Odd time signatures | Page 6 | Fab Forum | The Beatles Bible

On the Beatles Complete Scores, they’re extremely good at correctly notating the vocal syncopations of the melodies at the note-by-note level, but very wacky on interpreting them as time signatures. It’s like seeing the leaves but missing the forest. For example, Drive My Car is flat out 4/4 – here’s a youtube I made to prove it (see below). Complete Scores has this as having a bar of 9/8. And the problem with the Ringo Starr and the Beatles Beat book is that they rely on Complete Scores so the mistakes (there are many more in terms of notes than in terms of time sigs) get propagated. THAT SAID, I still love the Ringo book because – who cares about the notation anyway – just going song by song and hearing drummers talk about it makes you listen in a different way and it’s a gorgeously formatted book – it’s too bad that they have the notation errors but I’m still pleased with the book.

But back to Complete Scores – they should REALLY do a 2nd revision – so much of it is so right and so much more of it is so laughably wrong. The notes are nuts. Some of it sounds like they listened carefully to the master tapes (this was before all the isolations were available) and transcribed it perfectly; other parts are so wrong that any first year harmony student would laugh them out of the room. If you really want accuracy, the Kanayama youtube karaokes are much more accurate than Complete Scores and Galeazzo Frudua is absolutely, forensically, insanely accurate. He’s the absolute gold standard and studying the Beatles vocal harmonies, I’m convinced, is the secret to getting inside of their minds. For accuracy on guitar, the To a Tee DVDs are great and a youtuber named privettricker is quite good. But anything Frudua does is gospel.