Fast and Slow Quarter Notes?

Duder

Duder

Dec 6, 2014
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#1
A gentleman has been kind enough to post instructional videos on YouTube. He also includes a link to a PDF that he, again, was kind enough to create for everyone (for free, I might add). The video I watched was for Hysteria by Muse. It's a fast song and a lot of fun. The tempo is written as 93 bpm and it is in 4/4. It's not necessarily a fast tempo, but this song just drives. I noticed that he had written the majority of the notes as 8th notes. Now, having taken music lessons from elementary school through high school I thought "the song would have to be twice that tempo for 8th notes to be right." I commented on the video because I thought it was a bit off to write it that way. He responded with this:
"Off isn't the right word, it's just a judgement call when you're writing a chart where you set the quarter note, since 'quarter notes' and 'eighth notes' don't actually exist, they're just a way to conceptualize subdivisions. I chose to write the chart with a fast quarter note so it wasn't too 16th note-y, but it would be reasonable to write with a slow quarter note too."
I have never heard of "fast" or "slow" quarter notes. Maybe it's just a concept I never got to, but it made me stare at my screen awhile saying "what?" over and over again. This is not to knock the person who made the video. He is doing a great service to the music community. I am simply looking to be educated.
 
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#4
In this track, the kick and snare pattern dictate the beat. It's a 4/4, with the snare on the 2 & 4 (which happens to yield the 93 BPM). All other note length values are relative to this beat. You could notate it at twice the BPM and use quarter notes in place of eighths. You could notate it in half time and write it on 16ths in place of eighths. The truth is, most people don't/won't count it that way. While there is a driving feel to it, the track is at a pretty moderate tempo.
 
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#6
In 4/4 the word 'beat' is generally understood as a quarter.
So he's right in that it's a matter of choice to notate the fast notes as 8ths or 16ths. But when choosing eights, the 93 bpm is wrong (should be 186 bpm).
 
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#7
dreamadream99 said:
There are many ways to notate the same line: quarter notes at 240, eighth notes at 120, sixteenth notes at 60.
Click to expand...

To a rather course grained extent that's correct

...but it completely overlooks what we mean by the concept of "beats" and "meter". 8th- and 16th-note subdivisions imply that they are partials of a larger beat, and the weight that we give these larger individual beats is different than the weight that we give the resulting down-and up-beats within its subdivisions. A measure of 4/4 subdivided into 16th-notes isn't some infinitely recursive fractal; E.g., the downbeat of beat #4 is not played exactly like the "a" (as in "one-y-and-a" the fourth 16th-note partial) of beat #1, regardless of what the tempo is.
 
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#9
See, I never learned anything other than a 1/4 note = 1 beat, 1/8th = 1/2 beat, 1/16th = 1/4 beat, etc. It's a really odd concept to me that a 1/4 note could be a 1/2 beat.
HandsFree said:
In 4/4 the word 'beat' is generally understood as a quarter.
So he's right in that it's a matter of choice to notate the fast notes as 8ths or 16ths. But when choosing eights, the 93 bpm is wrong (should be 186 bpm).
Click to expand...
That's how I understand it.
 
#10
He may have been attempting to use and idea similar to cut time

400px-Cut_time_as_4-4.png
 
#13
Duder said:
A gentleman has been kind enough to post instructional videos on YouTube. He also includes a link to a PDF that he, again, was kind enough to create for everyone (for free, I might add). The video I watched was for Hysteria by Muse. It's a fast song and a lot of fun. The tempo is written as 93 bpm and it is in 4/4. It's not necessarily a fast tempo, but this song just drives. I noticed that he had written the majority of the notes as 8th notes. Now, having taken music lessons from elementary school through high school I thought "the song would have to be twice that tempo for 8th notes to be right." I commented on the video because I thought it was a bit off to write it that way. He responded with this:
"Off isn't the right word, it's just a judgement call when you're writing a chart where you set the quarter note, since 'quarter notes' and 'eighth notes' don't actually exist, they're just a way to conceptualize subdivisions. I chose to write the chart with a fast quarter note so it wasn't too 16th note-y, but it would be reasonable to write with a slow quarter note too."
I have never heard of "fast" or "slow" quarter notes. Maybe it's just a concept I never got to, but it made me stare at my screen awhile saying "what?" over and over again. This is not to knock the person who made the video. He is doing a great service to the music community. I am simply looking to be educated.
Click to expand...

From what you're describing, the transcriber is not being consistent. If he chose to call the quarter notes 93 BPM, then he would have to notate the song in 16ths. If those are 8th notes, then it would have to be specified as half note=93.

It's true that musical time is a theoretical construct, and there is leeway in interpretation, but it's common convention that a straight ahead rock song with a standard bass snare bass snare pattern is counted in quarter notes, 1,2,3,4. That song features a 16th note bassline and should be taught as such. Even if he specified it was half notes at 93 BPM, I still wouldn't find it technically correct. Philosophically, the best written music tells the story of the song, it's not just the most convenient way to write a string of notes.

Assuming the notes are right and you get the end result sounding good, it's far from the worst free instruction I've witnessed, but IMO it's unnecessarily dumbing it down. It's not any harder to read notes with an extra flag or beam, is it?
 
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