I’m trying to wrap my head around playing and improvising a bass line for Country Roads by John Denver. One issue is that the tune is in 4/4, with a sprinkling of 2/4. I assume that this is usually a turnaround and helps with the vocals.
(Apologies for the uneven chord letters, I added them in Paint)
In the verse, you walk down from C to G and effectively have six quarters. Then in the chorus, we don’t, the C chord is played over 4 quarters. Now I know that, I know why I felt rushed anytime the verse ended.
How do you approach this? Do you have a way to memorize that? Something like calling 5/4 time a “hiccup” because it’s 1-2-3-4-hic? I’m curious.
I put this into the theory section because I didn’t find a discussion of mixing time signatures.
Cheers,
Antonio
PS: Oh, and I assume every jam session ever just plays 4/4 all the way…
These things happen relatively often whenever a composer/performer feels a certain part “flows” better when truncating or extending a bar instead of stretching or squeezing it into a 4, 8, 16 or 32 bar grid.
I guess you “just” need to memorize the song form here. It shouldn’t be too hard as the tempo is not very fast to begin with and you don’t really get that “hiccup” feel (I think). Imagine if the score were written in 2/4 all the way through, it would even be less obvious. But, the importance is how the tune feels, and I don’t feel it stuttering or hiccupping.
As an aside: some of the best odd time motifs are so well done, you often don’t really notice they are in an odd time until you start to count it out. Think “Mission Impossible” theme, or “Money”
But, yes, these changing time signatures in a song can be quite baffling sometimes, and it makes you wonder what triggered them. I am convinced it is often that the musician(s) played the lines in a certain way and liked the feel, and later (when they needed to transcribe their own stuff) found out that the whole thing wasn’t quite fitting the old 4/4 all the time. I am looking at something like this right now:
That’s a good way to look at it, exactly why I posted here! I was so lost in getting the chord changes and my counting to line up, I could feel how I was overthinking this.
My plan to simply look at the lyrics & improvise over the chords was foiled by the short bars. I guess learning which ones are short by heart will get me there.
The hiccup idea is a quote by someone, unfortunately I forgot who said it. Not all odd-time signatures must hiccup, hehe.
Yeah. I am sure they typically have a musical phrase in their head and go with it, rather than working through the time signature transitions initially and filling in the notes from there
This is so fascinating. A few weeks ago my sister and i were working on Johnny Cash’s I Walk The Line and the exact same thing happens. Extra bars of 2/4 are sprinkled in. If you start counting 1234 in the intro you will find when Cash sings “I keep a close watch on this heart of mine” it is on count 3, but it feels like beat 1. So it is often interpreted as an extra 2 beats leading into the verse. In this and in the John Denver song it sounds perfectly normal but can throw you off when playing along for sure. I wonder if this is a country thing?
I mean, the song form for Folsom Prison Blues is just 11 bars. Presumably because it would have felt like dead air to play the twelfth bar, and it was going to be on the I chord, too.
I’m currently noticing a lot of things like this. Maybe it’s more of a sign of its times, i.e. songs of that era had it more frequently?
No, most certainly not. It’s really a music thing. But sure, certain genres will probably use it more often than others. As @swiens alluded to, prog rock, prog metal and similar genres have it all the time.
Try to listen to Parallels by Yes (great cover below) - I can provide the bass chart (the time signature changes very often ):
Might just be me and my inherent laziness but I tend to look at those as more of a “feel your way through that part” kind of thing in a similar vein to “swing feel”.
You did a fine job identifying it in your chart.
I would do it differently, but if a chart works for you, then it works.
I played folk/country/bluegrass for a long time and it was much easier for me to write / visualize / conceptualize these things in 2/4 time.
That way you end up with the occasional extra bar, but you’re not trying to navigate different time signatures.
Like @joergkutter said - if you wrote it all in 2/4 the extra pieces would be less obvious…
There are a million examples of these extra bars in millions of popular songs and they’re never obvious because our ears are following the melody, and the melody is going to justify the extra beats or bars.
The Johnny Cash example from @dlamson13 was spot on.
Singers sometimes need a few extra beats to get a phrase in, or they want extra time for a song to breath between lyrics, or all sorts of other things where the music doesn’t fit into a standard-sized number of bars.
As it should be!
