Odd time signatures | Page 7 | Fab Forum | The Beatles Bible

think for myself said

But… why would you do that? the strong beat is the first one of every group of three 1-2-3, 1-2-3…

Even they count 1-2-3 before start playing

The answer is, well, complicated.   

It boils down to the function of 6/8 in music.   For example, why do composers use 6/8 and not 3/4?   Aren’t they exactly the same?

No, they’re not.

3/4 is ‘waltz time’… think OOM-pah-pah, OOM-pah-pah… ONE-two-three, ONE-two-three.   Each beat has the duration of a quarter-note, as indicated by the /4.   And, as there are three quarter-notes to each bar, the time signature is 3/4.

6/8, on the other hand, is really 2/4 with a faster feeling.   Consider a slow 2/4 beat:  ONE – TWO, ONE – TWO.   Again, each beat has the duration of the quarter-note.   Now, break the ONE into equal thirds, and do the same to the TWO.   You’ve now got ONE-two-three, TWO-two-three, which is 6/8.   But do you see that the 2/4 is still “inside” the 6/8?   

See how 6/8 feels much faster than 2/4?   That’s because the basic meter has just been cut into thirds:  from quarter-notes to eighth-triplet-notes.

If you’re confused, here’s a helpful analogy.   Consider a clock face, with an hour-hand and seconds-hand.   In the space of one hour, the hour-hand goes round once, but the seconds-hand goes round 60 times.    Why?   Because the seconds-hand is counting smaller quantities of time, and therefore moves faster than the hour-hand.

So it is with 6/8:  it’s counting smaller quantities of time (i.e. eighth-triplet-notes), so it feels faster than 2/4 (which is counting quarter-notes). 

Now, let’s bring all this back to ‘Dig A Pony ‘, before one of us has a cerebral haemorrhage… 

I propose that the song’s time signatures, from a musicologist’s perspective, actually run as follows:

INTRO:  3/8 x 8 bars.   (A fast OOM-pah-pah.)

VERSE:  4/4 x 1 bar.   2/4 x 1 bar.  1/4 x 1 bar.   2/4 x 1 bar.   4/4 x 1 bar.

With the beats falling like this:

1           2           3          4              1            2                          1                                         1         2            1                                       2                  3              4

I – a-hi hi  a-hi hi              dig a  po-ony     Well you can celebrate anything you want       yes,  you can celebrate any-thing you want.       Oh now.

When considered this way, the switch from the eighth-note-based meter in the Intro to the quarter-note-based meter in the Verse has the effect of slowing the feel right down, while maintaining the same tempo.  (Of course, the */4 bars have a triplet feel, which maintains the rhythmic relationship with the Intro.)

Obviously The Beatles weren’t thinking about this nonsense when writing/performing the song… they weren’t musicologists.   Which, in a sense, is a pity, because if Ringo, as the laying-down-the-beat dude in the band, had thought this way, he would’ve struck his bass drum, not snare, on the eighth beat of every verse (“want”/”go”/”are”/”no”/”see”/”row”), which better fits the ‘Bass Drum on 1 and 3 / Snare on 2 and 4’ pattern.   

(Incidentally, he makes this same ‘error’ in ‘Happiness Is A Warm Gun ‘, in the “I need a fix” section.   “Down to the bits” should start with a bass drum note, not snare.)

Told you it was complicated…

Explaining how ‘Yer Blues ‘ and ‘I Me Mine ‘ (two songs that share ‘Dig A Pony ‘s triplet feel) speed up/slow down through time-signature changes is even more complicated! They go from 4/4 to 4/8 then back to 4/4… while retaining the triplet feel the whole time!