who has some weird time signatures!?
 

So I'm in a 3 piece "prog" rock band. we have a couple of songs in some interesting time signatures like 7/8, 6/8 and 13/8. I actually wrote out one of our songs just now the way I count it and tried to break it up so it was easy to read
It goes like this......

6/8 6/8 10/8 3/8 6/8 10/8 repeat. besides this intro, the rest of the song is in 6/8. Believe it or not, you can actually dance to that intro part, pretty groovy;)

Now it's your turn! Let's see some crazy time signatures, the weirder the better, I say:hyper:

I used to have a song that started out in 197/3 for 19 bars, then was played in 6/-5 for no bars, and then 4/4, 3/4, 3/3, 5/3, 9/12 and finally seventeen straight hours of 3/5,000,000, but the big problem was, I had a hard time remember the lyrics, and everyone who ever tried to dance to it ended up in the psych ward.

So I switched to "Mustang Sally" in a rare language found off of the Ivory Coast, that only pigeons and certain breeds of dog could understand.

Now everybody's happy.

Must drink beer with mellwoinman. It's on my bucket list.

Mustang sally in 3/16ths i thought, and is humanly impossible to dance to, are you trying to pull a fastbass on all us hucksters, what goes here!?

"Sail to the Moon" by Radiohead.

The intro alone.

7/4-2/4-7/4
6/4-2/4-6/4
5/4-2/4-5/4

Incredible song.

"Dance of Eternity" - Dream Theater - 104 time changes in under 7 minutes. Just played it last night (part of our regular setlist). 4/4, 3/4, 7/8, 5/8, 3/8, 7/16, 2/4, 5/4, 6/4, 12/8, 5/16, 9/8, 15/8, 11/8, 6/16, 6/8, etc.

Crazy time signatures?
Weird time signatures??

Sting. - I hung my Head.

How he wrote a country song that sounds smooth and natural in 9/8 is beyond me.
(and this is the 8+1 version of 9/8 not the 3/8 x 3 style)

Of course it was dumbed back down to 4/4 when Johnny Cash covered it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YgPTVIrR9NA

I wrote a song on bass and took me forever to figure out it was 11/8, I think. I didn't go into it wanting to write it like that. When I was trying to play it with a drummer I said I know the beat will be hard to find. We worked on it and figured the count as 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2. I think that is 11/8 anyway...

I do lots of Balkan stuff that's in 7/8 or i.e. alternating 7/8 with 8/8 (3/3/2) and even alternating 10/8, 9/8 and 7/8. If it's done right only the musicians realise it's in a 'weird' time signature. To the audience it's just danceable. Using different time signatures is not nescesarilly the same as being needlessly complicated. It's also a way to play simple grooves that are just a bit different from the standard four beats.

I was goofing around with 5/4 the other night. Honestly, I find it hard to write in 5/4, not because of the counting, but because the music always sounds so forced (to me). I know that I'm purposefully writing in that time sig., vs. writing a groove. 2/4, 3/4, 7/4, 6/8...no worries. But 5/4 is the bane of my existence.

One of my favorite odd time pieces is "Shadowdance" by the band Shadowfax.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zcLoIu-E3Fw

This.

Stravinsky was rather fond of odd meters:

http://imslp.org/wiki/Category:Stravinsky,_Igor

Conlon Nancarrow wrote a piece with the (mathematically) irrational meter √42:1. Of course, since it was for player piano nobody had to suffer trying to negotiate it.

Captain Beyond, from 1972 or so.

Some Zappa

All Gentle Giant

Try this one on for size: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWfmf...eature=related

Explore their catalog - that's one of the easy ones :cool:

Is 5/4 still considered weird? If so, I've got a tune to contribute.

I was in this crazy band with two bass players. Our drummer came up with an intro for one of our songs that involved the basses trading phrases. My phrase alternated between 7/8 and 4/4, while the other guy's phrase was in 3/4 the first two times, and then shortened by a beat for every other subsequent repeat. So the whole monstrosity went:

7/8, 3/4, 4/4, 3/4, 7/8, 3/4, 4/4, 2/4, 7/8, 3/4, 4/4, 1/4. Repeat. And it was actually not that hard to play.