There’s a lot to be said for being a music snob (especially having to justify many opinions). I guess that’s why I can spend so much time and energy punching little square tabs about organized sounds.

While everyone asks themselves just what in the hell am I talking about, if I say two words to drummers, they alone would stop wondering. The words: “Odd time”.

Though arguably made famous by Dave Brubeck Quartet’s “Take Five", bands like Rush, Dream Theater (a Rush influenced group), Pink Floyd and Tool reach into their bag of musical tricks in order to sprinkle seasoning (or come up with a truly wild concoction) on their songs. With Rush, songs featuring time signature changes like Natural Science, or (taken to a more extreme degree) Dream Theater’s Metropolis Pt. 1 (don’t get me started with Metropolis Pt. 2... I sometimes try to convince myself that I didn’t buy the album), you have bands that scatter these irregular beat patterns around their songs. With Pink Floyd’s “Money”, and Tool’s... well, most things Tool plays (I guess Danny gets bored), they use the irregular patterns to create regularity in randomness, while keeping a steady backbeat, the rest of the music dances around almost magically and at random.

To the lay-person, “odd time” is an alteration of the beat, pulse, or what I like to call, the “head-nod”. The nature of modern western music is cyclical, revolving around at a pace (tempo). There is the element of repetition which creates the air of familiarity to when we would hear the drum again (or guitar pattern). Odd time plays with that familiarity and either introduces an element of surprise (like in Rush or Dream Theater) or is primarily a means of providing texture (like heard in Tool’s The Grudge) to a revolving pattern that includes a non-normative amount of beats compared to contemporary pop music. So basically, it doesn’t sound normal.

But that’s not quite it, is it? I’ve have numerous conversations with Ryan about odd time feel, and whether or not it’s really necessary. Few bands can pull it off properly, but when the bands that can do, it’s almost seamless. Take a listen to “Everything In Its Right Place” by Radiohead. They make 10/4 sound natural (that’s 10 beat pulses before it rotates back to the beginning of the pattern).

Ok, so the reason this came up was because I had a conversation about why I love Jon Theodore’s playing so much. He’s brilliant in that his accents are outside normal convention. Then Thomas Pridgen came to mind. Most of the Mars Volta magic (as far as I’m concerned) left with Jon. Pridgen is an amazing, dexterous and capable (to say the least) drummer. However, his contributions (in my opinion) don’t carry the same weight as Jon’s does. As I was listening back to the Mars Volta albums that Pridgen plays on, I noticed that there was much play in the time signatures that the band was performing in. When listening, I got the sense that no matter how much I’d try to keep my head nodding in a time, I couldn’t keep it up.

This is where the “right” and “wrong” come into play. With Theodore, I felt that I never lost sense of where the strong pulses were supposed to be. Particularly when the beats got very complex (like “L’Via Vasquez”), I just know that my head would nod faster. Dream Theater is another example of times that I’ll lose the groove. “Metropolis pt. 1“ has all the tempo changes inside of the time signatures as well. I think it depends on my mood, but if I feel that I’m more in a mood to settle into hypnosis, changing the tempo and where the beats fall is the sure-fire way to pull me out of that mood real quick!

I originally meant to start this blog out as a comparison between Jon Theodore and Thomas Pridgen, but really, I think the broader picture should be “appropriate use of odd time signatures to create a sense of urgency or texture”. How would I incorporate this into my own songs? I have less interest in putting odd times in my songs. I like throwing accents around the beat, but in the times that I’ve tried to use the random time signatures in my songs, I before had gotten so involved in how cool the odd signature is, I lost the audience.

Anyways. Can you tell that I haven’t played drums in a while?? I’m starting to go stir crazy.