a couple of things about time signitures. it is extremely rare that an entire song is written in 1 time signiture. thats just absurd and incredibly boring. in trance pretty much the only thing that is a constant 4 beats per measure is the kick drum. maybe certain hihats and sometimes the bassline or part of it). very often leads have different time sigs (yep 3/4 is perfectly doable), very often these are syncopated with other parts of the song in different time signitures. why not write a trance song using a string quartet? you could tap out a beat and have a cello playing the bass notes, violins and viola playing the string leads. it may sound more like cheesy classical music than trance but its doable. in the end, trance derrives some of its musical routes from textbook classical music so id say its doable.

you could write a symphony out of woodblocks (maybe not one unless it was an extremely long composite woodblock that many people could strike along varying lengths). since the length, size and composition of different varieties of wood have different tonal properties when struck or resonate differently when sound is passed through them. its like a guitar. its just 6 lengths of wire of varying thickness, shortened by moving your hand up and down a fretboard to produce different harmonics when plucked. you dont need 6 strings either. you can do alot with 5 or 4 strings. 1 string could suffice in some cases but it would have to be long and would be very difficult for one person to play. but the idea is there. there are many many possibilities out of such a simple thing as a length of wire. with a wide variety of woodblocks made from all the trees in the world in varying lengths its quite feisable to make a symphony of woodblocks. there isnt much of a market for songs made entirely out of woodblocks though so not many people try.

i agree that certain types of pop can be depressingly identical and anonymous. but i think this is not due to some arbitrary standardness in music. its to do with laziness and/or lack of imagination. why think about what you could do in your song when you can use readymade rhythyms, ready made leads based on the same scales? ready made harmonies straight out of a theory textbook? pop is very often lazy in my opinion because the music isnt entirely what pop is about. pop is also a brand image. pop is also about a celebrity presence. its like the idols in japan - people who are famous for no other reason than they are famous. they cant sing. they cant act. but they make people happy. in a perculier kind of way.

Last edited by Derivative on Dec-18-2004 at 20:11

ok i don't really know what the point of this discussion is as its gone completely off topic now but hey lets just clarify some things...

quote:

it is extremely rare that an entire song is written in 1 time signiture

I'm sorry mate but that's complete ball hang

you cannot write a trance tune in 3/4 (like i said) with a string quartet. you're just being argumentative.

What you could do is write a waltz in the style of trance. But it would not be trance.

Also i said woodblock. not woodblocks.

And finally, again, i think we have missed the point of the original comment. There is

quote:

arbitrary standardness

in all music of every genre. People learn by immitating everyone else. Beethoven learnt off Bach ect. He then expanded on this and created the good stuff. Has anyone studies Bach's chorals? I have. They're all practically the same. You can write out pages of rules for them, compare them to chorales, and 99% of the time the rules will fit, but of course there are always execptions. In todays world its exactly the same, wanky producer/songwriters write out the same formulaic guff cos they know it'll do well in the charts. I'm not saying its good, I'm just saying it happens. It's not laziness, or lack of imagination, they're just doing what they know will sell. And depressingly it does.

When you hear a superb new tune you've not heard before, why do you like it so much? Because its different.

Again not sure of the point of all this.

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Derivative, I think what you mean is it's rare that an entire song will hold rhythms true to the 4/4 sig. I think all trance tracks are based on 4/4. When you say a lead can have a 3/4 sig, that's not quite accurate. Yes, if you took the lead out of the song and played it, maybe it would have a 3/4 feel to it, but it's still considered 4/4 if it's in the 4/4 beat, like you say.

Ever heard of a (I'm going to spell this really wrong) hemeola? (most common in jazz, when a melodic phrase of usually triplets is repeated over a different time signature). Doesn't mean the track itself is changing sig.

Then again I'm being really picky

quote:

Originally posted by messytechie In todays world its exactly the same, wanky producer/songwriters write out the same formulaic guff cos they know it'll do well in the charts. I'm not saying its good, I'm just saying it happens. It's not laziness, or lack of imagination, they're just doing what they know will sell. And depressingly it does.

I can tell you it's different.
I think it's lazyness:
because now they have the synths with presets, the standards for every genre with it's exeptions.
Not many producers have the knowledge to even write a melody/chord progression that lasts longer than 8/16 beats. They use computers synths as a starting point instead of making the track before even selecting a sound.

And it's also a lack of imagination:
Do you think a producer can tell you how his trance/pop song will sound like when played by a string quartet or a woodwind ensemble.

You could say this is the modern way of composing. But show some respect to the ones who invented al of this. Bach could hear 99% of his chorales in his head. He couldn;'t make as many as he wanted because writing it all down took so much time.
All composers compose original peaces with their sound to it. Producers think: That sounds nice I wnat to mmake something like that. I do know producers sound different, I'm talking about the thoughts behind a track.

And as you said. For everything is an exeption.

im sorry but you are talking out of your arse if you think that most songs have only a single flat time sig. rippassion you misinterpret what i say. in most cases, the entire song, despite consisting of multiple parts with different time sigs all do hold time with the kick drum. the exception would perhaps be swing beats which are in time but are delayed slightly to give things a bit of...hmm...'swing'. if they werent in time it would sound wrong and you would know it.

tap your foot to a kick drum. its a constant beat 4 times per measure. then it loops around again. this at least is the smallest looping interval in dance music. you will notice that you cannot tap your foot to the lead in the same way. unless it hits 4 notes sustained for a 1/4 length note per interval. how many trance songs do you know where this happens? practically none. i know of none at any rate and just doing this in floops is laughable. it sounds ridiculous. also lets not forget that hihats typically are in 1/8ths and 1/16ths underneath the offbeat open hat. sometimes you'll see a 'rolling' bassline that consists of 16 constant notes in 16/16 time - that is 16 notes, all of which are 1/16 of a full note in a single measure - thats pretty fast. it clearly is not in the same time signiture as the kick drum. its exactly 4 times faster. for every single down beat of the kick drum, you play the bass note 4 times in the same interval.

time sigs also depend on the tempo of a song. trance is often allegro or faster. if you were to take that bassline at 1/16th intervals and slow the bpm right down (to say 30 bpm, not sure what its called, never had occassion to write anything this slow) then the time sig would change in relation to how you define the length of a single full note.

you can syncopate certain notes as well so that they resolve in different ways, not just at the start and end of each bar.

please read up about time signitures and how they work in songs before you type posts that rely on knowledge of them. the example you provided about a string quartet playing in 3/4 is just absurd.

Last edited by Derivative on Dec-19-2004 at 12:45

(delayed response, i never saw your post)

No. A time signature by definition is what the whole track follows. In an orchestra or concert band, you will not find sheet music to anything where the time signature is different for different instrument areas of the band. (I can't remember by who), but a famous band arrangement of Greensleeves is called Second Suite in F, and it's a perfect example of what I'm talking about. The time signature throughout the whole thing remains a constant 6/8, but the greensleves lead that the trumpets play comes in over the 6/8 in a 3/4 feel, but it's STILL WRITTEN IN 6/8 on the sheet music.

You can't just tap your foot to a 4/4 beat and notice that the lead has a different feel, and then say that the lead isn't in 4/4. That's not what time signature is.

You can, of course, change the time signature for an entire arrangement at any given time; however, that isn't done in trance a lot. (ever?)

And I never said anything about a string quartet playing in 3/4 , where are you getting that from?

yeah he's right (RIPassion that is)


i think i mentioned the string quartet


this was ages ago anyway.......

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okay, so to keep this alive, and to answer a question of mine....

i see that most scales that were used in the discussion were major/minor scales...however i realized that someone had said aeolian minor scales were typically used. i know there are deviations from it...

oh and also, when i looked at the midi notes for some of system f's song's, i noticed that there were many flattened or sharpened notes.

i guess my question is, what are scales that are usually used? and which ones do i avoid? thanks.. later.

I dont even know chords by name.. never stopped me

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quote:

Originally posted by supraver i guess my question is, what are scales that are usually used? and which ones do i avoid? thanks.. later.

For electronic music, anything goes as long as it's one of the diatonic scales (standard major or minor). Practically speaking, the vast majority of trance tracks are in simple keys: C+/A-, G+/E-, D+/B-, F+/D-. There's no special reason for this really, other than it takes less effort to compose in those keys.

There's no right or wrong key really, but the key you pick determines the character of your track. A lot of the more unique tracks are in unique keys. The only hitch sometimes is the bassline range - generally I try to keep the fundamental below 250 Hz, so I try to arrange the track so that the bassline can play at least 1 full octave of the scale below that. That's not necessarily a requirement, just my take on it.

The rules are much more complicated when writing orchestral scores, but you probably don't want to get into that.

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Don't forget the other modes, esp. Dorian and Phrygian! They can add a lot of flavour to a track, and are still very easy to work with.

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quote:

Originally posted by DigiNut For electronic music, anything goes as long as it's one of the diatonic scales (standard major or minor). Practically speaking, the vast majority of trance tracks are in simple keys: C+/A-, G+/E-, D+/B-, F+/D-. There's no special reason for this really, other than it takes less effort to compose in those keys. There's no right or wrong key really, but the key you pick determines the character of your track. A lot of the more unique tracks are in unique keys. The only hitch sometimes is the bassline range - generally I try to keep the fundamental below 250 Hz, so I try to arrange the track so that the bassline can play at least 1 full octave of the scale below that. That's not necessarily a requirement, just my take on it. The rules are much more complicated when writing orchestral scores, but you probably don't want to get into that.

You bet they are

Chords are interesting things You can experiment a lot with them.

One way to avoid oversized chords is to merely chop off any notes from the bottom of the chord once you get up to four. I do it all the time. It's a habit I got into from playing the organ

Take the C range for example:

Cmaj = C E G
Cmin = C Eb G
Csus2 = C D G
C2 = C D E G (Debussy liked chords like these)
Csus2 = C D G
Caug = C E Ab
Caug7 (also written C7+5) = C E Ab Bb
(I conjecture that Caug6 is rare, it sounds better with an A bass note as the A minor major seventh chord)
C6 = C E G A (which is also Amin7 - the sixth chord of any major will be the seventh of its corresponding minor)
Csus7
C7 = C E G Bb
Cmaj7 = C E G B
Cdim = C Eb Gb (aka F#)
Cdim7 = C Eb Gb A (which for the record is also Adim7, Gbdim7 and Ebdim7)

Now pay attention here... this is where the shortening process begins.

C9 = D E G Bb
C11 = D F G Bb (effectively, a Gmin7) (C E G Bb D F is the full chord)
C13 = D E A Bb
C15 (I think) = D F A Bb (the full chord would be this big honkin mess C E G Bb D F A C#)

A full C9add13 is missing an F from a full C13 chord, but it isn't added in the organ chord because it sounds like crap in one big smooshed-in conglomerate like that. Hell, if you got a chord to go high enough, it'd cover all your basic 12 tones... hard on the fingers and the ears...

Plus you can mess around with combinations

Csus4add2 = C D F G (also a Gsus7)
Csus4-2 = I LOVE this chord. It's a little dissonant, but not quite cacophonous, if used properly... C C# F G
Csus7-5 = C F F# Bb
Csus7+5 = C F Ab Bb
C7-5 C E F# Bb
C7+5 see above

The list goes on... as long as they're used correctly, they'll sound fine.

A C15-C13, C13-9 combo can sound quite beautiful, actually

I think 11th chords were the most complicated I ever used in trance, though. I may have pulled out a suspended fourth with added flattened second, or two, as well.

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