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This is a neat little trick that you hear from time to time at the beginning of songs. The song starts out in 6/8, with an eighth note pulse implied by the only parts you can hear. However, when the drums come, they imply a different pulse and a new tempo, and that changes your whole rhythmic perception of the song. The drums play out in 4/4, but the original rhythm section continues on at its original speed, which creates a metric modulation. The former pulse of the song (the rhythm of the guitar), now sounds off as sextuplets in relationship to the drums.

Music Morsels are musical fragments, collected and analyzed.

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The intro to this track has some of the most seemingly arbitrary time signature lengths I can think of, but it works to great effect and has a certain charm. There is some rubato but I couldn’t say whether it was intentional or not. If you count 8th notes, starting a new count whenever the chord changes, you get the following sequence: 4, 14, 17, 17, 13. Assuming this section has 4 bars, the first two numbers can be combined, which would then yield the following 4 bar idea: 18/8, 17/8, 17/8, 13/8. When trying to figure out time signatures, I’ve found that it helps to start with an easy signature like 4/4, and then figure out how many extra beats it takes to get to the end of the bars.

Music Morsels are musical fragments, collected and analyzed.

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Listen from 0'07" to 0'33".

In the spirit of the season, let’s take a look at a bit of one of my all-time favorite Christmas songs. We’ll say this section is 8 bars of ¾ time in the key of C, played twice, but with some chord variation in the second half. The first 4 bars use a common three-chord progression, I IV V IV (in this case, C, F, G, F), with a melody made up of 3 consecutive turns with passing tones in between, moving downward. The melody is also harmonized by a second line that sounds up a diatonic third from it. In the key of C, a diatonic third is always the note two white keys to the right of the original note.

The turnaround starts on the root (bar 5), while bars 6-8 are borrowed chords, which add a lot of interesting color to the song. The first time through, these chords move up in minor thirds: C, Eb, Gb, A. The second time through, they start to move up the same way, but the last two chords move up in perfect fourths instead, and you get: C, Eb, Ab, Db. Db Major resolves resolves nicely back to C at the beginning of the section, partially because Db to C is a root motion of only a half-step. More importantly though, in the key of C Major, Db Major is a tritone substitution, meaning it performs the same harmonic function as a more common G chord would in this situation.

Music Morsels are musical fragments, collected and analyzed.