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.

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.

Listen from 5'09" to 5'53".

Polymeter is responsible for many of my favorite morsels. In this example, The section (which you’ll hear twice) is comprised of 24 bars, but the bass and the guitar take different roads to get there. The guitar phrasing takes the traditional road, sounding off in 8 bars of ¾, while the bass does something pretty cool: 2 bars of 7/4, 2 bars of 7/8, and 1 bar of ¾ to fill it all out. I find this to be especially smooth because 3/4 and 7/4 meet at 21 bars (3 bars of 7, or 7 bars of 3), and after doing so, the bass and guitar both need only play 1 bar of ¾ to round things off nicely.

Music Morsels are musical fragments, collected and analyzed.