House of the rising sun

[Philippe Astie]

Just bought this piece. Why did you write it in 4/4. Listening to the drum track and bass an rythm guitar , shoul it not be written in 6/8 or 3/4 ?

[john]

I prefer common time (4/4) over compound time (6/8, 12/8). whenever I arrange a tune that has that compound time feel I look at it very closely to see if it makes sense in 4/4 because it’s easier to read for me and most others.
Sometimes it doesn’t make sense cause there will be nothing but triplets but other times it works well in 4/4.

[Anonymous]

i agree with that, some tunes that swing in 6/8 if you count 1 2 3 4 5 6 while playing the sax it plays like normal time without any swing, whereas if you count 1-2-3 2-2-3 while playing you feel swinging sensation louder on two beats – ie you can clap one-two all the way through 6/8 time and swing your body in time with the one-two which you wouldn’t get if you were counting 1 2 3 4 5 6.

Short cuts in changing sheets can work, and can often confuse. Some people even rewrite every music sheet to be in C to make sight reading easier…..which i find more confusing as i have to work out what scale it was originally written in as it could be a minor scale.

[Philippe Astie]

Johnny,

I understand your answer – though for me what is very disturbing is that when listening to the band and looking at the sheet music while playing , I get lost immediately because the chord changes come at seemingly random positions (I know they are not random, just feels that way) rather than at the beginning and middle of the bar, as would be in 3/4 or 6/8.

If you use SW that can convert the time signature easily, it would be interesting at least for an educational purpose, to provide both 4/4 and 6/8 scores in this case, so that students could see both, study and understand the difference, and decide whatt works best for them.

[john]

ya I thought of that; to convert from 4/4 tp 6/8 within the software but it can’t be done….at least with what I am using and what I can see.

[Anonymous]

out of curiosity, i’ve just had a go at playing ‘House of the rising sun’, and i have to agree with Johnny it is very very easy to play along to the backing track in his 4/4 time.

when i listen to the base guitar all i hear is one-two in each bar, and playing along with that keeps the sheet reading in time. in fact try clapping in time with that. What you need to do is practice your timing by just playing the 1st note in each bar, to get the feel of where to come in on each new bar. when you can master that, then start playing through the whole sheet.

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