the end, they are separated by a bar of 2/4.

Another example of 2/4 being thrown in on the same album is Cry Baby Cry . This time, the intro chorus has a bar of 2/4 into the first verse, but the verses all end with a bar of 2/4 into the chorus instead, and the choruses end normally in 4/4 into the next verse. And again, Lennon uses bars of 2/4 to repeat the refrain at the end, so you can see both songs are actually closely related rhythmically and structurally to each other. In fact I hadn’t noticed that until I compared the scores just now. A final thing about Cry Baby Cry : Lennon does a wonderful thing at the end by resolving the chord but not the melody, ending the song on a half-note (so it rings for an extra note), so it sounds incomplete but actually is.

And just for laughs, John throws in a bar of 2/4 in the first verse of I’m So Tired like a pause.