Time Signature Quotes

The simplest beats, on what rock music or any music has been formed on, can be the toughest beats to execute and perform, because it's really easy to not respect a simple 4/4 beat, because people always want to play fast.

A beat is a moment in the life a groove.

Rhythm is the pulse of music.

My experience with playing in odd time signatures was progressive rock and learning King Crimson songs as a kid coming up and maybe learning Pink Floyd, 'Money,' that kind of thing.

We've done very different Yes albums - 11 bars, 13. I think we had something that had 17/4 in it. It's just like anything - the more you do it, the more you have to do it.

In music, four is the number that every measure is - four by four, four beats to every measure. The number four is a sense of completion, almost.

I guess I've become very accustomed to playing in the 7/4, which is something we've done quite a lot.

And if you are playing in several meters at once, there has to be a - not a rigid - but there definitely has to be a reference to a common pulse in the band.

Take '39 Steps'. When I finished writing it, I counted the number of measures in the composition. I always do this because I am interested in the length of a song. So I counted this one a couple of times because 39 is an unusual number of measures for a song.

I had a drummer in my band who started teaching me tricks to come up with interesting rhythms. Because I don't come from a musical background, I've never studied music, and I don't know music theory at all, so a lot of stuff I discover on my own are things students would learn in the first grade of music.

My role in AC/DC is to keep time and to drive the band as much as I can. That's a drummer's role anyway.

Most drummers are covered with a million drums, and everyone is like, 'What are you doing back there?'

You listen to a Metallica song, and you listen to the drums, and they're not necessarily swinging, but the arrangements are different. Why is that? Because it's more in tune with jazz arrangements. It's very different. It's not a traditional rock and roll production, in terms of the drums.

I don't think I make dance music. It's not even 4/4. And it's slow.

Western ears have a hard time hearing anything that isn't in four-four time. A lot of cultures experience music in five-eight, for example, five-four.

As with any art, you create it [drumming] out of something that isn't there. It's very architectural. It's the architecture of whatever piece of music I'm playing. I think the whole idea of drumming is to allow other people around you to more easily express themselves.

I put a metronome up to all the songs, and I tried to really keep it true to the original tempos.

The most necessary, most difficult and principal thing in music, that is time.

'Whiplash' was always the song I hated the most because it's a song designed to screw with drummers.

I needed another basis for musical structure. This I found in sound's duration parameter, sound's only parameter which is present even when no sound is intended.

Cage always wanted to know what my structure was, if I had one. I often did have some sense of the time structure. Then he'd make a different one for the music.

The mathematics of rhythm are universal. They don't belong to any particular culture.

From my music training, I knew that, some Spanish rhythms apart, 5/4 is a time signature used only in the modern era. Holst's Mars from the Planets is 5/4. But if you speak lines of poetry in that pattern you just end up hitting the off-beats. It's only when you add a rest - a sixth beat - that it sounds as it surely should sound.

I can conduct and play musical instruments, but dancers' counting is different - they only go to eight beats, which doesn't relate to a bar.

It is much the best way... to lay the emphasis on the first part of the bar in triple time, and on the first and third parts of the bar in common time.