Alright, we've already learned about how to find the beat in a piece of music. Now we're going to
look at how to organize those beats within the piece of music
and the word that we use for that organization is
meter.
You may have heard that word used in
English class. When we talk about poetry, we talk about the meter of poetry.
It's a
pattern of strong and weak beats. So when you learned to read poetry when
you were a child and you went
la-la-la-la-la-etc
you had created your own little metric pattern
of whatever you were reading.
So we use the same sort of system to organize the beats in music.
So we're going to start with the two basic structures and that is putting beats in
groups of two,
putting beats in groups of three. Everything else can be made up as
a combination of those two things. So let's start with
beats in groups of two. This is most of the music that you will hear.
Our bodies are in two's. We have two arms, two legs, two eyes, two ears
so
that's some of our natural metric pattern.
So, first we're going to learn how to conduct. So you're going to be a conductor for a minute.
This is useful as you're listening to the music cause it gives you a way to
really
physically respond to the music and see what you're talking about in terms
of the meter.
So we're going to pretend we're conductors here and we have our little
batons and
I'll use this handy stick here, so this is my the baton today.
So, when we talk about the beat and the meter,
we're looking for the strong beat in the pattern first
and gravity is strong so down is always the first beat so we would have down
for the first beat of a duple meter, and then back up
So down, up,
down, up,
down, up.
This is something you can do even if you're sitting in a concert and you're trying to figure out
the meter of a piece of music,
you can do this fairly surreptitiously under your lap there.
You don't have to go big and let everybody know what you're doing.
You can just, sort of,
tap it to yourself. So let's listen to a piece of music now that's in
this meter of two, which we call duple
meter; d-u-p-l-e; duple.
So, duple meter,
patterns of two, so the thing to listen for first is
where's the strong beat, so it's going to be strong, weak, strong, weak,
strong weak.
We're going to let you get started, and then I'm going to join in and show you where you should
be and you can make sure that you match.
(plays Good Feeling by Flo Rida)
OK I'm going to jump in... (plays Good Feeling by Flo Rida)
You may even feel this. (plays Good Feeling by Flo Rida)
(plays Good Feeling by Flo Rida)
Chances are if you were going that fast
by the time you got done, your arm would have fallen off as a conductor so
it's okay if you heard it that way because you were still hearing patterns of two
and that's not...
that's not a bad thing.
But what we have to sort of feel is where's the really big beats of that so
(fast tapping on hand) it's not a big beat. Dum-dum-dum-dum, that's more in tune with your body's
natural rhythms.
If your heart were going as fast as what we conducted - that double time version
of it, you would have been a
candidate for the ambulance I think so think about where the big beats are even
if it's got a lot of stuff going on. So, hopefully, you were able to do that pretty easily.
Now let's look at the other pattern and that is
well we call triple
meter. Groups of three. Three beats. So, again, we're looking for the strong beat, down
but now we've got two other beats to fit in between so it's going to be down,
out, and up
down, out, up,
so one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three.
And you're not going to hear nearly as much of that in the music you listen to on a day-to-day
basis.
But you will hear it. There are plenty of songs out there that have that particular
pattern.
We're actually going to use one here that is from the country music genre.
So, figure it out! (Could I have this Dance? - Anne Murray)
one-two-three-one-two-three (Could I have this Dance? - Anne Murray)
one-two-three-one-two-three-etc (Could I have this Dance? - Anne Murray)
OK, you see that
has a very different kind of feel.
If you imagine walking to that
the foot that's on the strong beat is always going to alternate
because you got one strong foot then two weeks and then the strong is going to be
back this way.
So if you try moving around to it while you're trying to figure out how
to determine where the meters are, that might be a way that you can
really solidify that for yourself physically.
So, conducting it
walking it, cause if it's going back and forth then you know it's in two. If you're
going back and forth but the strong beat keeps changing feet
then you can
figure that it's in three.
Let's try one more
and ... (music playing)
Okay, surely you got that one as being in two, right. You got the duple meter in that.
It's a march, a march is always going to be in duple meter because we've got two feet, got to
go back and forth.
Let's try another one
Find the strong beat first
(music playing)
Okay,
that's a good example of triple meter.
It has a
very typical pattern that you can listen for
om pah pah, om pah pah, om pah pah
You hear that kind of pattern
you'll know you're in triple meter.
A lot of my students sometimes think that
uh... just because they got a long and then two shorts that that makes it triple
meter, like one, two, three,
as in
doo doo cha,
the beginning of "We will Rock You" by Queen
doo doo cha,
they count one, two, three
one, two, three, but it's really one, two, one, two
short, short, long, short, short, long is the same as long, long, long, long, so be sure
you're not confusing
those subdivisions of things
with the beat itself. Go for the big thing that's consistent all the time. I'ts
not going to go doo, doo, dum, doo, doo, dum.
Let's get to a tricky one now see how you do it this one.
(music playing)
(music playing) Okay, you think you've got it figured out?
Let's see how it goes I'm going to conduct it. You see if you got the same
answer.
(music playing)
(music playing) one, two, three, one two
(music playing) one, two, three, or one, two, three, four, five
(music playing) one, two, three, one, two, three, four, five.
So we can see that this example, which is Jethro Tull, which is not recent popular
music but is popular music from the seventies.
It's taking
the
the two basic patterns we have: duple, triple.
Putting them together
they got five pattern which gives you this sort of sense of being kind off
balance because we don't walk in fives we don't
function in fives.
You go along very nicely so it's sort of like you've got a little hitch in your giddy-up.
So as you listen to pieces of music even popular music is going to through in those
little zingers where it's neither two nor three.
It might be a combination of them,
could be two plus three plus three to make eight, it could be two plus three plus two
to make seven.
So listen to those things as you listen to music the more you listen, the more you
practice,
the better you will get at finding the meter.