There is a thread going on right now about the Beatles using a click track. Of course it has morphed into an anti/pro click thing, but there's also been a little secondary sidetrack specifically about "Here Comes the Sun" which has some mixed meter and syncopation the some believe to be mixed meter but isn't.
I mention this because it had inspired the September Sticky.
It is a source of much annoyance to me that a good portion of musicians do not know hot to count music. They don't understand divisions, syncopation, or relationships to different sections of the same piece of music.
To again use "Here Comes the Sun" the turnaround of the song stays in 4/4 but has a syncopated rhythm where instead of accents right on the beat every other eight note the accents fall every third eight note for one and a half measures. Then in the bridge there are bars of 11/8 and 7/8, as I would interpret them, though other might think of them in other ways. I'm working completely aurally here so that how I hear them. Mr. Harrison would be the best person to ask the question of what is correct but that's not going to happen anytime soon. Indeed some of the key people in the production are still with us, but I'm pretty sure none of them is hanging out at the TOMB. In the thread mentioned, a poster referenced a book that calls the bar of 7/8 as I hear it as two bars of 2/4 followed by a bar of 3/8 and that also works mathematically. The poster implied that a metronome would not be able to be used because of this change in time signatures. Here was my reaction to that:
So I guess the discussion here is, do you know how to count and interpret music, and can you explain it to musicians who don't know if the need arises?Drumsound wrote: I was referring to the turnaround syncopation. So I went and listened to the record and figured out the bridge. I would interpret it a little differently than the music you have, but yes the time signature does change.
Now here is the rub. It would still be quite easy and useful to use a metronome. When there are shifts from 4/4 to X/8 unless otherwise noted the eight note will remain constant. Thus the metronome can instead of clicking quarter notes, it can/should click eight notes. So during 4/4 sections the metronome would be clicking 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and, but during (for instance) 7/8 the clicks would be 1 2 3 4 5 6 7. So in "Here Comes the Sun" using your sheet music example the metronome would be going at a constant eighth note click and counted 1 and 2 and 1 and 2 and 1 2 3. Does this make sense? I'd be happy to delve further.
**(Short diatribe here---Time signatures are NOT fractions but two numbers referencing two different things, but when typing there is no way to effectively stack them as a time signature should be expressed. In hand written correspondence I would never put the slash!)**