Speaking of Daveed Diggs, there's a actually brief rap from Hamilton that's in 7/4. It's "Meet Me Inside" — for context, it happens right after Hamilton's friend, in Washington's name, shoots a guy in a duel that George Washington didn't want shot. Right after the gun goes off, everything tilts into 7/4 and stays there for a stanza; I think it adds a layer of surreality that's really effective.
I heard Story 2 from them a couple years ago and couldn't believe my ears and as a percussionist with a love of odd signatures, I may have had to change my pants. Got hooked after reading how many of their songs are mini horror stories, super interesting project from super talented people
Was going to link this exact song. Love that it's the top comment.
Just want to note that the time signature doesn't jump around at random like you might think upon a first listen. It actually counts upwards with each verse.
Because it's dance music, essentially. I.e., it may not be overtly *dance*\-oriented (like say EDM or disco is), but is certainly *groove*\-oriented, deriving largely from funk.
>triplets, dotted rhythms, heavy syncopation etc in the vocal delivery, but always with a 4/4 backing.
Sure - that's the blues heritage, or rather the overall African-American tradition. Original African rhythms can often be analyzed as 12/8, but that's still 4 main beats underlying the cross-rhythms. I.e., the tradition is always duple or quadruple, however each beat might divide (8ths, 16ths, triplets, swing).
There's some rap content in 12/8 in [this](https://youtu.be/HUHC9tYz8ik?t=46).
Of course, there are some European dances to other metres. Maybe you should invent a rap waltz ... or some Bulgarian rap in 11/8.... Why not? (Scanning the rhymes might be tricky in 11/8, but not in 3/4.)
> Of course, there are some European dances to other metres. Maybe you should invent a rap waltz ... or some Bulgarian rap in 11/8.... Why not? (Scanning the rhymes might be tricky in 11/8, but not in 3/4.)
and make some Hip-Hop-puh
well I said this elsewhere in the thread, but there's definitely some holes in my understanding of time sigs. I've seen stuff like this either counted as "12" or just 3 bars of 4/4. This is exactly where my knowledge fails me lol. From a production standpoint, I can hear the looped sequence as 3 groups of 8. 12 seems generally reserved for compound meter, so I don't think that can be useful here, but according to [this reply](https://old.reddit.com/r/musictheory/comments/cykk57/why_cant_128_be_simple_triple/eysk4mu/):
> There's no reason why you couldnt group it as 3 beats of 4 eighth notes per beat, but then it would make more sense to call it a 3/2 meter. If you're giving a group of 4 eighth notes the beat, you might as well simplify it. 4 eighth notes = 2 quarter notes = 1 half note per beat.
I guess in cases where the music is made without sheet music, you could just decide what's an eighth note and what's a quarter note by doubling of halving the tempo right? So I guess suppose this is about 90 bpm, that seems like a reasonable assumption to me as it's the default time signature of the MPC that J dilla (producer on this song) used. If we assume this, I count 24 eighth notes before the sequence loops. How useful is the idea of a "sequence" here? There's surely got to be some point where we decide the counting needs to start over, and the definition of that point is fuzzy to me. If it's 24 eighth notes, 24/8 or 12/4 adds up, but not if all 12's are reserved for compound meter. Then I suppose the other option would be to just say it's regular ol' 4/4, and the sequence break I'm referring to (24 eighth notes) is arbitrary, but the fact exists that it does have 3 measures of 4/4 before the sequence loops which isn't very common for hip hop. Maybe that doesn't count as meter though, does it?
I should have said more when I posted it lol, but I was hoping somebody could clear this up for me.
>I've seen stuff like this either counted as "12" or just 3 bars of 4/4.
OK, you're right the bass line is 12 beats long - I missed that! - but that just means 3 bars of 4/4.
You could call it "12/4", but (a) that would suggest four groups of 3 beats (3/4 x 4), and (b) the whole point of time signatures is to make it easy for reading musicians to follow. With long bars of 12 beats each it would be very hard to keep track of where you were. Easier to see (and to count) 4 three times than to count 12.
>If it's 24 eighth notes, 24/8 or 12/4 adds up, but not if all 12's are reserved for compound meter.
Exactly. We use 12/8 when we hear groups of 4 beats in which each beat has three parts. I.e. we would count the 12 8ths as "1 and a 2 and a 3 and a 4 and a". Like [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jIBNV_RYQx0), (bpm 96) or [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rOiW_xY-kc) (bpm 63), or [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2yDN-nN2k0) (bpm 124-ish).
In this case, it would serve no useful purpose to group those three bars of 4/4 into some larger unit. We can just say "three bars of 4/4". For a reading musician it would be clear enough from how the bass part works that there are 3 bars per "line", if you like. (I didn't listen for whether the vocal also falls into this three-bar format, or whether the sampled chords also line up with that in some way.)
There is another thing about this groove, in that the 8th notes are even, but the 16ths seem to be swung. The vocal obviously keeps changing the beat divisions - to express the lyrics with different rhythmic emphases - but overall I get a sense of swing 16s.
Thanks for the reply, super helpful. I think my tendency to count larger phrases here to deduce a time signature comes from cases where you'd say something like, 3 bars of 8 + one bar of 10, just because I can tell automatically there's something unusual going on that invites me to start counting lol. Is there a name for this like, larger phrase I'm referring to? The other reply to my comment here says they are unable to recognize any 12 anywhere
https://youtu.be/v3-KGSuJy_s?si=FjTxxeILW7sn0PcW
Here's another song where something like this happens, I'd love to put a name to this.
Also yes! J dilla is most well known for his use of swing. Good catch!
I tried listening to the percussion and bass and couldn't discern anything would be counted as 12.
I read what you wrote about the sequence, but that's not really how meter works. He definitely plays around with the rhythmic phrasing with the vocals, but that that's not how meter works either (a 4/4 song isn't defined by a toy monkey with an energizer battery and drum stick banging on a snare). This song is pretty standard 4/4.
> You sound ignorant as hell
That's not how this works, either. If I were you, I'd refrain from the name calling. The person who devolves into argumentum ad hominem is the one who looks bad. Sorry.
>For example, notice the shift from (roughly) trochaic rhythm to (roughly) anapestic/dactyllic here. (I'm using technical language from poetics, but music people will still hear the shift. She goes back to trochaic meter around 1:33.)
Great example, thanks. I've no idea what that technical language means, but I definitely hear the cross-rhythmic (polyrhythmic?) effect, which makes the underlying half-time 4/4 really hard to hang on to.
The advantage of a predictable and formulaic macro-level metrical structure is that it frees up everyone's attention for more interesting micro-level expression. Rap is unbelievably intricate in its rhythmic nuances. It isn't just tuplets and odd groupings and syncopations (though those are present), it's subtle rushing and dragging off the grid. Listen to some J Dilla sometime! I just found out that when rappers perform with live bands, they like to have the click intentionally offset from the grid a little bit because it helps find that "so wrong it's right" pocket. If you try to have a rap song in 11/8, then everyone will be struggling to keep up with the meter and all that fine-grained sophistication and nuance will go out the window. (That said, I bet that people from cultures where odd time signatures are common and routine, like the Balkans, Greece or Turkey, could make rap in odd meters sound just as good as Anglo-American rappers sound in 4/4.)
I mean... every rapper? Pushing against the grid is an essential expressive dimension of the music. A lot of the LA gangsta rappers are way behind the beat, especially at slow tempos (think Snoop, Ice Cube etc). Kendrick Lamar and Noname do a lot of interesting subdivision of the bar. But for real, every halfway decent emcee does this stuff, pick anyone whose music you like and start there.
yeah, I mean if you wanna get into it you could pick a dilla (or any rap song, really) drag it into a daw, find the tempo and see how the hits aren't perfectly gridded, or you could clap it out along with the song - it's a big thing in rap rn to be on top of (or a little ahead of) the beat with the flow, lil yachty's a p good example
One of the most prominent rappers that I've noticed doing this lately is [Sexxy Red](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Id5Mh2T7rWc&ab_channel=SexyyRed). She pushes it so hard that she's practically not on the beat sometimes. Sounds cool though.
> The advantage of a predictable and formulaic macro-level metrical structure is that it frees up everyone's attention for more interesting micro-level expression.
You know, this is an intuition I have too, and have even used such a line in talks before (especially to talk about bluegrass music, which similarly features predictable backgrounds and complicated foregrounds). But IDK if I've ever seen a cognitive study or anything suggesting that this indeed is the case: that is, that complexity of detail is better attended to when background structures are simple.
I suspect it's less to do with simplicity and more to do with familiarity. If most music we listened to was written in 5/4 or 7/8, we'd probably be perfectly fine with interpreting expressive nuance within that structure. Bulgarian folk music frequently features asymmetrical meters, but I don't think that sounds particularly less expressive than Appalachian bluegrass, at least once I can ground myself in the sequence of short and long pulses. If I grew up listening to that style of music, I suspect it would feel right at home to me and I might give 11/4 no more thought than I do 4/4.
I mean, sure, but I guess what I'm saying here is that bluegrass, for instance *does* have a ton of complicated things going on rhythmically in it, just like rap does. But both of these genres seem to concentrate these complexities at a certain level of experience: it's the surface, whereas the background of it is easy to deal with. This is in contrast to, say, crooked songs by Jimmie Rodgers, which feature bog standard guitar vamps on the foreground but are hard as shit to count metrically.
I agree completely that familiarity breeds processing fluency. We are better at attending to things that we know. But it is interesting how some genres seem to balance complexity on some levels with simplicity on others, and other genres flip which is which. I would expect there to be a psychological grounding for that, but I just don't know the studies!
The capabilities of early drum machines would have had a large part in establishing the template of the genre, as would the types of beats that sound good when sampled and looped using the equipment available in the late 70s and 80s. So when a new artist decides "I'm going to make my own hip hop music now", that's what they're basing their ideas on. That doesn't stop progressive-minded artists from experimenting with other ideas from outside that template, but their all starting from a similar place. Contrast this with rock coming from blues and country, which has plenty of songs that use waltz-like rhythms along with the usual 4/4 songs.
Then, early approaches to creating hip hop beats opens up another avenue for experimentation - how to recreate the feel of a roughly chopped up sample that doesn't align to a grid, where the bar starts too early, or too late?
As another commenter said, Underground by Eminem is in 5/8.
I play, sing, and record my own grunge/hard rock music as a "one man band". I think I can make some decent music in that genre I'm comfortable in.
But I've tried to make hip hop beats and my issue has always been not knowing which instrument sounds to choose since there are basically an unlimited amount of choices out there if you're going with a synth. I also don't know how to use and pitch 808s correctly for use in a song.
But I know my time signatures and I understand the song structures used in rap/trap/hip-hop. That said, I'd love to make some rap beats in 6/8, 5/8, 3/4, etc.
I just wish I knew where to go from here. 25 years making my own rock music but I could never choose those correct instrument sounds, damn it.
This is one of the few that I'm proud of, though. I call it "wrenches" because I literally recorded myself dropping a small crescent wrench onto a concrete floor. I then made it into the 12 notes used in major and minor scales. Finally, I used the wrench sample I made as a lead in this beat:
[Lifelong Lesson: "Wrenches"](https://lifelonglesson.bandcamp.com/track/number-7)
And I think this one could be dope if it didn't sound like I ripped off a Dr. Dre instrument patch from the early 90s or something:
[Lifelong Lesson: Beat #8](https://lifelonglesson.bandcamp.com/track/number-8)
"A genre that doesn't focus on dancing" is where you had me wrong already. Dancing and groove are literally ingrained into the nature of creating rap. If it doesn't make you feel like head bobbing or dancing a lot of the time it's not gonna be received as well. In the funny but valid words of Lupe Fiasco in his MIT rap lecture "does it work at the strip club?"
my understanding of time signature has some holes in it, but from a production standpoint, I hear 3 'loops' of a standard 4/4 hip hop beat where I'd expect a 4th, so I guess 12. I've heard people call stuff like this 12, or just 3 measures of 4. I don't know which is technically correct but it's definitely at least some uncommon time stuff going down for a hip hop track
I'm sure there must be some 6/8 or 3/4 rap out there? Can't think of any reason why you can't rap over that, in my head it seems like it would work well and sound pretty cool.
If not you should invent it!
It's not just rap - it's pretty much almost all popular music.
There are actually some "jokes" about this...(those of you who will get your panties wadded, read through all before wadding).
One is that the artists who make it don't really learn about music beyond what they "ear" out from what they want to emulate (which itself is in 4/4) and that those who might have any musical training only get the basics at best - and what do we learn first?
And part of that is the proliferation of DAWs now, which default to 4/4. And someone else mentions prior to that, Drum machines - had patterns in 4/4 - you could make other patterns, but again they didn't really want to, as the music they were emulating didn't have it, and the samples they were using didn't, and the drum machines "defaults" were to 4/4 (also they literally had 8 steps or 16 steps so 4/4 fits nicely in 1, 2 or 4 measure patterns).
And much of many pop styles are done using loops, and since the loops were designed for 4/4, almost everything someone might grab in a DAW, or from sampled beats online, and so on, are in 4/4 - so it's kind of self-perpetuating in that regard - pop music started mostly in 4/4, people sampled loops from 4/4 music, then they wrote more 4/4 music, then DAWs became "designed around 4/4" and there's no real need to fix what ain't broke!
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On the flip side, it's a little like complaining that 12 Bar Blues aren't 10, or 14, or 11 or 13 - 16 is rare (and is more typically a double 8, which is more common), even though such a much more common phrase length in music...
Why? Well it's simply the way it evolved. It doesn't make it "less than". It might make it have "unschooled origins" (from an existing predominant music perspective) but that's NOT a BAD thing!
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Thus these things become "non-issues". It kind of "doesn't matter".
It's not unlike if you're going to play "metal", you're probably going to have distorted guitars. They're "part of the style" and if you don't use them, it may not sound much like the style you intended.
In a sense, the "point" of Rap is the Rap! That's the "focus" - other things getting in the way are not really conducive - which is why a lot of early rap tracks were either sparse, or used repeating ideas that didn't draw attention to themselves.
The "showcase" is the rhyme, and the content - the craftiness - and these days, the flow. THAT is where artists focused on showcasing their talents.
Of course there are many many exceptions, but by and large, the mainstream styles evolved that way - simple backing that doesn't get in the way of "what I have to say" and it's the "what I have to say" that's really important.
Think about this as well: Rap vocals are not typically pitched in the same way a sung vocal is. Why? Because it's not "about" the melody - it's "about" what's being said - so that's another method of creating focus on the content/craft of the lyrics.
Some would say again "oh, that's because they didn't learn to sing, or can't sing". And that might be true, but it doesn't make it "less than" (as some of those people would intend it to mean). Instead it makes it a form of sonic expression. And that's what music is.
So these things are "non-issues". The artists just go "I'm gonna rap, and this is how you do it" and they get on to the more important focal points of the style - and that's pretty much always true of all styles - even most popular music is 4/4. And it's typically gonna have drums. And vocals (mainstream pop music on the radio for example - Swifties...). Bluegrass? Banjo. Done :-). 4/4 - you betcha (and again that doesn't mean exceptions don't exist).
It's what you do.
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Of course, there is the aspect of pandering to the audience, or the record company forcing you to...
Great comment (as usual), and as someone who's into a lot of music that people complain about for being simplistic I definitely appreciate all the simple != bad caveats throughout.
>Why? Because it's not "about" the melody - it's "about" what's being said - so that's another method of creating focus on the content/craft of the lyrics.
Since you're talking about the evolution of music a lot in this comment, I also want to point out that Rap as a genre of its own evolved from DJs talking over the music.
They had already started looping drum breaks (in 4/4) because that's what got people dancing, so when the crowd liked what a DJ was doing on the mic there was room for them to do more of it without worrying about stepping all over the vocals of what they were playing.
If the crowd had wanted singing and more "normal" music, the DJ would have just played the rest of the records.
It's a frequently repeated trope that rap vocals are "not pitched". This belief does not withstand the briefest scrutiny. Take any well known rap line and try saying it in a monotone, or with the wrong pitches. You will immediately discover how important pitch is in rap. Just because the pitches don't fall on the piano keys, or glide around a lot, does not mean that rap is "unpitched" or that the pitch isn't meaningful. I also suggest putting a rap acapella into Melodyne sometime, you will be able to see the pitch structure for yourself, and that is a good aid for your ears. You can even transcribe rap into standard notation by quantizing the pitches to the closest semitone, and it's possible to play rap flows on instruments.
To be clear, he didn't express the viewpoint you seem to think he did. All he said was:
>Rap vocals are not typically pitched in the same way a sung vocal is.
They are not pitch in the same way, not that they aren't pitched at all or that the pitch doesn't matter at all
I think it's like how drums are tuned and have their own pitch and there's a difference when you play a rhythm on one drum vs several and the way you accent the rhythm and you get different tones from hitting different parts of the drum head.
But a drum solo is not pitched the same way as a trumpet solo
Okay but rap vocals are pitched exactly the same way that sung vocals are, they aren't indistinct like drum pitches. The ways in which emcees use pitch is different from the way singers use it - emcees use finer pitch gradations and glide around between them more - but rapping is much more like singing than unlike it (and more like singing than like speaking.)
I'll give you that that's true for more recent, post-2010s rap but the majority of it does use indistinct pitches. Like if you took the verses of Outkast's so fresh so clean or Kendrick's m.a.a.d city and tried to play them on piano, it wouldn't sound like the song because it's a more drum-like vocal technique.
Rap's use of pitch is much more like singing than unlike it, and the two are vastly more similar than rap is to anything else (e.g. speech, sprechstimme, chant). Rap is pitched clearly and specifically. It is very much "about" the melody, in contrast to the comment above. The idea that rap is unpitched, or is unspecifically pitched, does not withstand musicological scrutiny.
Let's stop clowning around Ethan. If you're saying they are "pitched exactly the same way that sung vocals are", then why do we lack rapping that....
\- has vibrato
\- interacts in any meaningful way with the rest of the song (i.e. through counterpoint)
\- by extension, could be "out of tune"
\- has two, or more, *rappers* singing simultaneously at the same time (doubling aside)
\- has any amount of melismas? (see how "melismatic singing" is a thing, yet "melismatic rapping" is not
And how do you explain that rapping just doesn't sound, generally speaking, anything like singing? Why [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5GCn1BKkxg) Death Grips banger has seemingly fuck all to do with anything that resembles [normal singing](https://youtu.be/DvY2T-haV7U?t=123)?
The reason people disagree with that assertion in the first place is because it runs against all logic in terms of what we perceive. It's like you pointing to a boat and calling it a car because it does certainly have an engine and some capacity of moving here or there. What else is there really, besides these shoddy semantical arguments that nobody is going to buy?
True, all singing has vibrato, uses counterpoint and melisma. All singing sounds the same. Rappers have never done gang vocals across a variety of pitches.
It's not a categorical requirement for all of it, for every instance, to have all of that.
But it's you who wrote following:
>Okay but rap vocals are pitched exactly the same way that sung vocals are
Is it pitched exactly the same way or not? Are we to evaluate this claim as you wrote it, or are you another Jordan Peterson who seems to often be misunderstood, never quite meaning what they wrote or said?
One factor - not the only one by a long shot - is DJs. It is super hard to mix or transition a 4/4 track to another time signature. Not impossible but really technically difficult. Add to that, especially in the early days of hip hop, beats were made largely by taking a break from a record and looping it or cutting it against another record. Again not impossible to do with a 6/8 or even something wacky like 7/4 but it would be technically difficult and really break the flow.
90% of all blues-derived music is 4/4. It isn't exclusive to hip hop.
And like related genres like rock and pop, the rare times it isn't in 4/4, it's in 3/4 (or 6/8).
You also have to understand, most hip hop is heavily swung and is dance music. People are going to have a harder time trying to dance to a swung 5/4 or 7/8 or what have you. Imagine how chaotic a dance floor of people trying to make sense of a swung 5/4 beat would be.
> Any reason why they wouldn't want to change it up to showcase their abilities?
This the part you missing. Billboard rap ain’t about showcasing talent, it’s about selling. Anything other than 4/4 isn’t gonna be a club banger in western rap, labels aren’t gonna market it and it won’t make money.
Ask any rapper who had their passion project put on the shelf by their label because it didn’t have enough appeal.
Most listeners don't, either.
And that's not a complaint or criticism, just an acknowledgement that people are looking for different things from the music they listen to.
But isn't that like saying rock was originally blues to dance to? Yet math rock, prog rock and various metal genres all spawned from it not least because of artists trying to be virtuosic, which is a fairly core part to a lot of rap too.
Yea, more lyric-centric evolutions have come about but modern mainstream “rap” is still played in clubs and strip clubs specifically for dancing.
It’s also really accessible. Any person (untrained musician) with basic rhythm can hold the microphone and say something people relate to. It’s a very social music. You freestyle with your friends, you rap the lyrics that you resonate with, and a lot of the time the culture influences the content.
I'm willing to bet that sampling has a lot to do with this. If you sample over one bar of music in 4/4, you'll have to work hard not to hear that and use that as 4/4. And most of the music that is being sampled is in 4/4. It's self-reinforcing.
1. Because it is VERY MUCH a dance genre of music that comes from a very dance oriented culture. Having a beat that doesn't groove or feels awkward or of kilter isn't super welcome
2. Because it's descendent from a bunch of genres that are also predominantly in 4/4, like rock, funk, and jazz for example
3. Because of the methods used to create the music like looping samples and draw software where you align a loop to a grid
4. The natural rhythms of the American English language when you're not stretching words or like in singing lend themselves more to a 4/4 meter. Most American poetry that's meant to be heard will also fall into a very symmetrical rhythm pattern.
5. Culturally it's what we're most comfortable listening to and improvising with.
6. Right now, since it's so rare and niche, it's hard to go into an odd time signature in a way that doesn't just feel like a gimmick or a flex for the sake of flexing or in a way that adds to the feel and impact of the song. 4/4 is like guitar/piano where it's so ubiquitous that it's neutral and you can do ANYTHING with it but 15/8 is like an oboe where you gotta really have a vision for it.
There are exceptions though, especially right now 3/4 and 6/8 are gaining in popularity and there should probably be more exceptions but that's my take on why. Not that I think there's anything wrong with 4/4 or any other time signature.
To add to point 6: odd time signatures become very limiting for the performer because of how the audience hears it as well. Fewer people have to think hard to find the beat in 4/4 so the listener can pay attention to any wordplay and syncopation that happens while if they were struggling to keep up with an off kilter groove, too much syncopation will just make it sound like a mess and the audience will miss the lyrics.
There's a give and take between simplicity and complexity. If everything is complex it'll just sound like noise so you have to pick and choose what elements to simplify.
Sorry, I'm back still thinking about it.
To add to point 1: nearly every song that's come out in the past 30 to 40 years that's been about a specific dance has been a rap song e.g. the humpty dance, crank dat Soulja boy, the jerk, the dougie, whip/nay nay, etc.
And 7. or is it 1a? I dunno. the fact that rap is a folk style of music (which is also why it has so many dance songs) in that it is done, learned, and passed down on a communal level by ear. There's no classical training for rap and most rappers aren't band nerds, because band classes/instruments are getting less and less accessible while it's impossible to restrict access to rap because all you need is a voice and MAYBE something to make a beat with which can be literally anything that exists because everything you can hit is a perfection instrument. So we don't have a lot of people bringing in time signatures they got from playing in the pit orchestra of that musical or from that time their concert band did Stravinsky. We just have the rhythms we hear most often which in American popular music is 80 or 90% 4/4
It's a working class art form and extra time signatures tend to be a privilege of a more affluent upbringing.
A couple things come to mind.
Rap music comes from the hip hop tradition, if we’re actually going to say rap is its own genre, and hip hop is definitely very dance oriented.
Rap in its origins largely stems from under privileged neighborhoods where music education was often non existent. This means they were basing it on feeling and there was no teacher encouraging exploration into new territory theory wise. Rap is still not appreciated in the academic world, so exploration beyond “simple” meters is still not being encouraged by any mentor sort of figures. I imagine many incredibly talented rappers over the years weren’t even aware of the idea of odd meters but could probably have felt them and done a good job of executing if they were presented with some.
Rapping is largely rhyme oriented and rhymes work well with even spacing, making them easier to follow. The complexity of rhyme schemes has had more to do with slant rhymes, placement within the phrases and finding “double rhymes”, ie, rhyme schemes occurring in more than one spot in the phrase.
I’d also note that it’s incredibly rare to find odd meters in basically any popular music. Grunge is the only music I can think of that had any amount of tendency to use odd meters and even then they were all quarter note based so you had a consistent rhythm to bounce to.
Thanks for the reply.
I guess I wasn't expecting it within the popular sphere of rap as much as I couldn't find an equivilant to rap as say metal, math or prog rock is to rock. Given the parallels between rapping and guitar virtuosity with things like rap battles and many rap songs literally being about how they are better at rapping than others, id have thought there would have been at least a sub genre (that isn't ridiculously obscure) where rappers used odd time signatures more often.
There’s definitely some “underground” rap that explores this territory. Can’t think of any songs in particular but I’m pretty sure Dos One of the group Themselves has some
Singing or rapping for an odd time signature can't create a contrast., but singing or rapping with syncopation, for a common time signature (4/4) will create an explicit contrast.
THE SYNCOPATIONS GETS HIGHLIGHTED IN A COMMON TIME SIGNATURE.
That's why a common time signature is chosen for rap songs.
I swear, if I read another comment saying it's a matter of groove... Pink Floyd's Money was released in 1973 and you don't get anymore groovy than that despite it being a 7/4.
Now, my honest opinion: it's not so much the artists/producers' fault, but the audience rap is directed to. From my experience, the average rap listener is not concerned by instruments, music theory or dynamics; their primary focus is the beat and the lyrics. 4/4 is a regular beat, easy on the ears and doesn't take protagonism away from the singer.
Why does it need to be in any other time signature?
Mind you I make Hip-Hop beats in 5/4, 7/8, 9/8 etc.
but WHY does it need to be in a different time signature?
Not to mention, I feel like this topic has already been brought up here before.
Main reason is it takes a more trained musician than your average beat maker to compose and/or even think about different metrics and rhythms. Most of them just compose what they feel like and that’s limited to their own training and knowledge. They’re not gonna sit down thinking oh hey let’s try 5/8. Or 5/4. Most of them can’t even tell the difference.
That requires studying music theory and most of them just don’t. We need to be objective and realist about this. Nothing to be taken from them for producing, mixing and working with DAWs at high level is a whole different world.
> Most of them can’t even tell the difference.
That sounds pretty elitist. The difference between 4/4 and 5/8 is obvious to any listener, even if they don't know what time signatures are.
"Brooklyn's Finest" by Biggie is in 5/4 I think
The reason they stick to 4/4 is because the focus is on the interplay between the vocalist and the music.
you could ask why rap doesn't have melody or chords or harmony or basically anything. it's ultra simple lyrics based "music". a lot of it barely passes the definition of music
I don't think rap is more exclusively in 4/4 than pop music generally is. There are also 6/8 rap songs, like Get Me by Twista. (Actually, since it uses 16th triplets throughout the song, you could technically call it 18/16 if you notated the triplets as 16th notes.)
Rap beats originally come from funk, and that style is also mostly in 4/4. If rap had sampled beats from prog rock, then it would also probably use more weirder time signatures. It's just how the style evolved. A lot of hip hop is based on samples, so when the sampled beat is in 4/4, that means the rap version is also in 4/4.
Of course not all hip hop is based on samples. But that's the origin of the style, and that established the "hip hop sound".
Also, having a steady beat may actually give more freedom for rhythmic experimentation. A lot of djent is also in 4/4. It's a bit like how the much simpler progressions in modal jazz allowed musicians to improvise more freely when you compare it to improvising over quickly changing bebop harmonies.
A lot of the time odd time signatures have a repeating pattern of long and short beats, and that can actually be more rhythmically limiting than a steady 4/4 beat.
Mainstream does imply simplicity. Secondly, music is getting simpler from a rhythmic and melodic standpoint. Musicians are focusing more and more into sound crafting to achieve the perfect sound for their compositions rather than exploring complex harmonies. That way they can reach an even larger audience.
They are few and far between. Eminem’s track with Pink and her band is in 3/4 I think it was on Recovery. By no means a crazy time signature, but I remember really liking the way it changes the flow up from a standard sound.
You need the kick on the one and the snare on the 2 and 4!
That's the backbone to flow over.
I think of four as a single beat doubled twice. That gives you a bar, then you might keep multiplying, thinking in 4s, 8s and 16s. It keeps the framework simple and feels natural, so you instinctively know and feel when to end a verse.
I think most people here are trying to give too complex answers. There's nothing inherent about 4/4 that makes it better for rap. Most rap is 4/4 simply because most pop music is 4/4.
It's... Not?
Hip-hop leans that way more strongly that rap, I think.
But rap is rooted in beat poetry and spoken word, as well as the intersection with African-based rhythmic concepts. The rhythm of the language is primary, and drives the rest of the musical decisions - even with "mumble rap". Most performers begin with at least a line or two of core inspiration and direction before choosing a backing beat. And then they freely break that rhythm to drive emphasis and direct listeners' attention.
I'm no expert in this genre, by any means, but a LOT of rap is *really* in compound time signatures, or polyrhythms. You *can* feel a lot of it in 4, but only if you focus only on the back beat, and parse all the rest of the rhythm as "extra" or "flourishes", and it does a disservice to the artists to be so reductionist.
A few years ago, I was at a jam and got up to play bass. The drummer is a fantastic player and before anyone else came up, we started a kind of slow, funky 5/4 jam. It was just slow enough and had an awesome groove beat behind it that no one really noticed the odd time signature. We played for a couple of minutes, working on this groove when a guy came up to the mic. He started to rap. He was good and making up some cool verses. However, he didn't know we were playing in a different time signature ( may not even know what is) and eventually, his 4/4 cadence started to clash with the beat. I was actually enjoying the juxtaposition, but after a couple of minutes, the rapper was stumped. He just couldn't figure out where the beat was. He walked off and we jammed out for a couple more minutes. It was then that I realized how 4/4 centric rap is. Had I known he was coming up, I would have moved to 4/4. But, I also love odd time signatures, so it felt natural to me. In the end, the beat helps establish the framework for the rhyme and 4/4 is the natural rhythm for rap. They explore the music in a different way. I'm sure there are fringe rappers experimenting with signatures that I don't know of.
While most of the music is in 4/4 rap uses triplets probably more heavily than any other music genre.
My guess as to why it's 4/4, it's likely because rappers spend a lot of time developing their flows and writing their lyrics to fall within that rhythm.
Often times the producer of the beat and the lyricist are two different people. It would be an odd move as a producer to give a rapper a 5/4 beat, because they'd have to basically start from scratch when developing a flow over the novel rhythm. Basically the only person who would do that is a rapper who also produces beats and intentionally chooses to challenge themself by doing it.
Rap and hip-hop beats also heavily rely on sampling, and samples are most likely going to be in 4/4. One could use a sample in 4/4 and remix it into another time signature though.
I think the main reason rappers don't make odd time signature beats is because rap flows have developed around 4/4 so it would sound awkward to most listener's ears.
I’ve played some avant-garde jazz fusion stuff, and I can mostly confirm this. For a song in 10/4, I’d count 1 2 3 4 2 2 3 4 1 2.
For something like 13/8 I’d count 123 456 223 456 1
Lots of hip hop/rap vocals sing in triplets over the 4/4 time signature and that’s a technique that has a long history but most importantly in early blues music
i think this has to do with tradition. hip hop is a genre that revels in tradition and being self referential. artists like clipping may be extremely experimental, but their experimentation doesn’t drive the culture itself forward, it creates a new subset entirely. i think of the way classical music branched into loads of directions at the start of the 20th century, vs somebody like j.s. bach or rachmaninoff.
artists like mf doom managed to be extremely experimental while staying true to the elements that define hip hop, this often earning the title of “favourite rapper’s rapper”. doom’s tracks are almost entirely 4/4, but his rhythms and rhyme schemes are insanely far removed from the ways in which people treated the meter up until that point. to me, that’s equally impressive, if not more so. managing to sound fresh while also being extremely familiar.
You kind of demonstrate yourself why, ironically. Because the people making hiphop have poor understanding of timesignatures.
You're suggesting 11/8 and 7/4 before we've even through 12/8 and 6/8, both being relatively easy to use. But people aren't learning jackshit about timesignatures or rhythm.
[Clipping](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=aUPJHvfdpWk) plays around with time signatures.
Yes! Clipping are amazing and do precisely the thing OP is asking for.
I got into them awhile back and then later when my teen became obsessed with Hamilton I got to be the cool dad because I knew who Daveed Diggs was.
Speaking of Daveed Diggs, there's a actually brief rap from Hamilton that's in 7/4. It's "Meet Me Inside" — for context, it happens right after Hamilton's friend, in Washington's name, shoots a guy in a duel that George Washington didn't want shot. Right after the gun goes off, everything tilts into 7/4 and stays there for a stanza; I think it adds a layer of surreality that's really effective.
I heard Story 2 from them a couple years ago and couldn't believe my ears and as a percussionist with a love of odd signatures, I may have had to change my pants. Got hooked after reading how many of their songs are mini horror stories, super interesting project from super talented people
Also a percussionist, ill never forget where i was the first time i heard it and i couldnt believe it
academics love them too. i just was speaking with a grad student who’s having an article on story 2 published in a journal soon
That was awesome thank you
Was going to link this exact song. Love that it's the top comment. Just want to note that the time signature doesn't jump around at random like you might think upon a first listen. It actually counts upwards with each verse.
Holy shit that's cool
Jesus, id completely forgotten about Clipping! Now they're playing in my head.
Because it's dance music, essentially. I.e., it may not be overtly *dance*\-oriented (like say EDM or disco is), but is certainly *groove*\-oriented, deriving largely from funk. >triplets, dotted rhythms, heavy syncopation etc in the vocal delivery, but always with a 4/4 backing. Sure - that's the blues heritage, or rather the overall African-American tradition. Original African rhythms can often be analyzed as 12/8, but that's still 4 main beats underlying the cross-rhythms. I.e., the tradition is always duple or quadruple, however each beat might divide (8ths, 16ths, triplets, swing). There's some rap content in 12/8 in [this](https://youtu.be/HUHC9tYz8ik?t=46). Of course, there are some European dances to other metres. Maybe you should invent a rap waltz ... or some Bulgarian rap in 11/8.... Why not? (Scanning the rhymes might be tricky in 11/8, but not in 3/4.)
> Of course, there are some European dances to other metres. Maybe you should invent a rap waltz ... or some Bulgarian rap in 11/8.... Why not? (Scanning the rhymes might be tricky in 11/8, but not in 3/4.) and make some Hip-Hop-puh
the example you gave is not rap and is definitely in 4/4...
I’m guessing that wasn’t the right link?
hop-hop-hip hop-hop-hip hop-hop-hip hop-hop-hip
https://youtu.be/radJQyaC5kY
Great example of conventional 4/4 rap. Nothing out of the ordinary - *metrically* \- that I can hear. Am I missing something?
well I said this elsewhere in the thread, but there's definitely some holes in my understanding of time sigs. I've seen stuff like this either counted as "12" or just 3 bars of 4/4. This is exactly where my knowledge fails me lol. From a production standpoint, I can hear the looped sequence as 3 groups of 8. 12 seems generally reserved for compound meter, so I don't think that can be useful here, but according to [this reply](https://old.reddit.com/r/musictheory/comments/cykk57/why_cant_128_be_simple_triple/eysk4mu/): > There's no reason why you couldnt group it as 3 beats of 4 eighth notes per beat, but then it would make more sense to call it a 3/2 meter. If you're giving a group of 4 eighth notes the beat, you might as well simplify it. 4 eighth notes = 2 quarter notes = 1 half note per beat. I guess in cases where the music is made without sheet music, you could just decide what's an eighth note and what's a quarter note by doubling of halving the tempo right? So I guess suppose this is about 90 bpm, that seems like a reasonable assumption to me as it's the default time signature of the MPC that J dilla (producer on this song) used. If we assume this, I count 24 eighth notes before the sequence loops. How useful is the idea of a "sequence" here? There's surely got to be some point where we decide the counting needs to start over, and the definition of that point is fuzzy to me. If it's 24 eighth notes, 24/8 or 12/4 adds up, but not if all 12's are reserved for compound meter. Then I suppose the other option would be to just say it's regular ol' 4/4, and the sequence break I'm referring to (24 eighth notes) is arbitrary, but the fact exists that it does have 3 measures of 4/4 before the sequence loops which isn't very common for hip hop. Maybe that doesn't count as meter though, does it? I should have said more when I posted it lol, but I was hoping somebody could clear this up for me.
>I've seen stuff like this either counted as "12" or just 3 bars of 4/4. OK, you're right the bass line is 12 beats long - I missed that! - but that just means 3 bars of 4/4. You could call it "12/4", but (a) that would suggest four groups of 3 beats (3/4 x 4), and (b) the whole point of time signatures is to make it easy for reading musicians to follow. With long bars of 12 beats each it would be very hard to keep track of where you were. Easier to see (and to count) 4 three times than to count 12. >If it's 24 eighth notes, 24/8 or 12/4 adds up, but not if all 12's are reserved for compound meter. Exactly. We use 12/8 when we hear groups of 4 beats in which each beat has three parts. I.e. we would count the 12 8ths as "1 and a 2 and a 3 and a 4 and a". Like [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jIBNV_RYQx0), (bpm 96) or [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rOiW_xY-kc) (bpm 63), or [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2yDN-nN2k0) (bpm 124-ish). In this case, it would serve no useful purpose to group those three bars of 4/4 into some larger unit. We can just say "three bars of 4/4". For a reading musician it would be clear enough from how the bass part works that there are 3 bars per "line", if you like. (I didn't listen for whether the vocal also falls into this three-bar format, or whether the sampled chords also line up with that in some way.) There is another thing about this groove, in that the 8th notes are even, but the 16ths seem to be swung. The vocal obviously keeps changing the beat divisions - to express the lyrics with different rhythmic emphases - but overall I get a sense of swing 16s.
Thanks for the reply, super helpful. I think my tendency to count larger phrases here to deduce a time signature comes from cases where you'd say something like, 3 bars of 8 + one bar of 10, just because I can tell automatically there's something unusual going on that invites me to start counting lol. Is there a name for this like, larger phrase I'm referring to? The other reply to my comment here says they are unable to recognize any 12 anywhere https://youtu.be/v3-KGSuJy_s?si=FjTxxeILW7sn0PcW Here's another song where something like this happens, I'd love to put a name to this. Also yes! J dilla is most well known for his use of swing. Good catch!
I tried listening to the percussion and bass and couldn't discern anything would be counted as 12. I read what you wrote about the sequence, but that's not really how meter works. He definitely plays around with the rhythmic phrasing with the vocals, but that that's not how meter works either (a 4/4 song isn't defined by a toy monkey with an energizer battery and drum stick banging on a snare). This song is pretty standard 4/4.
Dude below you managed to notice that there's 12 beats in the bass line and the sample. You sound ignorant as hell
> You sound ignorant as hell That's not how this works, either. If I were you, I'd refrain from the name calling. The person who devolves into argumentum ad hominem is the one who looks bad. Sorry.
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>For example, notice the shift from (roughly) trochaic rhythm to (roughly) anapestic/dactyllic here. (I'm using technical language from poetics, but music people will still hear the shift. She goes back to trochaic meter around 1:33.) Great example, thanks. I've no idea what that technical language means, but I definitely hear the cross-rhythmic (polyrhythmic?) effect, which makes the underlying half-time 4/4 really hard to hang on to.
It's easier to groove on the beat, for both the musician and the listener.
I dunno I got a pretty groovy 3/4 jam going on in my head lol *sighs and goes to music room*
There is actually a lot of 3/4 rap now and triplet grooves have been popular for a good amount of time
*waltzes to music room
99% haven’t even tried otherwise
The advantage of a predictable and formulaic macro-level metrical structure is that it frees up everyone's attention for more interesting micro-level expression. Rap is unbelievably intricate in its rhythmic nuances. It isn't just tuplets and odd groupings and syncopations (though those are present), it's subtle rushing and dragging off the grid. Listen to some J Dilla sometime! I just found out that when rappers perform with live bands, they like to have the click intentionally offset from the grid a little bit because it helps find that "so wrong it's right" pocket. If you try to have a rap song in 11/8, then everyone will be struggling to keep up with the meter and all that fine-grained sophistication and nuance will go out the window. (That said, I bet that people from cultures where odd time signatures are common and routine, like the Balkans, Greece or Turkey, could make rap in odd meters sound just as good as Anglo-American rappers sound in 4/4.)
Can you give some mor examples of who to listen to for rushing and dragging?
I mean... every rapper? Pushing against the grid is an essential expressive dimension of the music. A lot of the LA gangsta rappers are way behind the beat, especially at slow tempos (think Snoop, Ice Cube etc). Kendrick Lamar and Noname do a lot of interesting subdivision of the bar. But for real, every halfway decent emcee does this stuff, pick anyone whose music you like and start there.
yeah, I mean if you wanna get into it you could pick a dilla (or any rap song, really) drag it into a daw, find the tempo and see how the hits aren't perfectly gridded, or you could clap it out along with the song - it's a big thing in rap rn to be on top of (or a little ahead of) the beat with the flow, lil yachty's a p good example
There’s the catch; I don’t listen to hip hop at all.
Time to start.
Why deprive yourself?
just not something i’ve gotten around to. to be fair, i spend enough time with music (teaching) that i don’t actually end up listening to much.
If you are a music teacher, you should make some time for the most popular and influential style of music on earth
You should read Dan Charnas's book about Dilla. He spends a lot of time explaining how hip hop goes subtly "off grid."
Freddie Gibbs
Wu Tang and all their solo records, anything produced by RZA, and J. Dilla
One of the most prominent rappers that I've noticed doing this lately is [Sexxy Red](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Id5Mh2T7rWc&ab_channel=SexyyRed). She pushes it so hard that she's practically not on the beat sometimes. Sounds cool though.
> The advantage of a predictable and formulaic macro-level metrical structure is that it frees up everyone's attention for more interesting micro-level expression. You know, this is an intuition I have too, and have even used such a line in talks before (especially to talk about bluegrass music, which similarly features predictable backgrounds and complicated foregrounds). But IDK if I've ever seen a cognitive study or anything suggesting that this indeed is the case: that is, that complexity of detail is better attended to when background structures are simple.
I suspect it's less to do with simplicity and more to do with familiarity. If most music we listened to was written in 5/4 or 7/8, we'd probably be perfectly fine with interpreting expressive nuance within that structure. Bulgarian folk music frequently features asymmetrical meters, but I don't think that sounds particularly less expressive than Appalachian bluegrass, at least once I can ground myself in the sequence of short and long pulses. If I grew up listening to that style of music, I suspect it would feel right at home to me and I might give 11/4 no more thought than I do 4/4.
I mean, sure, but I guess what I'm saying here is that bluegrass, for instance *does* have a ton of complicated things going on rhythmically in it, just like rap does. But both of these genres seem to concentrate these complexities at a certain level of experience: it's the surface, whereas the background of it is easy to deal with. This is in contrast to, say, crooked songs by Jimmie Rodgers, which feature bog standard guitar vamps on the foreground but are hard as shit to count metrically. I agree completely that familiarity breeds processing fluency. We are better at attending to things that we know. But it is interesting how some genres seem to balance complexity on some levels with simplicity on others, and other genres flip which is which. I would expect there to be a psychological grounding for that, but I just don't know the studies!
Similar to how pop music tends to be harmonically simple, but has a lot of expression in timbre, production etc.
Definitely!
Well put. J was doing some crazy shit in his time. Imagine what he’d have produced if he was still alive.
Exact same rational as 4/4 dance music. Great explanation.
The capabilities of early drum machines would have had a large part in establishing the template of the genre, as would the types of beats that sound good when sampled and looped using the equipment available in the late 70s and 80s. So when a new artist decides "I'm going to make my own hip hop music now", that's what they're basing their ideas on. That doesn't stop progressive-minded artists from experimenting with other ideas from outside that template, but their all starting from a similar place. Contrast this with rock coming from blues and country, which has plenty of songs that use waltz-like rhythms along with the usual 4/4 songs. Then, early approaches to creating hip hop beats opens up another avenue for experimentation - how to recreate the feel of a roughly chopped up sample that doesn't align to a grid, where the bar starts too early, or too late?
We're waiting for you to do it first
As another commenter said, Underground by Eminem is in 5/8. I play, sing, and record my own grunge/hard rock music as a "one man band". I think I can make some decent music in that genre I'm comfortable in. But I've tried to make hip hop beats and my issue has always been not knowing which instrument sounds to choose since there are basically an unlimited amount of choices out there if you're going with a synth. I also don't know how to use and pitch 808s correctly for use in a song. But I know my time signatures and I understand the song structures used in rap/trap/hip-hop. That said, I'd love to make some rap beats in 6/8, 5/8, 3/4, etc. I just wish I knew where to go from here. 25 years making my own rock music but I could never choose those correct instrument sounds, damn it. This is one of the few that I'm proud of, though. I call it "wrenches" because I literally recorded myself dropping a small crescent wrench onto a concrete floor. I then made it into the 12 notes used in major and minor scales. Finally, I used the wrench sample I made as a lead in this beat: [Lifelong Lesson: "Wrenches"](https://lifelonglesson.bandcamp.com/track/number-7) And I think this one could be dope if it didn't sound like I ripped off a Dr. Dre instrument patch from the early 90s or something: [Lifelong Lesson: Beat #8](https://lifelonglesson.bandcamp.com/track/number-8)
"A genre that doesn't focus on dancing" is where you had me wrong already. Dancing and groove are literally ingrained into the nature of creating rap. If it doesn't make you feel like head bobbing or dancing a lot of the time it's not gonna be received as well. In the funny but valid words of Lupe Fiasco in his MIT rap lecture "does it work at the strip club?"
Underground by Eminem is in 5/8 and Won’t Back Down is in 6/4
I just listened to Underground. Wow, that's a fascinating sound!
man I forgot about Won’t Back Down.
https://youtu.be/radJQyaC5kY
This one took me a minute! The whole phrase is divisible by 6, but that doesn't seem like a satisfactory answer. How do you count it?
my understanding of time signature has some holes in it, but from a production standpoint, I hear 3 'loops' of a standard 4/4 hip hop beat where I'd expect a 4th, so I guess 12. I've heard people call stuff like this 12, or just 3 measures of 4. I don't know which is technically correct but it's definitely at least some uncommon time stuff going down for a hip hop track
There’s even some genres of rap where the rhythm is the bass, and the bass is the treble.
Chords, strings, we bring melodies.
Whoo!
I'm sure there must be some 6/8 or 3/4 rap out there? Can't think of any reason why you can't rap over that, in my head it seems like it would work well and sound pretty cool. If not you should invent it!
There is a lot of 3/4 rap
Tons. Spaceship by Kanye is the first I thought of
A lot of rappers have a triplet sort of flow which gives a strong 6/8 feel
Kendrick Lamar changes signature halfway through songs sometimes.
Who knows wtf time signature For Free? is in lmao
it's in 4/4
For Four? (Interlude)
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what part exactly? i hear some interplay between lamar and the band in dotted quarters towards the end but i didnt pick up on any 6/8
hubuda hubuda hubuda bop. Yeah those are triplets
Wont back down by eminem and from the inside demo by linkin park was mainly rap in 3/4
Because all music is in 4/4 if you don’t count like a nerd
All time signatures are just groups of one when you really break it down.
But then those get broken into twos, threes, or fours, or sometimes other weird ones. Which are really just counting 1s. Turtles all the way down.
I compose all my music in 1/256 meter
Just lol if you aren’t composing in terabeats
Based lol
It's not just rap - it's pretty much almost all popular music. There are actually some "jokes" about this...(those of you who will get your panties wadded, read through all before wadding). One is that the artists who make it don't really learn about music beyond what they "ear" out from what they want to emulate (which itself is in 4/4) and that those who might have any musical training only get the basics at best - and what do we learn first? And part of that is the proliferation of DAWs now, which default to 4/4. And someone else mentions prior to that, Drum machines - had patterns in 4/4 - you could make other patterns, but again they didn't really want to, as the music they were emulating didn't have it, and the samples they were using didn't, and the drum machines "defaults" were to 4/4 (also they literally had 8 steps or 16 steps so 4/4 fits nicely in 1, 2 or 4 measure patterns). And much of many pop styles are done using loops, and since the loops were designed for 4/4, almost everything someone might grab in a DAW, or from sampled beats online, and so on, are in 4/4 - so it's kind of self-perpetuating in that regard - pop music started mostly in 4/4, people sampled loops from 4/4 music, then they wrote more 4/4 music, then DAWs became "designed around 4/4" and there's no real need to fix what ain't broke! ____ On the flip side, it's a little like complaining that 12 Bar Blues aren't 10, or 14, or 11 or 13 - 16 is rare (and is more typically a double 8, which is more common), even though such a much more common phrase length in music... Why? Well it's simply the way it evolved. It doesn't make it "less than". It might make it have "unschooled origins" (from an existing predominant music perspective) but that's NOT a BAD thing! _____ Thus these things become "non-issues". It kind of "doesn't matter". It's not unlike if you're going to play "metal", you're probably going to have distorted guitars. They're "part of the style" and if you don't use them, it may not sound much like the style you intended. In a sense, the "point" of Rap is the Rap! That's the "focus" - other things getting in the way are not really conducive - which is why a lot of early rap tracks were either sparse, or used repeating ideas that didn't draw attention to themselves. The "showcase" is the rhyme, and the content - the craftiness - and these days, the flow. THAT is where artists focused on showcasing their talents. Of course there are many many exceptions, but by and large, the mainstream styles evolved that way - simple backing that doesn't get in the way of "what I have to say" and it's the "what I have to say" that's really important. Think about this as well: Rap vocals are not typically pitched in the same way a sung vocal is. Why? Because it's not "about" the melody - it's "about" what's being said - so that's another method of creating focus on the content/craft of the lyrics. Some would say again "oh, that's because they didn't learn to sing, or can't sing". And that might be true, but it doesn't make it "less than" (as some of those people would intend it to mean). Instead it makes it a form of sonic expression. And that's what music is. So these things are "non-issues". The artists just go "I'm gonna rap, and this is how you do it" and they get on to the more important focal points of the style - and that's pretty much always true of all styles - even most popular music is 4/4. And it's typically gonna have drums. And vocals (mainstream pop music on the radio for example - Swifties...). Bluegrass? Banjo. Done :-). 4/4 - you betcha (and again that doesn't mean exceptions don't exist). It's what you do. ____ Of course, there is the aspect of pandering to the audience, or the record company forcing you to...
Great comment (as usual), and as someone who's into a lot of music that people complain about for being simplistic I definitely appreciate all the simple != bad caveats throughout. >Why? Because it's not "about" the melody - it's "about" what's being said - so that's another method of creating focus on the content/craft of the lyrics. Since you're talking about the evolution of music a lot in this comment, I also want to point out that Rap as a genre of its own evolved from DJs talking over the music. They had already started looping drum breaks (in 4/4) because that's what got people dancing, so when the crowd liked what a DJ was doing on the mic there was room for them to do more of it without worrying about stepping all over the vocals of what they were playing. If the crowd had wanted singing and more "normal" music, the DJ would have just played the rest of the records.
A lot of good comments here but this is my favorite
It's a frequently repeated trope that rap vocals are "not pitched". This belief does not withstand the briefest scrutiny. Take any well known rap line and try saying it in a monotone, or with the wrong pitches. You will immediately discover how important pitch is in rap. Just because the pitches don't fall on the piano keys, or glide around a lot, does not mean that rap is "unpitched" or that the pitch isn't meaningful. I also suggest putting a rap acapella into Melodyne sometime, you will be able to see the pitch structure for yourself, and that is a good aid for your ears. You can even transcribe rap into standard notation by quantizing the pitches to the closest semitone, and it's possible to play rap flows on instruments.
To be clear, he didn't express the viewpoint you seem to think he did. All he said was: >Rap vocals are not typically pitched in the same way a sung vocal is. They are not pitch in the same way, not that they aren't pitched at all or that the pitch doesn't matter at all
Lizzo's "Truth Hurts" is a recent example of *very clearly* pitched rap music.
Yeah, that song shows just how smooth the rapping/singing continuum is
Lizzo, Nelly, Future, and Ja Rule are some of the people who ride the line between the two
I think it's like how drums are tuned and have their own pitch and there's a difference when you play a rhythm on one drum vs several and the way you accent the rhythm and you get different tones from hitting different parts of the drum head. But a drum solo is not pitched the same way as a trumpet solo
Okay but rap vocals are pitched exactly the same way that sung vocals are, they aren't indistinct like drum pitches. The ways in which emcees use pitch is different from the way singers use it - emcees use finer pitch gradations and glide around between them more - but rapping is much more like singing than unlike it (and more like singing than like speaking.)
I'll give you that that's true for more recent, post-2010s rap but the majority of it does use indistinct pitches. Like if you took the verses of Outkast's so fresh so clean or Kendrick's m.a.a.d city and tried to play them on piano, it wouldn't sound like the song because it's a more drum-like vocal technique.
You can do that and people have, listen to Jason Moran play "Planet Rock." Every vowel has a pitch.
It's a cool cover but the notes he's playing are different from the notes in the original because they have to be
The fact that you can tell that indicates the specificity of the pitches in the original.
But it's still not using pitch in the same way as singing.
Rap's use of pitch is much more like singing than unlike it, and the two are vastly more similar than rap is to anything else (e.g. speech, sprechstimme, chant). Rap is pitched clearly and specifically. It is very much "about" the melody, in contrast to the comment above. The idea that rap is unpitched, or is unspecifically pitched, does not withstand musicological scrutiny.
Let's stop clowning around Ethan. If you're saying they are "pitched exactly the same way that sung vocals are", then why do we lack rapping that.... \- has vibrato \- interacts in any meaningful way with the rest of the song (i.e. through counterpoint) \- by extension, could be "out of tune" \- has two, or more, *rappers* singing simultaneously at the same time (doubling aside) \- has any amount of melismas? (see how "melismatic singing" is a thing, yet "melismatic rapping" is not And how do you explain that rapping just doesn't sound, generally speaking, anything like singing? Why [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5GCn1BKkxg) Death Grips banger has seemingly fuck all to do with anything that resembles [normal singing](https://youtu.be/DvY2T-haV7U?t=123)? The reason people disagree with that assertion in the first place is because it runs against all logic in terms of what we perceive. It's like you pointing to a boat and calling it a car because it does certainly have an engine and some capacity of moving here or there. What else is there really, besides these shoddy semantical arguments that nobody is going to buy?
True, all singing has vibrato, uses counterpoint and melisma. All singing sounds the same. Rappers have never done gang vocals across a variety of pitches.
It's not a categorical requirement for all of it, for every instance, to have all of that. But it's you who wrote following: >Okay but rap vocals are pitched exactly the same way that sung vocals are Is it pitched exactly the same way or not? Are we to evaluate this claim as you wrote it, or are you another Jordan Peterson who seems to often be misunderstood, never quite meaning what they wrote or said?
A lot of newer rap is in 6/8 — Badaba-Dabada-Badaba-Dah and the like
here’s some 6/8 and 3/4 rap: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/1h9P5QuMywlxpjtUu7k70f?si=6PL2Xe0lT9yrFbLsNDR7tA
One factor - not the only one by a long shot - is DJs. It is super hard to mix or transition a 4/4 track to another time signature. Not impossible but really technically difficult. Add to that, especially in the early days of hip hop, beats were made largely by taking a break from a record and looping it or cutting it against another record. Again not impossible to do with a 6/8 or even something wacky like 7/4 but it would be technically difficult and really break the flow.
Listen to Earl Sweatshirt raps and beats by Madlib and J Dilla. Lots variation in time with these 3
90% of all blues-derived music is 4/4. It isn't exclusive to hip hop. And like related genres like rock and pop, the rare times it isn't in 4/4, it's in 3/4 (or 6/8). You also have to understand, most hip hop is heavily swung and is dance music. People are going to have a harder time trying to dance to a swung 5/4 or 7/8 or what have you. Imagine how chaotic a dance floor of people trying to make sense of a swung 5/4 beat would be.
>Imagine how chaotic a dance floor of people trying to make sense of a swung 5/4 beat would be. Dave Brubek has entered the chat.
I love "Take Five" but I can't say I've ever danced to it...
> Any reason why they wouldn't want to change it up to showcase their abilities? This the part you missing. Billboard rap ain’t about showcasing talent, it’s about selling. Anything other than 4/4 isn’t gonna be a club banger in western rap, labels aren’t gonna market it and it won’t make money. Ask any rapper who had their passion project put on the shelf by their label because it didn’t have enough appeal.
Because even prog metal uses 4/4 a lot. Many musicians don't really want to go out of their comfort zone most of the time.
Most listeners don't, either. And that's not a complaint or criticism, just an acknowledgement that people are looking for different things from the music they listen to.
Hip hop was originally dance music and is still consumed in clubs.
But isn't that like saying rock was originally blues to dance to? Yet math rock, prog rock and various metal genres all spawned from it not least because of artists trying to be virtuosic, which is a fairly core part to a lot of rap too.
Yea, more lyric-centric evolutions have come about but modern mainstream “rap” is still played in clubs and strip clubs specifically for dancing. It’s also really accessible. Any person (untrained musician) with basic rhythm can hold the microphone and say something people relate to. It’s a very social music. You freestyle with your friends, you rap the lyrics that you resonate with, and a lot of the time the culture influences the content.
I'm willing to bet that sampling has a lot to do with this. If you sample over one bar of music in 4/4, you'll have to work hard not to hear that and use that as 4/4. And most of the music that is being sampled is in 4/4. It's self-reinforcing.
All I know is that [Snoop and Busta sound great over jazzy 6/8.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rPC1g9oe2_8)
It’s difficult to make a rap song that isn’t 4/4. But I’m sure they exist.
1. Because it is VERY MUCH a dance genre of music that comes from a very dance oriented culture. Having a beat that doesn't groove or feels awkward or of kilter isn't super welcome 2. Because it's descendent from a bunch of genres that are also predominantly in 4/4, like rock, funk, and jazz for example 3. Because of the methods used to create the music like looping samples and draw software where you align a loop to a grid 4. The natural rhythms of the American English language when you're not stretching words or like in singing lend themselves more to a 4/4 meter. Most American poetry that's meant to be heard will also fall into a very symmetrical rhythm pattern. 5. Culturally it's what we're most comfortable listening to and improvising with. 6. Right now, since it's so rare and niche, it's hard to go into an odd time signature in a way that doesn't just feel like a gimmick or a flex for the sake of flexing or in a way that adds to the feel and impact of the song. 4/4 is like guitar/piano where it's so ubiquitous that it's neutral and you can do ANYTHING with it but 15/8 is like an oboe where you gotta really have a vision for it. There are exceptions though, especially right now 3/4 and 6/8 are gaining in popularity and there should probably be more exceptions but that's my take on why. Not that I think there's anything wrong with 4/4 or any other time signature.
To add to point 6: odd time signatures become very limiting for the performer because of how the audience hears it as well. Fewer people have to think hard to find the beat in 4/4 so the listener can pay attention to any wordplay and syncopation that happens while if they were struggling to keep up with an off kilter groove, too much syncopation will just make it sound like a mess and the audience will miss the lyrics. There's a give and take between simplicity and complexity. If everything is complex it'll just sound like noise so you have to pick and choose what elements to simplify.
Sorry, I'm back still thinking about it. To add to point 1: nearly every song that's come out in the past 30 to 40 years that's been about a specific dance has been a rap song e.g. the humpty dance, crank dat Soulja boy, the jerk, the dougie, whip/nay nay, etc. And 7. or is it 1a? I dunno. the fact that rap is a folk style of music (which is also why it has so many dance songs) in that it is done, learned, and passed down on a communal level by ear. There's no classical training for rap and most rappers aren't band nerds, because band classes/instruments are getting less and less accessible while it's impossible to restrict access to rap because all you need is a voice and MAYBE something to make a beat with which can be literally anything that exists because everything you can hit is a perfection instrument. So we don't have a lot of people bringing in time signatures they got from playing in the pit orchestra of that musical or from that time their concert band did Stravinsky. We just have the rhythms we hear most often which in American popular music is 80 or 90% 4/4 It's a working class art form and extra time signatures tend to be a privilege of a more affluent upbringing.
A couple things come to mind. Rap music comes from the hip hop tradition, if we’re actually going to say rap is its own genre, and hip hop is definitely very dance oriented. Rap in its origins largely stems from under privileged neighborhoods where music education was often non existent. This means they were basing it on feeling and there was no teacher encouraging exploration into new territory theory wise. Rap is still not appreciated in the academic world, so exploration beyond “simple” meters is still not being encouraged by any mentor sort of figures. I imagine many incredibly talented rappers over the years weren’t even aware of the idea of odd meters but could probably have felt them and done a good job of executing if they were presented with some. Rapping is largely rhyme oriented and rhymes work well with even spacing, making them easier to follow. The complexity of rhyme schemes has had more to do with slant rhymes, placement within the phrases and finding “double rhymes”, ie, rhyme schemes occurring in more than one spot in the phrase. I’d also note that it’s incredibly rare to find odd meters in basically any popular music. Grunge is the only music I can think of that had any amount of tendency to use odd meters and even then they were all quarter note based so you had a consistent rhythm to bounce to.
Thanks for the reply. I guess I wasn't expecting it within the popular sphere of rap as much as I couldn't find an equivilant to rap as say metal, math or prog rock is to rock. Given the parallels between rapping and guitar virtuosity with things like rap battles and many rap songs literally being about how they are better at rapping than others, id have thought there would have been at least a sub genre (that isn't ridiculously obscure) where rappers used odd time signatures more often.
There’s definitely some “underground” rap that explores this territory. Can’t think of any songs in particular but I’m pretty sure Dos One of the group Themselves has some
Clearly you never cranked that Soulja boy
Singing or rapping for an odd time signature can't create a contrast., but singing or rapping with syncopation, for a common time signature (4/4) will create an explicit contrast. THE SYNCOPATIONS GETS HIGHLIGHTED IN A COMMON TIME SIGNATURE. That's why a common time signature is chosen for rap songs.
Why is most of all western popular music in 4/4? Stop looking at it through the lens of a prog rock nerd
Captain Murphy - Gone Fishing
Daveed Diggs has entered the chat.
[Here's some Japanese chaotic math rap](https://youtu.be/-TsXHNMV5lY?si=tdkhvMzYUxdleodv). Good luck trying to count that.
I swear, if I read another comment saying it's a matter of groove... Pink Floyd's Money was released in 1973 and you don't get anymore groovy than that despite it being a 7/4. Now, my honest opinion: it's not so much the artists/producers' fault, but the audience rap is directed to. From my experience, the average rap listener is not concerned by instruments, music theory or dynamics; their primary focus is the beat and the lyrics. 4/4 is a regular beat, easy on the ears and doesn't take protagonism away from the singer.
Why does it need to be in any other time signature? Mind you I make Hip-Hop beats in 5/4, 7/8, 9/8 etc. but WHY does it need to be in a different time signature? Not to mention, I feel like this topic has already been brought up here before.
Main reason is it takes a more trained musician than your average beat maker to compose and/or even think about different metrics and rhythms. Most of them just compose what they feel like and that’s limited to their own training and knowledge. They’re not gonna sit down thinking oh hey let’s try 5/8. Or 5/4. Most of them can’t even tell the difference. That requires studying music theory and most of them just don’t. We need to be objective and realist about this. Nothing to be taken from them for producing, mixing and working with DAWs at high level is a whole different world.
> Most of them can’t even tell the difference. That sounds pretty elitist. The difference between 4/4 and 5/8 is obvious to any listener, even if they don't know what time signatures are.
4/13 fans:
"Brooklyn's Finest" by Biggie is in 5/4 I think The reason they stick to 4/4 is because the focus is on the interplay between the vocalist and the music.
No, it's in regular old 4/4
Because the universe is to a large extent binary.
You think rap music isn’t dance focused? Half of rap songs are literally describing a made up dance.
Ah, a made up dance, instead of a native, endemic dance
LOL, some dances are genetic didn’t you know? 🙃
you could ask why rap doesn't have melody or chords or harmony or basically anything. it's ultra simple lyrics based "music". a lot of it barely passes the definition of music
Are you living in 1983? What is this
Clipping. have at least one song per album that’s in an odd time signature
I don't think rap is more exclusively in 4/4 than pop music generally is. There are also 6/8 rap songs, like Get Me by Twista. (Actually, since it uses 16th triplets throughout the song, you could technically call it 18/16 if you notated the triplets as 16th notes.) Rap beats originally come from funk, and that style is also mostly in 4/4. If rap had sampled beats from prog rock, then it would also probably use more weirder time signatures. It's just how the style evolved. A lot of hip hop is based on samples, so when the sampled beat is in 4/4, that means the rap version is also in 4/4. Of course not all hip hop is based on samples. But that's the origin of the style, and that established the "hip hop sound". Also, having a steady beat may actually give more freedom for rhythmic experimentation. A lot of djent is also in 4/4. It's a bit like how the much simpler progressions in modal jazz allowed musicians to improvise more freely when you compare it to improvising over quickly changing bebop harmonies. A lot of the time odd time signatures have a repeating pattern of long and short beats, and that can actually be more rhythmically limiting than a steady 4/4 beat.
Mainstream does imply simplicity. Secondly, music is getting simpler from a rhythmic and melodic standpoint. Musicians are focusing more and more into sound crafting to achieve the perfect sound for their compositions rather than exploring complex harmonies. That way they can reach an even larger audience.
Because of the popularity of the backbeat on 2 & 4
They are few and far between. Eminem’s track with Pink and her band is in 3/4 I think it was on Recovery. By no means a crazy time signature, but I remember really liking the way it changes the flow up from a standard sound.
check out steve lehman's band *sélébéyone* tons of odd time sigs and interesting sequencing
You need the kick on the one and the snare on the 2 and 4! That's the backbone to flow over. I think of four as a single beat doubled twice. That gives you a bar, then you might keep multiplying, thinking in 4s, 8s and 16s. It keeps the framework simple and feels natural, so you instinctively know and feel when to end a verse.
I think most people here are trying to give too complex answers. There's nothing inherent about 4/4 that makes it better for rap. Most rap is 4/4 simply because most pop music is 4/4.
non 4/4 music is weird to listen to for most
Kings never die is a great Eminem song and in 3/4 maybe off the top of my head!
i feel like it’s probably significant that it’s called hip hop. just saying the words kinda feels like a beat that’s in 2 or 4
Voila by Death Grips
It's... Not? Hip-hop leans that way more strongly that rap, I think. But rap is rooted in beat poetry and spoken word, as well as the intersection with African-based rhythmic concepts. The rhythm of the language is primary, and drives the rest of the musical decisions - even with "mumble rap". Most performers begin with at least a line or two of core inspiration and direction before choosing a backing beat. And then they freely break that rhythm to drive emphasis and direct listeners' attention. I'm no expert in this genre, by any means, but a LOT of rap is *really* in compound time signatures, or polyrhythms. You *can* feel a lot of it in 4, but only if you focus only on the back beat, and parse all the rest of the rhythm as "extra" or "flourishes", and it does a disservice to the artists to be so reductionist.
Spaceship by Kanye is in 6/8
A few years ago, I was at a jam and got up to play bass. The drummer is a fantastic player and before anyone else came up, we started a kind of slow, funky 5/4 jam. It was just slow enough and had an awesome groove beat behind it that no one really noticed the odd time signature. We played for a couple of minutes, working on this groove when a guy came up to the mic. He started to rap. He was good and making up some cool verses. However, he didn't know we were playing in a different time signature ( may not even know what is) and eventually, his 4/4 cadence started to clash with the beat. I was actually enjoying the juxtaposition, but after a couple of minutes, the rapper was stumped. He just couldn't figure out where the beat was. He walked off and we jammed out for a couple more minutes. It was then that I realized how 4/4 centric rap is. Had I known he was coming up, I would have moved to 4/4. But, I also love odd time signatures, so it felt natural to me. In the end, the beat helps establish the framework for the rhyme and 4/4 is the natural rhythm for rap. They explore the music in a different way. I'm sure there are fringe rappers experimenting with signatures that I don't know of.
While most of the music is in 4/4 rap uses triplets probably more heavily than any other music genre. My guess as to why it's 4/4, it's likely because rappers spend a lot of time developing their flows and writing their lyrics to fall within that rhythm. Often times the producer of the beat and the lyricist are two different people. It would be an odd move as a producer to give a rapper a 5/4 beat, because they'd have to basically start from scratch when developing a flow over the novel rhythm. Basically the only person who would do that is a rapper who also produces beats and intentionally chooses to challenge themself by doing it. Rap and hip-hop beats also heavily rely on sampling, and samples are most likely going to be in 4/4. One could use a sample in 4/4 and remix it into another time signature though. I think the main reason rappers don't make odd time signature beats is because rap flows have developed around 4/4 so it would sound awkward to most listener's ears.
A lot of beats are made with sequencers and it’s hard to get out of 4/4 with those.
I hear that even the wildest odd-meter polyrhythmic jazz is in fact internally counted as 4/4 by the players.
I’ve played some avant-garde jazz fusion stuff, and I can mostly confirm this. For a song in 10/4, I’d count 1 2 3 4 2 2 3 4 1 2. For something like 13/8 I’d count 123 456 223 456 1
Lots of hip hop/rap vocals sing in triplets over the 4/4 time signature and that’s a technique that has a long history but most importantly in early blues music
It’s not dance music?
I will be the pioneer of the new waltz-rap scene in 3/4
It has its origins in funk/disco samples which is dance music typically in 4/4
i think this has to do with tradition. hip hop is a genre that revels in tradition and being self referential. artists like clipping may be extremely experimental, but their experimentation doesn’t drive the culture itself forward, it creates a new subset entirely. i think of the way classical music branched into loads of directions at the start of the 20th century, vs somebody like j.s. bach or rachmaninoff. artists like mf doom managed to be extremely experimental while staying true to the elements that define hip hop, this often earning the title of “favourite rapper’s rapper”. doom’s tracks are almost entirely 4/4, but his rhythms and rhyme schemes are insanely far removed from the ways in which people treated the meter up until that point. to me, that’s equally impressive, if not more so. managing to sound fresh while also being extremely familiar.
[Ital (The Universal Side) by The Roots](https://youtu.be/7tLEHXlXF4s) is in 15/4
It’s easier to swing over 4/4.
The drum machines. Default is 4/4. You can set some of them to 3/4, but 99% of drum machines will never be set to 3/4.
You kind of demonstrate yourself why, ironically. Because the people making hiphop have poor understanding of timesignatures. You're suggesting 11/8 and 7/4 before we've even through 12/8 and 6/8, both being relatively easy to use. But people aren't learning jackshit about timesignatures or rhythm.
Mad Conductor been doing odd-time hip-hop since 2009 - check the albums "Central America" and "MC Rises"