@@vicentehamel its not accurate at all ... Pulse is time and time is relative.. note groupings relate space to time... You can count anything in anything, if you speed up or slow down by the precise amount. Your impulse to count fours is trained, really your brain just knows 1 beat of the pulse at a time.
@@dooshnukem32 I was replying to the other reply... People are by and large taking it a face value, Adam himself is kind of implying this un-ironically
Exactly! Yes, a 7:11 polyrythym is a bit silly, but if that's what makes sense to use, then I don't see the holdup. Hell, David Bruce wrote a 4 movement string ensemble piece using The Lick entirely seriously, and it doesn't sound like a joke, it's genuinely really good
Perhaps it wasn't a snarky attack, but rather a plea: don't fight me on this.... or I know I'll lose. The person "simply" forgot that small magic word: please ;)
In my view, there are four real ways to look at the time signature of any tune: 1) how the person writing it was feeling it 2) how the audience feels it 3) how it’s easiest to put in sheet music for a new performer 4) writing it weirdly for fun (you can write anything in 3/11 if you try hard enough) Aside from #4, none of them are wrong, just different use cases
All of them are wrong except maybe 3. Time signature and meter are two different things, and the time signature is specifically a *notational* element. The time signature is how it is written, not how it feels. For example, the Passacaglia from Peter Grimes by Benjamin Britten is in a *meter* of 11, as the repeating bassline is 11 beats long, but the *time signature* is 4/4 as that's what it's notated in, with each repetition (each variation) being 2¾ bars long.
"write" language (any kind) is a representational tool, isn't "the thing itself". You can be very nerdy and get into hermeneutics (interpretation of language) isues and so on, but there is no such thing as an "incorrect" way of representing something in a language (you can claim more or less adequate ways, but music is not writing itself).
@@wilh3lmmusic I feel like this misses the point in that there is no " *the* time signature" of any given piece; anything can be independently written by anyone using a different time signature for one of the four purposes. Your example sounds like a case of the writer doing number 4); the time signature of 4/4 basically having no relation to how the writer, audience, or performer would feel it. It sounds like if someone else rewrote the music using a time signature with a numerator of 11, they would likely achieve 1), 2), and/or 3) and as the comment suggested, this would have been much more useful. I'd say just because the idea of meter and time signature can be two different things, doesn't mean it's somehow less correct to not choose a time signature with a clear relationship to the meter.
@@M0odezNah, there are many good reasons to write something with a pattern of 11 beats in 4/4. Especially if it's for an orchestra, because 11/4 becomes almost impossible to conduct (try to come up with 11 different ways to swing your arm). And you don't have to say "on the 9th beat of this bar..." which would have musicians searching in their score for a long time. It's also easier to keep track of where you are. And experienced classical musicians don't really need to see the 11/4 time signature to know how to phrase the melody.
@@pepijnstreng4643 That's a great point; I suppose that's another reason quite similar to number 3) and another good example of purpose behind a time signature choice. I still think it stands that if someone chooses to rewrite in 11 to communicate the feeling, that's not more or less correct than choosing 4/4 for the orchestra setting. It could be logical for a solo arrangement of an orchestral piece that was originally written in 4/4 for the reasons you suggested.
''I have a feeling that 3 is like crabs, it is the evolutionarily most optimal way to groove to hyper-tuplets'' Yeah, okay maybe my friends are right. I'm too deep in this music nerd shit.
Both those are just primed for massive missunderstanding as well - the crab thing is about similar crustaceans, not about "all animals" as some people took it. Same here, I'm sure some people will soon shout "Adam Neely said every rhythm is 3/4 so there!"
Adam, 5 or 6 years ago your channel inspired me more than anything else to chase music professionally. I met someone years later that pushed me to really challenge myself. I'm making a living in entertainment now. You've never been just a meme guy to me. You've been a genuinely inspiring person. Hope to catch y'all in Atlanta next go 'round. Thank you, for more than you can ever know.
@@soundninja99 You are in for a -treat-. They ROCK ASS live. (Seriously. If Adam calls out that they are about to play a song called "Anthem" START RECORDING.
SEE HIM LIVE!!!! Sungazer's live take on "Drunk" is amazing! Crowder takes his drumset on a *walk*, and tells the story of a night spent with too much to drink in a way that is more expressive then anything i've ever heard a drum kit do before.
There's a video somewhere on YT of him explaining his techniques and he's all "I can play individual beat patterns with each hand. No biggie." as if anybody can do it. Dude's brilliant.
It's been 6 years since I offhandedly said "Everything is in 4/4 if you don't count it like a nerd." to you in Thomann's kitchen. I'm glad it's still funny, and that Sungazer is so awesome.
I actually wrote a tune called Periapsis, but it was based on a comet reaching it's Perihelion and max velocity around the sun. I wanted to write an album including "Aphelion" or "Apoapsis" for the whole orbit, but I only wrote two tunes :(
That's just how I hear music; time signatures don't matter to me, even with someone literally counting out the measures I just don't hear it as being anything significant, especially when they start getting into "off beat" stuff. Then you have some people trying to argue that 1/1 physically can't exist. To me I only ever hear it as one note of various lengths pitch and volume.
@@GAHAHAHHhonestly this is a mix and mastering engineers way of perceiving music and is probably closest to how you get a waveform To sound good, make that one sound, sound good lol
imagine walking up to Adam god damned Neely and telling him you know more about music than him, let alone music that he composed. can i have some of that confidence?
@@mrharvest you can question anything or anyone. A guy who makes RUclips videos is just a guy. Why should his ideas be so holy? This is what limits all thinking in general.
@@latheofheaven1017 it's just easier for most people to wait for a the metaphors others have brought forward than forge their own conclusions. In this particular case, I would argue neither is right, there is a fundamental misconception about time and space Adam and the redditors have. They are both adding complexity for ... reasons. If your curious about that, go read my other comment on this video. The point is you shouldn't just take others at face value if your perception leads you to more questions. Asserting what you believe is often the first step to finding a more objective truth.
Its so cool you brought this up because as a drummer my favorite thing to do is come up with a synth loop and add delay to it so it creates a bunch of weird accents and then drum into different feelings within the loop. Its an absolute BLAST just feeling the strangest rhythms and pushing and pulling out of the framework of the loop. Just dropping and picking up the rythms. Making all the accidents seem as intentional as possible. Its amazing ❤❤❤
Part IV made me realize that Adam Neely literally starts with the music memes, and then they become *refined* ideas backed by musical pedagogy and cool songs.
20:19 "Um actually" moment incoming! It is totally possible to write this passage without the whole 7:11 polyrhythm thing. It's a bit odd at first glance, but what you can do is change the meter to 7/16, and then use the metric modulation of "whole rest = whole rest". This would imply that the length of the measure is the same, but now it's subdivided differently. You could also use "Whole note = Whole note".
Yeah that's what I was thinking too. It's the same thing, but without unnecessarily barfing a 7:11 above every measure, and actually kinda comprehensible if we still care about that
I came down here looking for this comment, it's exactly what I thought of, and it's not exactly rare either, it happens all the time when composers switch from 6/8 to 2/4
I could imagine that the 3/4 crab phenomenon comes from the idea that, if it is not 4/4, it must be 3/4 because that's the next most well known time signature.
I’m glad you’re addressing music cognition. So many people get lost in the weeds of complicated seeming ideas that just don’t sound interesting. As a composer, I almost always start with the desire to create a new cognitive effect and work backwards from there to develop compositional techniques to achieve it. Most people seem to go the other way around.
We had a drumline warmup in highschool like the martian mambo called "7/8" it basically moved around the 2-2-3 pattern each phrase so 2-2-3, 2-3-2, 3-2-2 etc. We had a variation where all drums played the pattern in the same order, but we had a "big-split" version where the snares, quads, and bases would start at a different phrase. Like playing "in a round"
Holy smokes, I work at Scientific American, some of my colleagues are gunna think it's cool that you used that screengrab of the "Why Do Animals Keep Evolving into Crabs" article!
Yep, it's interesting how quickly the drum reactors all catch on to the Bleed drumcam, "Oh yeah, he's doing hertas on the kicks, snare hits on the one."
I remember discovering a Frank Zappa piece called “13” where at the beginning he explains how to count the 13 in subdivisions of 1-2 1-2-3 1-2-3-4 (the last section counted half as fast) and it blew my mind and i’ve used that method to help discern weirder time signatures over the years. Great video Adam!
Writing something in 11/16 instead of writing out the subdivisions in 4/4 seems like a logical continuation of writing 12/8 instead of 4/4 with a lot of triplets.
Two things come to mind: 1. Charlie Chaplin's observation: "We think too much and feel too little." 2. Iain McGilchrist's hypothesis that we have created a culture that wires us to lean heavily into the hyper-analytical, decontextualized, rigid, and categorization-obsessed brain hemisphere.
Each string / synth oscillator / drum head / monophonic instrument is only producing one note at a time; on an instrument built for twelve-tone equal temperament, that's eleven notes they aren't playing even when they're playing continuously, which is to say nothing of octaves and microtones.
I love what the journal piece said about the connection created by the challenge; it's sort of an optimistic take on something that rides the fine line of meme-ification, and I think you drive the argument home with your perspective on "quoting" the phrase. Nicely done and thanks for the tuplet knowledge drop!
i'm not particularly fond of that sort of music and find it baffling how trap, which does fall into that category has become so popular. bass to fall asleep to with nervous hihats on top.
Maybe it's because of the thing he talked about where music depends on how fast you can move your lower body to it? But if you aren't moving your lower body, it's a different experience? 🤔
On the crab statement, grouping into sub beats of 3 will always work in this “smoothing out” method because every number is either a multiple of 3 or 1 away from a multiple of three. The higher the number gets, the smaller the difference will be when smoothed out to 3/4 (100 will be 33, 34, and 33, and their ratios would likely be unnoticeable at every possible tempo).
I'm thinking of what you're saying in terms of how a leap day "smooths out" our 365 day calendar. I don't know if that's a close analogy or not though lol.
Tuplet Chill. I have always thought it is a more descriptive name for this music. No matter how many notes are played it stills has a pulse of chill. Always good to see Adam.
Dude, come to Bulgaria next. There are people here that would absolutely eat your music up. Also, I have the feeling that even people who don't like traditional folk music (such as myself) still have a respect and a sort of natural understanding of it. Meaning that counting in 7,9,11 or 13 comes really naturally to many of us. I know I definitely would be trying to headbang to your music if you decide to come here.
I'm Bosnian and I feel the same way about our traditional music, though I never learned to dance the kolo so I am kind of a bit of a failure lol I bet people better at it than me could dance kolo to their stuff 🤣
@@phelanii4444 Yeah, it makes sense that basically any person from the Balkans would feel a similar way. I believe Balkan music in general has a similar vibe with slight variation between smaller regions. After all it doesn't matter where something originated from when there's so much cross-pollination in this region and everything influenced and continues to influence everything else.
I don't know how you've managed to be *both* a meme figure and a genuinely respectable musician, but you've absolutely achieved that and it's super respectable :)
The band Consider The Source has been playing traditional Balkan tunes with Metal instruments for 20 years. They make some great compositions based on the concepts as well! Great video and great music.
Thanks for the suggestion. I've gone to "just check them out", clicked on the first video result "Consider The Source Live at Relix Studio" and got immediately sucked in. I just finished listening to the full 1 hour and 40 minutes concert with my eyes closed. Damn!
4/4 in 4k! Amazing metaphor. Kinda reminds me a little of Aphex Twin. Some of his most twisted break beats are in 4. Doesn't seem like it because the 1 is elusive but once you find it, it's as plain as day. Very cool lesson today Adam
Big Aphex Twin fan but I don't think I know anything of his that isn't obviously 4/4. He uses a lot of syncopation, sure, but if you have any examples where it's not so obvious I'd love to know.
@@lewijiyeah me neither, *but* i think i get it as in, very detailed, (4k), rhythms in 4/4. also, drill n bass. fast, quick notes, but its "bob"abble (?) :P
"You're all music majors so how can you be so wrong about this?" Dude if you find yourself saying this, the answer is that you have failed to understand something critical, not that all the experts are all Wrong.
Adam, just to say, this is an incredible video. Inspirational, and making these complex concepts so clear. Both you and Sungazer are doing so much for music, thanks man.
The thing with sheet music existed all the way back in classical music too: most Ländler-walzes are compositionally in 12/8 (or 4/4 for non-nerds) but due to some quirks of history they end up being notated in 3/4 where a bar takes the place of what would normally be a single beat.
Music theory on this channel melts my brain, and its clear Adam and his band have mad skills, but I found it hard to groove to any this at all. Something about it makes my brain "itch" and it's somehow unsettling. Anyone else? Bueller?
I'm with you. I enjoy learning from Adam's videos, but I kinda perceive Sungazer's music like the auditory equivalent of ghost peppers -- too spicy to enjoy unadulterated. It needs some heavy cream to coat the tongue, metaphorically speaking.
I can vibe to it but I’m also a jazz guy so I’m used to the spice, so to speak. I can understand it being too rhythmically confusing if you’re used to mostly 4/4, or other common odd time signatures like 3/4 and even 7/4.
@@DeltaEntropy It's not so much that it's confusing, it just doesn't elicit an emotional response beyond an abstract appreciation for the obvious skill required to produce it. I hear it, but I don't feel it.
@@DeltaEntropyit's not that it's rhythmically confusing, it's that the subdivisions are too fast and too fine to be practically rhythm at all. Like he said in the video, the subdivisions tighter than 100ms cease to have any real rhythmic meaning. I'm not confused, I know exactly what's happening. What's happening is rhythmic ambiguity. Free time over 4/4.
I'm not sure you get it in this genre of music, but I've played some "modern classical" where it's notated in 6/4, but it really feels like it's in 3/4, and I really don't at all understand why they chose to write it in 6 instead - it just makes multi-bar rests hard to count (unless you just give up and count twice as many bars in 3)
I've always been a fan of making odds sound natural and work around 4/4 overall. Your work has been inspirational for sure. I usually try not to extend the same measure the whole song.
Oh man, I've been listening to black metal for years and one of my favorite things about it is how tremolo picking can suddenly make me feel relaxed, calm, ethereal. A million notes a minute, but the pulse is still slow.
I also think of the Knower song, "It's All Nothing Until It's Everything" It's a very simple 4/4 rhythm, but it consists of a constant triplet beat for the first 3 and 2/3rds beats of each measure. So many people mistook it for being a complex meter. It's such a simple beat, but the legato triplets are really effective
What you're talking about at 19:14 (shifting between different n-tuplets while keeping a constant pulse) is found in "Restless Boy" by Pain of Salvation. The end is basically a massive 4/4 groove alternating between quintuplets and septuplets. Really cool effect in my opinion
7:39 That’s what I love so much about Perihelion though. It has become my standard relaxation music because I can totally zone in to it and really feel it. Not good for long car rides though.
You can literally project 4/4 on the unit circle and do full fourier analysis with the tuplets. I worked this out for my self in the last couple years: You can dynamically split any base 4 type and use arithmetics and intuition to work out complex patterrns, where you switch the 1 between both hands, depending whether you come from on- or off-beat, while you try to switch inbetween everytime you do a chord change or other higher order structures like shuffles.
The paradox of hypertuplets killing the momentum of a set is similar to something you get with extreme high-speed dance genres like splittercore. Sure, it’s supposed to be 1000+ bpm, but it just ends up feeling like a constant wall of 16th or 32nd note kicks. For my personal tastes, 250 bpm is roughly the maximum speed for constant 4/4 kicks before they all sound like subdivisions no matter the context.
As someone who has listened to a lot of speedcore and other fast music, i notice that a lot of well-made speedcore sounds fast because it still is fast. Despite the BPM being an unreasonable 880, there are a lot of musical cues that direct the listener towards a still-quite-fast 220 BPM. A song like Camellia's "Hello (BPM) 2021" still sounds lively and energetic because the other elements of the song reduce it to a more palatable tempo (just barely) of around 250. Other songs at such high tempos might not reinforce the human-scale tempo as well, resulting in what sounds like tempoless noise. On the other hand, this can actually work to the benefit of the song. One of my favorite extratone songs, "Singularity at 2.64e+6 BPM" by Kobaryo doesn't provide as many clues to reduce its massive BPM of 2,640,000, but instead uses the hyperspeed kick drums to create an incredibly high-pitched melody above a tranquil backing that doesnt sound like it has even a triple digit BPM, much less a SEVEN-digit one.
This was a really cool video to watch, both because 1) I am a music theory nerd and I enjoy the memes but also always wonder how it can be put into music that makes people feel things and 2) because I grooved to Against the Fall of Night in three and came into the video really curious about that very thing. Awesome presentation, love the new single
Earlier today I was listening to someone talking about non-Western music attuned people hear Western music as marching music, all stiff and 4/4 and thud thud thud thud. Then I see this video. It's a sign! Time to revisit the lovely 7/4 piece I accidentally came up with a while ago!
"Everything is in 4/4 if you stop counting like a nerd" will forever be my favourite musical joke.
It is pretty accurate tho
@@vicentehamel its not accurate at all ... Pulse is time and time is relative.. note groupings relate space to time... You can count anything in anything, if you speed up or slow down by the precise amount. Your impulse to count fours is trained, really your brain just knows 1 beat of the pulse at a time.
you are counting it like a nerd@@aibrainlet8041
@@aibrainlet8041please refer to the latter half of OP's statement 🤓
@@dooshnukem32 I was replying to the other reply... People are by and large taking it a face value, Adam himself is kind of implying this un-ironically
Shawn is the best value in drumming; no one plays more hits per beat.
legal eagle!!!
I did not expect to see a legal eagle comment on this channel
The crossover I didn't know I needed.
Would you say more hits per beat is the equivalent of higher value? 🤔
@@jj8703get off his Beak
It’s in 3. Please don’t fight me on this
Okay
It's in 4.
Comedy comes in 4s
@@gabevreyesno, comedy comes in Pi.
@@gabevreyes Nope. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_three_(writing)
I deeply need people to understand that serious and silly are not enemies
Like how visual experimental "high art" is actually quite close to stuff like RUclips Poop.
Just recommend Randall Munroe's "What If?"
Exactly! Yes, a 7:11 polyrythym is a bit silly, but if that's what makes sense to use, then I don't see the holdup. Hell, David Bruce wrote a 4 movement string ensemble piece using The Lick entirely seriously, and it doesn't sound like a joke, it's genuinely really good
Silliness is serious business.
Frank Zappa has entered the chat
"Don't fight me on this" at the guys that made the god damn song is insane lmao
Reminds me of that time someone tweeted at Paul McCartney to tell him "Blackbird" was NOT the political song he claimed it to be
"we literally made the song, it is in 4/4"
"NUH-UH >:("
Perhaps it wasn't a snarky attack, but rather a plea: don't fight me on this.... or I know I'll lose. The person "simply" forgot that small magic word: please ;)
"Don't press me on this Sadeas"
Hey man the author is just as much a participant in the work as the reader authorial intentions don't matter Death of the Author etc.
That beat at ten minutes is like when you're really tired and have a red bull. It doesn't really wake you up, you're just turbo tired now.
Crowder is an *amazingly* expressive drummer. That is *exactly* what that sounds like.
Love (hate) when I'm jsut tired faster
"It's the microplastics of time signatures" so you're telling me 4/4 is stored in the balls?
The pocket, if you will.
I dunno... It sure is a simpler rhythm than CBAT!
Whatever moves the lower body
@@CloudObsolete Got it in the bag.
4/4 is stored in the balls and 3/4 is the crab of music. Amazing. Enlightening even.
In my view, there are four real ways to look at the time signature of any tune:
1) how the person writing it was feeling it
2) how the audience feels it
3) how it’s easiest to put in sheet music for a new performer
4) writing it weirdly for fun (you can write anything in 3/11 if you try hard enough)
Aside from #4, none of them are wrong, just different use cases
All of them are wrong except maybe 3. Time signature and meter are two different things, and the time signature is specifically a *notational* element. The time signature is how it is written, not how it feels. For example, the Passacaglia from Peter Grimes by Benjamin Britten is in a *meter* of 11, as the repeating bassline is 11 beats long, but the *time signature* is 4/4 as that's what it's notated in, with each repetition (each variation) being 2¾ bars long.
"write" language (any kind) is a representational tool, isn't "the thing itself". You can be very nerdy and get into hermeneutics (interpretation of language) isues and so on, but there is no such thing as an "incorrect" way of representing something in a language (you can claim more or less adequate ways, but music is not writing itself).
@@wilh3lmmusic I feel like this misses the point in that there is no " *the* time signature" of any given piece; anything can be independently written by anyone using a different time signature for one of the four purposes. Your example sounds like a case of the writer doing number 4); the time signature of 4/4 basically having no relation to how the writer, audience, or performer would feel it. It sounds like if someone else rewrote the music using a time signature with a numerator of 11, they would likely achieve 1), 2), and/or 3) and as the comment suggested, this would have been much more useful. I'd say just because the idea of meter and time signature can be two different things, doesn't mean it's somehow less correct to not choose a time signature with a clear relationship to the meter.
@@M0odezNah, there are many good reasons to write something with a pattern of 11 beats in 4/4. Especially if it's for an orchestra, because 11/4 becomes almost impossible to conduct (try to come up with 11 different ways to swing your arm). And you don't have to say "on the 9th beat of this bar..." which would have musicians searching in their score for a long time. It's also easier to keep track of where you are. And experienced classical musicians don't really need to see the 11/4 time signature to know how to phrase the melody.
@@pepijnstreng4643 That's a great point; I suppose that's another reason quite similar to number 3) and another good example of purpose behind a time signature choice. I still think it stands that if someone chooses to rewrite in 11 to communicate the feeling, that's not more or less correct than choosing 4/4 for the orchestra setting. It could be logical for a solo arrangement of an orchestral piece that was originally written in 4/4 for the reasons you suggested.
''I have a feeling that 3 is like crabs, it is the evolutionarily most optimal way to groove to hyper-tuplets''
Yeah, okay maybe my friends are right. I'm too deep in this music nerd shit.
Nah, yer friends ain't deep enough.
"3 is like crabs. Makes you wonder why you're always itchy". That's where I initially thought Adam was going with the crab talk. Oh well.
Both those are just primed for massive missunderstanding as well - the crab thing is about similar crustaceans, not about "all animals" as some people took it. Same here, I'm sure some people will soon shout "Adam Neely said every rhythm is 3/4 so there!"
They're just not cool enough to understand
Or perhaps they’re just fans of 3 bean salad podcast
Adam, 5 or 6 years ago your channel inspired me more than anything else to chase music professionally. I met someone years later that pushed me to really challenge myself. I'm making a living in entertainment now. You've never been just a meme guy to me. You've been a genuinely inspiring person. Hope to catch y'all in Atlanta next go 'round. Thank you, for more than you can ever know.
that 7/11 challenge was the sleeping agent to start liking sungazer years later 😂❤
It's like a gateway drug. Now years later i'm heading to a sungazer concert in a few months
@@soundninja99 You are in for a -treat-. They ROCK ASS live. (Seriously. If Adam calls out that they are about to play a song called "Anthem" START RECORDING.
@@soundninja99
Your drummer is a friggin beast, dude. What a sense of time and feel.
SEE HIM LIVE!!!! Sungazer's live take on "Drunk" is amazing! Crowder takes his drumset on a *walk*, and tells the story of a night spent with too much to drink in a way that is more expressive then anything i've ever heard a drum kit do before.
@@LordChaosWing that sounds amazing
There's a video somewhere on YT of him explaining his techniques and he's all "I can play individual beat patterns with each hand. No biggie." as if anybody can do it. Dude's brilliant.
It's been 6 years since I offhandedly said "Everything is in 4/4 if you don't count it like a nerd." to you in Thomann's kitchen. I'm glad it's still funny, and that Sungazer is so awesome.
Legend
Dude, like EVERYONE quotes that all the time, that's crazy
Maybe one day that quote will end up in an academic paper like the 7/11 trend did.
Mkay
3:16 "the micro plastics of time signatures" is one of my favorite euphemisms for something that is so inescapably ubiquitous as 4/4
I'm gonna write a song called Aphelion, based on the groundbreaking conception of a 4/4 time signature, with four evenly divided beats each bar.
I actually wrote a tune called Periapsis, but it was based on a comet reaching it's Perihelion and max velocity around the sun. I wanted to write an album including "Aphelion" or "Apoapsis" for the whole orbit, but I only wrote two tunes :(
I'm writing Syzygy, it's in 1/1 with 1 neatly undivided whole note per bar.
Lol.
All music is in 1/1.
It's just that the BPM can differ wildly, and it's easier to remember things in groups of 3 or 4.
Took the words out of my mouth
Not *all* music has a tactus.
That's just how I hear music; time signatures don't matter to me, even with someone literally counting out the measures I just don't hear it as being anything significant, especially when they start getting into "off beat" stuff. Then you have some people trying to argue that 1/1 physically can't exist. To me I only ever hear it as one note of various lengths pitch and volume.
@@GAHAHAHHhonestly this is a mix and mastering engineers way of perceiving music and is probably closest to how you get a waveform
To sound good, make that one sound, sound good lol
imagine walking up to Adam god damned Neely and telling him you know more about music than him, let alone music that he composed. can i have some of that confidence?
It's free
"The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure, while the intelligent are full of doubt." Bertrand Russell
@@mrharvest you can question anything or anyone. A guy who makes RUclips videos is just a guy. Why should his ideas be so holy? This is what limits all thinking in general.
Being so confident in your wrongness is probably not a great idea.
@@latheofheaven1017 it's just easier for most people to wait for a the metaphors others have brought forward than forge their own conclusions.
In this particular case, I would argue neither is right, there is a fundamental misconception about time and space Adam and the redditors have. They are both adding complexity for ... reasons. If your curious about that, go read my other comment on this video. The point is you shouldn't just take others at face value if your perception leads you to more questions. Asserting what you believe is often the first step to finding a more objective truth.
Its so cool you brought this up because as a drummer my favorite thing to do is come up with a synth loop and add delay to it so it creates a bunch of weird accents and then drum into different feelings within the loop. Its an absolute BLAST just feeling the strangest rhythms and pushing and pulling out of the framework of the loop. Just dropping and picking up the rythms. Making all the accidents seem as intentional as possible. Its amazing ❤❤❤
Part IV made me realize that Adam Neely literally starts with the music memes, and then they become *refined* ideas backed by musical pedagogy and cool songs.
feels like a metaphor for how the channel has evolved since 2018
Partially sarcastically, totally sincerely:how did you think it worked?
Repetition legitimizes
20:19
"Um actually" moment incoming!
It is totally possible to write this passage without the whole 7:11 polyrhythm thing. It's a bit odd at first glance, but what you can do is change the meter to 7/16, and then use the metric modulation of "whole rest = whole rest". This would imply that the length of the measure is the same, but now it's subdivided differently. You could also use "Whole note = Whole note".
Yeah that's what I was thinking too. It's the same thing, but without unnecessarily barfing a 7:11 above every measure, and actually kinda comprehensible if we still care about that
I came down here looking for this comment, it's exactly what I thought of, and it's not exactly rare either, it happens all the time when composers switch from 6/8 to 2/4
Why is nobody talking about the amazing LEGO sets Adam owns
it's all on Adam Neely Lego channel, didn't you know really?
@@shateq Nice opportunity for a RickRoll®
@@tiltil9442 Even your coment fool me for a nano second, imagine if it had a link...
LOLZ
It's a LEGO Creator Modular Building set, #10255, Assembly Square, from 2017. Just for the record.
I could imagine that the 3/4 crab phenomenon comes from the idea that, if it is not 4/4, it must be 3/4 because that's the next most well known time signature.
New sungazer means new adam neely video breaking it down
🕺
I’m glad you’re addressing music cognition. So many people get lost in the weeds of complicated seeming ideas that just don’t sound interesting. As a composer, I almost always start with the desire to create a new cognitive effect and work backwards from there to develop compositional techniques to achieve it. Most people seem to go the other way around.
We had a drumline warmup in highschool like the martian mambo called "7/8" it basically moved around the 2-2-3 pattern each phrase so 2-2-3, 2-3-2, 3-2-2 etc. We had a variation where all drums played the pattern in the same order, but we had a "big-split" version where the snares, quads, and bases would start at a different phrase. Like playing "in a round"
Yup, we did that one too. Lol the first part, I mean. I will tap that out still today, when I'm trying to concentrate on something.
The Martian Mambo is *directly* referenced in this vid.
@@LordChaosWing I know, that’s why I mentioned it
@@GAJake Aaaaah. Apologies. I misread your post.
@@LordChaosWing its ok, sometimes many people comment before watching a video
0:55 ... civilians?
Ah yes, the civil folk
Yes 🙂
You heard him. 😂
The jazz troops at it again
What he means is "muggles"
Always has been
Was looking for this
Yooo salut cest Côme 😂
Holy smokes, I work at Scientific American, some of my colleagues are gunna think it's cool that you used that screengrab of the "Why Do Animals Keep Evolving into Crabs" article!
That's basically Meshuggah as a band, isn't it. 4/4 underneath it all
Gotta have a steady pulse or it's tough to actually lock in and groove with.
The stuff that isn't pseudo random anyways (I, Parts of Catch 33)
Yep, they play around with it a lot so it's hard to tell sometimes, but it all has a base of 4
They use polymeter a lot. Check out Yogev Gabay for some good analysis of the rhythm in their songs.
Yep, it's interesting how quickly the drum reactors all catch on to the Bleed drumcam, "Oh yeah, he's doing hertas on the kicks, snare hits on the one."
Came for for the geeky theory memes, stayed for Sungazer.
I’ve listen to Perihelion A LOT over the last few years. Hyped for the new album!
I remember discovering a Frank Zappa piece called “13” where at the beginning he explains how to count the 13 in subdivisions of 1-2 1-2-3 1-2-3-4 (the last section counted half as fast) and it blew my mind and i’ve used that method to help discern weirder time signatures over the years. Great video Adam!
Link?
@@LordChaosWing ruclips.net/video/w7AZjx9sz7k/видео.html
Zappa was for real
a genius!
The fact that Gentle Giant's "So Sincere" is in straight 4/4 is one of the most amazing facts of all modern music...
Writing something in 11/16 instead of writing out the subdivisions in 4/4 seems like a logical continuation of writing 12/8 instead of 4/4 with a lot of triplets.
Two things come to mind:
1. Charlie Chaplin's observation: "We think too much and feel too little."
2. Iain McGilchrist's hypothesis that we have created a culture that wires us to lean heavily into the hyper-analytical, decontextualized, rigid, and categorization-obsessed brain hemisphere.
You might be overthinking this.
@@wheatthicksyou might be underthinking this.
@@bazzfromthebackground3696 return to the background
If you follow the adage "listen to the notes they are not playing," Sungazer is silence.
Each string / synth oscillator / drum head / monophonic instrument is only producing one note at a time; on an instrument built for twelve-tone equal temperament, that's eleven notes they aren't playing even when they're playing continuously, which is to say nothing of octaves and microtones.
pending lawsuit from John Cage...
@@gorak9000 😆
I love what the journal piece said about the connection created by the challenge; it's sort of an optimistic take on something that rides the fine line of meme-ification, and I think you drive the argument home with your perspective on "quoting" the phrase. Nicely done and thanks for the tuplet knowledge drop!
Honestly, whatever the struggles in the club, I always find "simultaneously slow and fast" super fun when I'm sitting at home listening.
It's tough to dance to but it's great in video games
i'm not particularly fond of that sort of music and find it baffling how trap, which does fall into that category has become so popular. bass to fall asleep to with nervous hihats on top.
Maybe it's because of the thing he talked about where music depends on how fast you can move your lower body to it? But if you aren't moving your lower body, it's a different experience? 🤔
If you're old, Blue Rondo a la Turk, Kathy's Waltz, The Eleven, and Estimated Prophet covers it all.
On the crab statement, grouping into sub beats of 3 will always work in this “smoothing out” method because every number is either a multiple of 3 or 1 away from a multiple of three. The higher the number gets, the smaller the difference will be when smoothed out to 3/4 (100 will be 33, 34, and 33, and their ratios would likely be unnoticeable at every possible tempo).
I'm thinking of what you're saying in terms of how a leap day "smooths out" our 365 day calendar. I don't know if that's a close analogy or not though lol.
Tuplet Chill. I have always thought it is a more descriptive name for this music. No matter how many notes are played it stills has a pulse of chill. Always good to see Adam.
When you want to fight someone on a topic, but they break out "don't fight me on this."
What am I supposed to do with this counterpoint now!!
i went to look for their comment and they deleted it 😂
The transition at 9:39 is genius. Great video, this is some of your best work!
sungazer: but we wrote the song.
social media: wrong!!
Adam Neely content drops are officially an event now
Dude, come to Bulgaria next. There are people here that would absolutely eat your music up.
Also, I have the feeling that even people who don't like traditional folk music (such as myself) still have a respect and a sort of natural understanding of it. Meaning that counting in 7,9,11 or 13 comes really naturally to many of us.
I know I definitely would be trying to headbang to your music if you decide to come here.
I'm Bosnian and I feel the same way about our traditional music, though I never learned to dance the kolo so I am kind of a bit of a failure lol I bet people better at it than me could dance kolo to their stuff 🤣
@@phelanii4444 Yeah, it makes sense that basically any person from the Balkans would feel a similar way. I believe Balkan music in general has a similar vibe with slight variation between smaller regions.
After all it doesn't matter where something originated from when there's so much cross-pollination in this region and everything influenced and continues to influence everything else.
I immediately thought about Balkan music.
I don't know how you've managed to be *both* a meme figure and a genuinely respectable musician, but you've absolutely achieved that and it's super respectable :)
The band Consider The Source has been playing traditional Balkan tunes with Metal instruments for 20 years. They make some great compositions based on the concepts as well! Great video and great music.
I've got a CTS neck tattoo. Listened to them for over 15 years
pretty dope thanks for the tip!
Thanks for the suggestion. I've gone to "just check them out", clicked on the first video result "Consider The Source Live at Relix Studio" and got immediately sucked in. I just finished listening to the full 1 hour and 40 minutes concert with my eyes closed. Damn!
@@letrhysdance5926 I've never met you but I have Facebook stalked the hell out of you. You're the real deal. Thanks for saying hey! You rock!
The Belgrade concert was one of a kind, for sure! Thank you so much, I've never felt that much like one both with the music and with the crowd
4/4 in 4k! Amazing metaphor. Kinda reminds me a little of Aphex Twin. Some of his most twisted break beats are in 4. Doesn't seem like it because the 1 is elusive but once you find it, it's as plain as day. Very cool lesson today Adam
Can you give some examples?
Big Aphex Twin fan but I don't think I know anything of his that isn't obviously 4/4. He uses a lot of syncopation, sure, but if you have any examples where it's not so obvious I'd love to know.
@@lewijiyeah me neither, *but* i think i get it as in, very detailed, (4k), rhythms in 4/4. also, drill n bass. fast, quick notes, but its "bob"abble (?) :P
"You're all music majors so how can you be so wrong about this?" Dude if you find yourself saying this, the answer is that you have failed to understand something critical, not that all the experts are all Wrong.
When the world needed him most.
“BASS!!”
“REPETITION LEGITIMIZES X3”
Welcome back Adam Neely.
its in A/A because you got A note, and then you got A nother note
1/1: Allow me to introduce myself
time signatures aren't real
This rocks. I’m so happy to hear about musicians exploring this stuff!! I listen to “Bird on the wing” weekly! Nice stuff man.
9:21 well repetition legitimizes
Literally was about to say the same thing but saw your comment already posted at the top of the comments section 😂
Adam, just to say, this is an incredible video. Inspirational, and making these complex concepts so clear. Both you and Sungazer are doing so much for music, thanks man.
Omg Adam Neely just dropped a new video
Loved getting to see you talk about this and demonstrate it live when you guys toured with Jakub and Plini!
Been watching you for years and while I'm a failed musical theater kid, I'm now a LEGO adult. So...yeah, I liked seeing the bricks & minifigs. :)
Bro, Adam, I HAVE SOOOO MUCH RESPECT FOR YOU! Dont worry - you are one of the best for me tho🙏🏼
I liked the image with 2 cops more than the image with 3 cops because it has less cops in it
? That's a mechanic, a security guard, and Some Guy tm
The thing with sheet music existed all the way back in classical music too: most Ländler-walzes are compositionally in 12/8 (or 4/4 for non-nerds) but due to some quirks of history they end up being notated in 3/4 where a bar takes the place of what would normally be a single beat.
What does it mean to be "compositionally" in a time signature though?
At the 11:17 section I was literally thinking, "wait that's like Martian mambo" and then he said it and I felt so smart
Music theory on this channel melts my brain, and its clear Adam and his band have mad skills, but I found it hard to groove to any this at all. Something about it makes my brain "itch" and it's somehow unsettling. Anyone else? Bueller?
I'm with you. I enjoy learning from Adam's videos, but I kinda perceive Sungazer's music like the auditory equivalent of ghost peppers -- too spicy to enjoy unadulterated. It needs some heavy cream to coat the tongue, metaphorically speaking.
I can vibe to it but I’m also a jazz guy so I’m used to the spice, so to speak.
I can understand it being too rhythmically confusing if you’re used to mostly 4/4, or other common odd time signatures like 3/4 and even 7/4.
Yeah, but the itch is nice! It's unfamiliar and surprising!
@@DeltaEntropy It's not so much that it's confusing, it just doesn't elicit an emotional response beyond an abstract appreciation for the obvious skill required to produce it. I hear it, but I don't feel it.
@@DeltaEntropyit's not that it's rhythmically confusing, it's that the subdivisions are too fast and too fine to be practically rhythm at all. Like he said in the video, the subdivisions tighter than 100ms cease to have any real rhythmic meaning.
I'm not confused, I know exactly what's happening. What's happening is rhythmic ambiguity. Free time over 4/4.
everything evolving to 3/4 was interesting to me because the older I get the more I find 3/4 or any meter felt in 3s to feel better than meters of 4
I'm not sure you get it in this genre of music, but I've played some "modern classical" where it's notated in 6/4, but it really feels like it's in 3/4, and I really don't at all understand why they chose to write it in 6 instead - it just makes multi-bar rests hard to count (unless you just give up and count twice as many bars in 3)
I've always been a fan of making odds sound natural and work around 4/4 overall. Your work has been inspirational for sure. I usually try not to extend the same measure the whole song.
4:09 Meshuggah without distortion be like
Spent yesterday learning this one for the tour. Its so awesome. Cant wait to play it live!
If it helps you in any way with the self-respect: That 7:11 breakdown is justified simply for the fact that it absolutely slaps.
Oh man, I've been listening to black metal for years and one of my favorite things about it is how tremolo picking can suddenly make me feel relaxed, calm, ethereal. A million notes a minute, but the pulse is still slow.
Finally someone else who gets it! Atmospheric black metal and post-black metal are my go-to chillout music.
68 missed calls from Tigran Hamasyan
This breaks down some of those rhythms I find so uber attractive really well. Thanks! I feel excited to explore them more.
15-tuplets at 60bpm be like shooting speed into one arm and horse tranquilizer into the other one. 🤣🤣
Every thing is in 4, just get comfortable moving your one around. Love this video!!! Thanks!
New Adam Neely WE EATING GOOD
I'm so glad that you talk about Balkan music. I adore the prevalence of 7/8 and 9/8 rhythmd especially
"I'm like a wide 4/4" is going to do gangbusters on my dating profile.
I also think of the Knower song, "It's All Nothing Until It's Everything"
It's a very simple 4/4 rhythm, but it consists of a constant triplet beat for the first 3 and 2/3rds beats of each measure. So many people mistook it for being a complex meter. It's such a simple beat, but the legato triplets are really effective
As a Maths teacher and musician I love that you mentioned subitising!
Hearing that the 7:11 video was in 2019 made me realize how long I’ve been watching Adam Neely, dang!
What you're talking about at 19:14 (shifting between different n-tuplets while keeping a constant pulse) is found in "Restless Boy" by Pain of Salvation. The end is basically a massive 4/4 groove alternating between quintuplets and septuplets. Really cool effect in my opinion
Shifting between 7- and 11-tuplets... *yawns in drum corps*
Shifting between 7- and 11-tuplets... *yawns in drum corps*
At 16:22 that song I was groovin in a slooow 5/4 , and he’s like “it’s obviously in 3 “…… I love this !
“Jared Yi takes a massive…
saxophone solo”
7:39 That’s what I love so much about Perihelion though. It has become my standard relaxation music because I can totally zone in to it and really feel it. Not good for long car rides though.
Santa Clara Vanguard mentioned!
You can literally project 4/4 on the unit circle and do full fourier analysis with the tuplets. I worked this out for my self in the last couple years: You can dynamically split any base 4 type and use arithmetics and intuition to work out complex patterrns, where you switch the 1 between both hands, depending whether you come from on- or off-beat, while you try to switch inbetween everytime you do a chord change or other higher order structures like shuffles.
But in fact, you could extend this for every n/n beat. You might want to ask me what modulo arithmetics for other characteristics are as well.
The paradox of hypertuplets killing the momentum of a set is similar to something you get with extreme high-speed dance genres like splittercore. Sure, it’s supposed to be 1000+ bpm, but it just ends up feeling like a constant wall of 16th or 32nd note kicks. For my personal tastes, 250 bpm is roughly the maximum speed for constant 4/4 kicks before they all sound like subdivisions no matter the context.
That’s exactly what the music psychology research suggests! 240-250bpm is roughly the fastest embodied pulse.
As someone who has listened to a lot of speedcore and other fast music, i notice that a lot of well-made speedcore sounds fast because it still is fast. Despite the BPM being an unreasonable 880, there are a lot of musical cues that direct the listener towards a still-quite-fast 220 BPM. A song like Camellia's "Hello (BPM) 2021" still sounds lively and energetic because the other elements of the song reduce it to a more palatable tempo (just barely) of around 250. Other songs at such high tempos might not reinforce the human-scale tempo as well, resulting in what sounds like tempoless noise. On the other hand, this can actually work to the benefit of the song. One of my favorite extratone songs, "Singularity at 2.64e+6 BPM" by Kobaryo doesn't provide as many clues to reduce its massive BPM of 2,640,000, but instead uses the hyperspeed kick drums to create an incredibly high-pitched melody above a tranquil backing that doesnt sound like it has even a triple digit BPM, much less a SEVEN-digit one.
Awesome video as always Adam! So happy to see how your channel and how Sungazer has grown over the years. Hoping someday you play a gig in Denver!
The rule of odds is the reason why 6 piece nuggets should always include an extra 7th nugget!
Every other one should have 5
Adam, I can't count it, but I'm always glad to learn about it. Love your content. The 7-11 challenge is meta!
oh hey im in the adam neely video in 21:23
This was a really cool video to watch, both because 1) I am a music theory nerd and I enjoy the memes but also always wonder how it can be put into music that makes people feel things and 2) because I grooved to Against the Fall of Night in three and came into the video really curious about that very thing. Awesome presentation, love the new single
Earlier today I was listening to someone talking about non-Western music attuned people hear Western music as marching music, all stiff and 4/4 and thud thud thud thud. Then I see this video. It's a sign! Time to revisit the lovely 7/4 piece I accidentally came up with a while ago!
thanks for this upload, it reminded me how good of a drummer Shawn actually is
I'm a simple man: I see an Adam Neely video, I click it.
Facts😂
Click repeatedly in hyper-tuplets no less
I *love* Balkan music! You can talk about it any time you want, Adam! (and yes, I can do the dances, too!)
"all music is in 4/4" has the same energy of "verything is a dildo if youre brave enough"
I instantly guessed the 13 lego bricks, I feel insane
Wait its all 4/4???
Adam Neely: Always has been...
Adam, don't worry. You are a great musician AND the music theory meme guy! Consider yourself a polyrhythm polymath