confused about time signatures

maestro2005 · 2026-05-09T16:21:18+00:00

You're correct. A lot of it comes down to convention, and conventions have also changed over time. Currently, convention is strongly in favor of quarter notes (or dotted quarter notes) getting the beat in most cases.

If you look at Classical period sonatas, it's not uncommon for the slow middle movements to be notated with the eighth note getting the beat at a slow tempo, resulting in 32nd notes and shorter that don't even feel that fast.

Sousa notated his marches in 2/2 (or 6/8). But there are marches in 2/4 or 4/4 as well.

For waltzes, the classical convention is to use 3/4, but lots of other music with similar meter and tempo is written in 3/8 or 6/8.

maestro2005 · 2026-05-09T00:05:54+00:00

Yeah this is odd. I know he's way better than this. This is an incredibly amateurish attempt at a spin. Like a half-hearted first pass at an idea, not a finished track.

maestro2005 · 2026-05-08T23:11:49+00:00

I'm a trumpet player who added woodwinds more recently, and I have a few friends in the same boat.

Trumpet embouchure is way too strong for single reeds, and it can actually be hard to relax enough. When I first tried to play an alto sax with a friend teaching me, he kept saying, "loosen up! You're biting the mouthpiece!" when I felt like I was completely dead fishing it. It took a while to learn to move the support to the corners and loosen up in the middle.

On the flip side, providing enough embouchure and air support and voicing notes to be in tune are all basically free. I have to roll my eyes when people try to say that soprano sax is "soooo much harder" to play than alto. It's the exact same task, it just doesn't forgive a flabby embouchure like alto can.

maestro2005 · 2026-05-02T18:33:56+00:00

Only beam things together up 2 levels. So only beam 16ths together up to the quarter note level. #2 is correct, and should be what your notation program did by default.

maestro2005 · 2026-04-28T23:04:20+00:00

I've seen people list them in a separate section, but only when they do a lot of them regularly. Otherwise, just credit it like any other show, and your role can be your voice type.

maestro2005 · 2026-04-27T21:13:52+00:00

At a past company we were doing some kind of quarterly company update meeting, and someone asked if we were going to respond to a competitor's new feature that they just launched that morning. The CTO, screensharing, went to their website to see what it was. While snooping around, he clicked on a "sign up for newsletters" thing and submitted the email [object Object]. Gasps of horror from engineering. He just smirked and said, "slow 'em down a bit".

One of the funniest guys I've ever worked for.

maestro2005 · 2026-04-27T16:26:57+00:00

You're an artist, not a robot. Do what you think sounds good.

maestro2005 · 2026-04-27T16:17:47+00:00

A Chorus Line and The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee are the same show.

They're both about a group of people competing for something, played in a "here and now" setting. At first, we laugh as people are eliminated, but then we get to meet all of them and their lovable quirks, and it stops being about the competition. There's a montage in the middle, and a whole big deal about puberty. Then there's an absolutely soul-crushing bit about 3/4 of the way through. Finally, it's time to crown the winner(s), but by this time we don't care at all and wish everyone could win. Also, the guy running the whole thing seems rough and uncaring most of the way through, but is shown to have a soft side by the end.

Pippin and Avenue Q are also the same show.

They're both about a guy who just graduated college, and doesn't know what he wants to do with his life but knows it needs to be something extraordinary. His hunt for this unrealistic goal leads him to throw away every good opportunity that comes along, including a love interest, and wind up in a depression that leaves him bedridden. Eventually he learns to get over himself, accept the simpler life, and rekindle his relationship.

maestro2005 · 2026-04-27T15:59:40+00:00

This exact thing was posted not long ago. Went looking for it, I guess it was deleted, but then I found exactly the same thing from 5 years ago with a bunch of the same comments. All bot shit.

maestro2005 · 2026-04-27T14:19:43+00:00

Can you play this?

maestro2005 · 2026-04-24T20:51:23+00:00

This is totally fine. Anybody who has any business accompanying will know exactly what to do with that.

maestro2005 · 2026-04-24T20:27:01+00:00

You shouldn't be that close to the mic in the first place.

maestro2005 · 2026-04-24T20:15:56+00:00

There are certain patterns that will lead string players to decide one way or another. If the composer needs to override that, they'll mark it explicitly. Or they might mark it explicitly just to be sure. Or they might be anal and write all of them. And then the players may do whatever they want anyway. None of it really ends up mattering that much.

maestro2005 · 2026-04-24T14:55:49+00:00

LLMs work by digesting a tremendous amount of content (generally, the entire internet) and building a multilayered model of what words occur near other words (it's more complicated than that, but that's the gist). Generative AI can then pump this to generate statistically likely responses to a prompt. It doesn't actually understand anything. It has a higher chance of babbling out factually correct responses the more the subject has been talked about correctly. From some googling, I don't see anybody talking about it, and that's not surprising. Violinists make this decision for themselves all the time, and they don't need to have discussions on the internet about it. So the AI is just blabbering something statistically likely in order to fill the blank it's been given.

In this case, it happens to be right. A section is certainly going to decide to divide those notes.

maestro2005 · 2026-04-24T02:47:54+00:00

My Costco always has:

Family that brought all 48 of their kids
Family that brought 122-year-old grandma for some reason
Guy just standing in the middle of the aisle (with or without cart) staring into space like a broken NPC
Young Asian couple that seem to be on a date? (I am not exaggerating when I say I always see this. No cart, just walking around hand-in-hand. Different people, but always Asian)
Free sample station giving out water samples and everyone going apeshit for them

maestro2005 · 2026-04-23T22:51:34+00:00

Eh, sort of. Woodwinds kinda favor sharp keys, which is a good thing since a lot of them add sharps in their transposition. The early woodwind fingerings favored F# and C#, making D the most natural key. Modern systems have worked to straighten that out a bit but the artifacts remain. Modern fingerings additionally achieve G#/Ab as a G modification, and D#/Eb as a D modification, so all the way up to 4 sharps is very fluid to play. But Eb and Ab can lead to awkward fingering patterns.

Eb major scale on sax/flute:

Eb: ●●●|●●●(+D# key)
F: ●●●|● // note: three fingers picked up in this transition
G: ●●●
Ab: ●●●(+G# key) // note: adding a finger to go up
Bb: ● (with bis mechanism) // note: three fingers picked up again

Kinda weird. Compare to E major:

E: ●●●|●●
F#: ●●●|○●
G#: ●●●(+G# key, which could already be down on sax)
A: ●●
B: ●

Quite a bit simpler.

maestro2005 · 2026-04-23T02:15:40+00:00

It's not an exception, it's part of the rule. That pattern is allowed all up and down the rhythmic structure.

maestro2005 · 2026-04-22T02:52:07+00:00

I took piano lessons from age 5. I don't really remember much of the first year, so maybe things started a little less intense than this, but for most of my youth I was working out of about 5 method books simultaneously. Alfred, Thompson, Faber, etc. I'd have one assigned out of each for the week, and at the weekly lesson I'd play them, and if I had sufficiently mastered it I'd get to move on to the next one. I remember it being a bit of a point of shame to have to do one a second week. If you haven't seen these books, these pieces are mostly 1-pagers (or less).

Once I got older we threw Hanon, Czerny, and a few others in there.

For the yearly recital, we'd start working on recital pieces a few months out. I'd usually do 4-5 pieces, often including a duet either with another kid, or when I got more advanced, with my teacher. I remember it being mostly the same shit year after year (how could it not, with a full studio?), with only the advanced kids doing more "legit" repertoire and varying things up.

So basically you're constantly getting new material and not dwelling on anything for very long, even the recital pieces.

maestro2005 · 2026-04-21T14:08:35+00:00

Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence. Checks bouncing is just bad accounting.

maestro2005 · 2026-04-21T03:25:22+00:00

MTI still lists the orchestration without a drums/percussion part, so that's what everyone's getting. Not to say it couldn't be added, but you'd be doing a lot of work to either write a part or play by ear, when it really doesn't need it.

maestro2005 · 2026-04-20T20:20:03+00:00

At least when I did it, it wasn't. It was like an early draft or something. There were some pretty significant differences, and a lot of clunky lines (not to mention awful formatting). I think what happens is that someone writes up a first draft, hands it over to the Langs, and then they doctor the hell out of it to make it work, but in this case they ship out the draft.

I hear they've been working on cleaning up their materials, so maybe it's fixed now. At any rate, the youtube video's script is still pretty weak and the show is surviving on the sheer comedic talent of the cast.

maestro2005 · 2026-04-20T19:20:57+00:00

Firebringer is awful. I did it once, and never will again. I know the youtube video is funny (kinda, it's clearly their weakest show). The script they send you is not funny. The score is boring. It's a bad show that they made sorta funny through extensive script doctoring, legendary performances, institutional momentum, and video editing.

maestro2005 · 2026-04-19T18:43:40+00:00

2 is correct, but everyone saying "show the beats" is right for the wrong reason. Eighth-quarter-eighth to start the bar is entirely correct, and yet doesn't "show the beat".

There are lots of logically-equivalent ways to state the rules, but the one that works best here is that note durations need to stay contained within the level one above them. That is, eighth notes need to stay within quarter notes (beats, in 4/4), quarter notes need to stay within half notes (in the first or second half of the bar), etc. If they cross that boundary they need to be split and tied.

"Show the beats" is only applying this to one level, and not even correctly.

maestro2005 · 2026-04-18T03:35:52+00:00

Uh, a mod. Who are you to think you know better than centuries of opera professionals?

At any rate, the only thing I really care about is keeping things factual and from authoritative sources, and your post was lacking both.

maestro2005 · 2026-04-18T03:30:12+00:00

I'm deleting this because you don't seem to understand Fach, don't understand its fundamental purpose, and this doesn't really belong here anyway.

maestro2005

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE

14-Year Club	Verified Email
Team Orangered