What Time Signature is Radiohead’s 'Pyramid Song' in?
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 21 พ.ย. 2018
- Radiohead's 'Pyramid Song' explained! I look at the time signature and rhythm of 'Pyramid Song' by Radiohead and try to conclusively explain what is happening in this classic song's unusual feel.
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Bossa Nova Example: ‘Água de Beber’ by Antonio Jobim (1963)
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“Time signature is meant to make the song easier to understand”
Pyramid Song: no
LoL
😅🥰
The quavers are 3, 3, 4, 3, 3. This is because 4 triangles (3,3,3,3) and 1 square (4) make a pyramid.
mind = blown. Thank you Craig
I swear the drummer is doing it 4, 4, 5, 4, 4 though. The fills he plays might fit that grid a bit better. The piano definitely sounds like 3, 3, 4, 3, 3 which I never noticed until reading your comment. Cheers!
illuminati
@@jheckerman
All pop-culture is Illuminati, it's disgusting. They enslave humanity through spiritual "social"-engineering. "Creep" is right.
Christ is All 😄.
Much love.
oh damn
4/4 is not a easy time signature anymore, thanks to Radiohead
4/4 is supposed to be a basic time signature, but radiohead made it complicated. Lol
Debussy - Rêverie
and meshuggah
Zappa said time signature shouldnt exist, because they dont when you are composing, they exist only on paper.
Bruh, check out Tigran Hamasyan if you think this is a complicated 4/4.
Rather than notating it in 4/4, I'd say this song is an example where notating it as 8/8 might be more useful. 4/4 implies the strong and weak beats being on a 4th, around which we usually synchopate. With this song the piano pattern goes out of its way to only accent the 1st beat of the whole 4 bar chord change pattern.
If we think of it as a swung 8/8, it's easier to understand the 3 - 3 - 4 - 3 - 3 8ths pattern and actually feel it throughout the piano only part, and the drums also become easier to understand. If you say "tacara tacara tacaraca tacara tacara" along with the piano, the song's meter makes sense and feels right.
Unit27 no one with a clue writes music in 8/8
TehWinnerz notation is about communicating musical ideas on paper. If a song requires a certain feel or interpretation, the copyist can and must communicate performance nuances to the musicians using the tools available, including time signatures. Same reason you can write music in 12/8 to indicate 4 beats with an 8th triplet feel per bar, instead of writing in 4/4ths and adding triplet marks to everything. Writing this song in 4/4 with swung 8ths might be technically correct, but the placement of the accents and grouping of 8ths makes it really hard to understand how to perform, and the last thing you want is confusion in your musicians.
Unit27 I’ve been a professional musician for a long time, playing v complicated rhythmic music and I’ve never seen 8/8. But I’m sorry for my comment because I came across as a total arse so i apologise! I’d just write this in 4 and say it was swung
In Greek music, there are these weird time signatures, which were influenced by Minor Asia. Think of 5/8, 7/8, or 9/8. An well-known example of the latter time signature is Dave Brubeck’s “Blue Rondo A La Turk”.
So, I can tell you that there actually is an 8/8 time signature, in which there is an accent on the first, the fourth and the seventh eighth note of each bar.
An example of this time signature in a song is this beautiful Greek ‘60s song:
th-cam.com/video/-F_Po6KJozg/w-d-xo.html
(The translation of the title is “Someone is celebrating”)
keynestortoise thanks but that Brubeck song is still 4/4
I'm not a musician, but I absolutely love Radiohead. I just found that I can listen to their songs many times, and they just stay interesting and incredibly atmospheric.
Thank you for helping me understand why that is.
The more complex a song is, the more you can listen to it and it stays interesting. Can be chords or chord progressions, rhythms, lyrics. Radiohead go for all three
The 4/4 time signature is fully revealed at the 2 minute mark, when the drums enter, initially mimicking 33433, then breaking into a full 4/4 swing, while the rest of the band stays locked on 33433. The two patterns beat against each other the rest of the song. I can't imagine how they do this. It's absolute genius.
Basically the same debate as Videotape, it feels disoriented because it's the piano who starts the song, but the tempo is still the same as when the drums kick in, just imagine the ride of the drums playing alongside the start of the song and it will make sense
Wonderfully explained
Great stuff, really clear and loved the part where you re-wrote it in 3/8 4/8. I also hadn't heard about the Mingus influence. Keep up the great work, but watch out using long clips of audio, you might get the dreaded strike from youtube!
David Bruce Composer thank you David! Yeah, I know what you mean with copyright strikes! Scary! I’ve got away with it so far but no one is safe! Thanks again 🙏
Not with this song in particular, but rather, Mingus is "quoted" in the National anthem, with the signature horn parts. Funky indeed. That section was influenced by the jazz players.
Great video! The claps in the Mingus song instantly reminded me of those in “We Suck Young Blood” off of Hail To The Thief... which also has that jazz freakout
Whenever I find a new music youtuber that I love, you always have comments on their videos. Can you please forward me a list of all of them so I don't have to find them?
I really couldn’t see Any of the guys from radio head having a problem with a vid like this. One of them occasionally gives musical lectures at a uni near where I live. Don’t know if the label they where with at the time have much to say anymore tho.
“What time signature is your song?”
“Yes”
Very original. Have a life. I mean, a like.
So lame. Stop. You repeated a comment meme. Cool
Daily Routine:
Post dead meme in a comments section :||
True music geeks would get that.
@@YAMMAS I see what you did there :II
@@YAMMAS sorry but just because you know what a repeat is doesn't necessarily make you a music geek. We have higher standards than that.
the fact that its making a pyramid ... the fact that the chords are sort of moving around like theyre glitching .... their minds are so powerful
as soon as you brought in crotchets and quavers i blacked out
Is that Roach Dog's little boy?
Indeed. Eighth Notes, Quarter Notes, etc, are so much more easier to understand. Its name IS the definition. Simple. layering names like Quaver and such, is an unnecessary step imo. The one thing America gets right, when it comes fractions and whatever. That useless Imperial system would 10 times more of a hassle to learn, if you had to memorize what a Crotchet of a Inch was.
@@gredangeo yeah but that also doesnt mean to hate it to complete in te n s it y, use what you want
Crotchets and quavers etc make more sense as names once you know them *because* they're not a descriptive term. A quarter note makes sense in 4/4 but not in 3/4
@@lsplord " A quarter note makes sense in 4/4 but not in 3/4" - That makes no sense, what you said. Sorry. 3/4 contains 3 Quarter notes. That's how you get 3 out of 4. 3 Quarters. Thus 4/4 has 4 of them. Guess how 8th Notes are in 6/8 time? That's right, 6 of them. Everything contains its own relevant definition. That's why it's easy to understand.
"As I`m sure you know..."
Yes. Mhm.
Sure
LoL
The bossa nova thing really of caught my attention. Never considered it before. Thanks.
I stand completely mindfucked. How does Yorke not mess this up playing it live is beyond my comprehension! A true genius.
When you put the swing metronome alongside the piano it made sooo much more sense and easier to feel the rhythm.
Once the drum kicks in it is clearly a 4/4 song (but took me 5 years to figure it out
Yuchen Wang it also makes it clear that it’s swung, which isn’t so clear before it kicks in. It’s almost like one of those song intros that come in on an off beat with no clear reference to the pulse so you’re like two to four bars in before you realize you have the beat backward in your head. I’m not sure if there’s a musicological term for it but there’s two good examples on Led Zeppelin IV: Misty Mountain Hop and Rock and Roll, the latter of which I didn’t figure out what Bonham was really doing until I watched a bonzoleum TH-cam video that explained that it’s basically a 50’s style jump intro like Rock Around The Clock or Little Richard stuff and that the drums come in on the ‘and’ of 3.
@@McGuinty2 if we stick with radiohead, try and wrap your head around Videotape. The whole song is offbeat.
agreed, first tine i heard this song i struggled until the drums come in. then it becomes really clear what’s happening
now i only hear 4/4, and just tap along to the song in crotchets
i still cant figure it out fuck
That's so funny to me because I feel the opposite. The drums actually emphasize away from 4/4. The swing pattern is a kick on 1, snare on & of 2, kick on 4, snare on & of 1, and then either kick on 3, snare on & of 3 (first time around), or a fill across 3 and 4 (second time around). If you write that as two bars of 3/4 and a bar of 2/4, and repeat, it becomes much easier to parse: kick on 1, snare on & of 2, kick on 1, snare on & of 2, and then either kick on 1, snare on & of 1, or a fill across 1 and 2. I'm actually a bit disappointed he didn't mention the fact that the drums purposely try to subvert the rhythm in such a way to make it feel even harder to keep straight. It purposely emphasizes 3's and 2's over 4s, and those snare hits on the &s are genius because they further emphasize that the song is swung. The kick and snare hits coincide with the piano chords also, so on top of the chord changes it further emphasizes that the piano is in 3/4 a lot of the time, making it harder to keep the song straight in your head as 4/4.
I can honestly say...as a musician and Uber progrock geek...no song has baffled more than this song. That lead in drum fill is so wonderfully disorienting...even for those brief seconds. Great video chap...the metronome portion was enlightening
Great stuff. It's worth mentioning the amazing drumming on Pyramid Song, since it also contributes to the eery, loose feel of the song. Thanks!
7:54 except that song is easy to follow. I've been working on Pyramid Song for ages now and it still trips me up. I've got the piano pattern down pretty well now, but I'm having a hard time timing the singing over the piano rhythm. Thom's phrasing is incredible. I'm sure he's never had to think about it. He probably just feels it. So far, I haven't been able to get there.
Absolutely
@@JonesWazza i can happily report I got there in the end, i can now sing and play it effortlessly
If it hasn't already been suggested or done, I think a video over "Reckoner" would be pretty interesting. I've heard there is some hidden meaning in the placement and timing of the lyrics and something to do with a so called "Golden Ratio". Loved this video by the way.
Spencer Allen that is actually really interesting, if that is true. I have never heard that before. I covered that song many years ago, and I remembered how different the vocals were in regards where they came in. Well at least to me the timing was different then what I initially thought it would be.
By the way commenting here so your comment gets more visible, so there is more likely that he will cover that subject.
Thanks for this analysis this was probably the best explanation i found on the rhythm and time signature of pyramid song, my favorite song of all time :)
Also, if the bossa nova influence is intentional, then that rhythm is traditionally written in 4/4. Even if there is no conscious intention for drawing from a bossa nova, it has a greater feel for the 4/4 with the bass drum and hi-hat.
In groups of eights: 3 - 3 - 4 - 3 - 3
Note that a pyramid's outer surface consists of four triangles and one square
Yes you are correct here
Such a brilliant band
The fuck I thought this channel would have at least a couple hundred thousand subscribers... Such good production quality, thanks for the video.
this aged well
So glad that you picked up the second important aspect where the chords shift on different beats! Others have already touched on the subdivided rhythm but it's nice to see my hunch was right :3. Great stuff man
seems like thom yorke found a way to put those claps later cos they remind me a lot of We suck young blood
My thoughts exactly.
National Anthem= Moanin' horn section
Brilliantly done! Thank you!
I'd always heard Pyramid Song in 3/8 4/8 but hadn't noticed the symmetry (or the bossa nova connection) before. The rhythms are more resolved in my head now, and the song seems somehow more spacious and balanced.
Great video, thanks David. Love how the swung meter pulls it altogether!
I saw many videos about this topic and yours is the best so far. Thanks man. 🙏🏽
This is an amazing breakdown of an amazing song! I'd always intuited this rhythm, but never had a proper explanation for it, so thank you for laying out so clearly. Definitely earned a new subscriber!
Thanks, this beautiful and mysterious song was aching me with structural curiosity from a while now. Keep it up!
Really excellent video. So much of TH-cam is quickly put together rubbish, this was so well put together. You obviously really put a huge amount of work into these. Thanks!
Great breakdown and analysis. I had enormous problems figuring out the rhythm, meter and chords. I eventually got there on my own and impressed all my friends.
My personal weak point when it comes to reading and writing music is the rhythm aspect. Not sure why. Anyway, the way I play and count it is not perfect, but it gets me there: I simply count:
1, 2, 3, 4, 5 *pause*
...Repeat...
The only exception to this is the beginning of the song, which counts 1, 2, 3 before a pause.
The “pause” for me is felt instead of counted, which works well enough because I know the song.
Any other way of approaching it is just too confusing for my brain.
You have explained this unbelievably well. Well done and thanks! Wonderful stuff.
I've just come across your videos, and I want to thank you for turning pyramid song from one of my favorite beautiful confusing songs into one of my favorite songs that's just beautiful.
i was waiting for this explanation. Simply great
Great, great job ! I am impressed with your ability to make the complexity of this rythme pattern so clearly understable. Clap your hands, people !
But clap in swung quavers though!
When you explain how it could have been written over cyclically changing 3/8 and 4/8 time signatures, which correspond to the earlier breakdown you showed, grouping the (half) beats as 3+3+4+3+3 = 16, it occurred to me, why not just write the whole thing in 8/4?
That would be truer than pairs of 4/4 to the repetition of that pattern, while still avoiding constantly changing time signatures.
I play piano, and I was also reminded by this video, of some sheet music I have of Norwegian folk songs/carols, that I got from my mother, who sang in a choir back in the 50's. This is really obscure, but it's an 8-page booklet with six carols scored for 4 voices (making them ideally suited for solo piano).
When I first went through them years ago, the 3rd one really caught my ear. It has a most intriguing and unusual structure.
It's written with a mix of 3/2 and 2/2 measures, in no particular pattern; in fact, rather than 'tag' each t.sig. change in the score, there is just a pair of t.s.'s at the beginning. (I've seen this done on other sheet music where there are frequent time signature changes throughout a piece.)
The song has 3 "parts," each of which is repeated - AABBCC - and they are different lengths. As written,
A is 2+3+3+2+2+2+2 (= 16);
B is 2+2+2+2 (= 8) the first time; 2+2+3+2 (= 10) the 2nd time;
C is 2+3+2+3+2+2+2 (= 16).
Total -measure- beat (½-notes) count = 82.
To me, it shares with _Pyramid Song,_ the delicious ambiguity of where the downbeats belong, when listened to. And it's quite a beautiful tune! It's in C minor and sounds very Nordic.
For whatever it may be worth, the song title is _Sjung, hjerte, sjung en aftensang,_ and the booklet is titled, "RELIGIØSE FOLKETONAR," published in Bergen, Norway; ©1958 by Tonika.
Fred
What?
I always appreciate and enjoy the brilliant insight you share. Thumbs ups!
Thank you so much for this video! I've been thinking about rhythm of pyramid song such a long time. It was like a mystery for me!
love your videos man, high quality content !
That Mingus song kind of reminds me of "We suck young blood"
Its just the claps
I'm pretty sure I remember reading that We suck young blood was influenced by Freedom too.
@
Vanilla Milkshake .. yeah, I can hear that.
@@faboolean7039 It's not just the claps--Freedom also influenced the rhythmic shifts between the funeral dirge verses of We Suck Young Blood and the cacophonous musical interludes, back into the much slower verses. They didn't just ape the claps from Freedom, but the dynamics.
Love your music theory class! Happy Thanksgiving from Chicago
Excellent job! Wondered about this for years
Loved this. Would love to see more musical analysis from you in the future. Subscribed
Amazing job with the visuals!!!
I don't know how good of a musician you are but I know you have a natural gift for teaching. I suspect for both tho :)
Thank you! 😀
“Pyramid Song is in 4/4?”
Radiohead: “Well, yes, but actually no.”
What an overused bad joke
Wow, this was excellent! I've always loved the strange rhythm pattern to Pyramid Song and wanted to know more about the time signature. You explained it really well. I knew about the Mingus influence but had forgotten which song Thom had said was the one which inspired him when writing this tune. Thanks for mentioning that.
I hope you could do one on the song 'The Butcher' as that has a strange time signature IMO and would love to hear you talk about it.
A pyramid is made up of four 3-sided polygons and one 4-sided polygon; Radiohead converted the geometric shape into the repeated rhythmic unit of this song. 5 beats (over two measures), four of which are 3 quavers in length, one of which is 4 quavers in length. I love that it's **literally** a pyramid song :)
Fabulously informative. Thank you Sir!
Thankyou for another great video
Any thoughts on Decent Days and Nights by Futureheads?
When I saw the name Futureheads, I wasn't expecting such a metrically interesting song! They're using what I call the "3/4 trick". The intro ends with one bar of 3/4 instead of 4/4, creating a 'skipping beat' effect. The same thing happens at the end of the chorus where we suddenly get two bars of 3/4. There is plenty more sudden jumps to 3/4 in the second verse. Later for the bridge it actually fully shifts to 3/4 for a while before jumping back to 4/4. That riff in the intro is also really cool - the very first time we hear it it starts on the downbeat, but then subsequently it starts on the 2& of the bar instead which is really disorientating!
Great suggestion Jay! I might include it in a new video I'm doing soon on the "3/4 trick". I'm a big fan of your channel by the way, nice to hear from you 😊
any thoughts on the map i have on my bedroom wall its huge
Of all places to find jay foreman!
Excellent video. Thank you. Two tracks that come to mind when it comes to time signatures and tempo changes are Family Galaxy by Tim Exile and Brain Dance by Animals as Leaders. The latter, I'm told is mostly in 4/4 but it doesn't sound like it. The non technical term for us non musicians is "all over the place but still works" There is some black art going on.
Really excellent and informative analysis! Thanks :)
The straightening of the rhythm pretty much turned it into an Elbow song
I LOVE RADIOHEAD'S MUSIC OH MY
Thanks for sharing your knowledge. Your videos are great.
My favourite Radiohead song. I love how the loose, dreamy intro resolves into a straight rhythm without losing any of its ethereal beauty. Incidentally, they did the Mingus claps one album later in We Suck Young Blood. That gives that song a weirdly cult-ish feel, like slowed-down Christian revivalist music.
Christianity is not a cult.
I think an eyes wide shut style , Masonic secret party is more accurate.
I play in a band and we cover Pyramid Song. We do it in flamenco style. (Those chords sound so Spanish if you speed it up.) One of the toughest damn songs to keep together! Every time we play it in front of people, it’s shear terror that it’s going to fall apart. We can only do it if we all feel it together in 4/4. If any of us get distracted by the phrasing, it’s done for!
It is only a pathetic song "released" by who would appear extraordinary out by conventional expressive rhythmic style...
Instead it is a typical way to conceal own creative inability... This band is typical doing it !
Pathetic the piano out rhytmic, written scores out std, out musical accent... all by free style.. Would it have been at least rumba...
This is as for Picasso paints... If you put his paining hag at the contrary up/dow it is the same nonsense.. Likewise, of you play this in a different time, of even your disk player jump, or turn asynchronous, it is the same... always weird remaines !
Fella are you having a mental break down what are you trying to say
Great video. One point I would like to add is that what makes the rhythm difficult to figure out at first (at least to me) is also the fact that it starts with dotted quarter notes, which tricks you to hear that as the pulse, and at first I though the rhythm was something like 2 quarter notes, a random longer note, 4 quarter notes, a random longer note, etc. and finding the first beat of the pattern was really difficult because of the seemingly random placement of the chords. But when the drums come in, the pattern becomes clear.
Don't have anything clever to say. This is great mate, thanks. Helpful for digital music producers who work visually too.
After all these years my question is finally answered! Thank you for this enlightening video!!
😊😊
I love the way you present these things.
I think another reason this song sounds strange is that our ears want the half note to be the end of the phrase, not in the middle. This is because the swung dotted quarter notes have "rhythmic dissonance" due to their syncopation, but the half note is rhythmically consonant, since it starts on the beat and ends on the beat. It's also the only long note in the phrase, so it sounds like a resolution. It's almost like they started writing it that way (with q. q. q. q. h phrases) then cut that in half and started in the middle to make it more interesting.
hey man, you have made an amazing channel!! this is my favourite Radiohead analysis vid ever. well done!! What about a video on the analysis of True love waits on A moon shaped pool? Maybe talk about what is going on in the piano / syncopation / Euclidean rhythms. lots of people would be interested . Cheers, Andrew, Leicestershire
Thanks for that, I thoroughly enjoyed it. keep up the good work
Great work... And thank you for posting
Love your channel bro
One of the best videos I’ve ever watched on TH-cam.
Amazing video, great job. Thank you
What a simply brilliant video...thankyou
Awesome work, I've always asked my more musical theory based people to tell me the time signature to no avail! you've solved a good pub quiz riddle. Cheers
I kinda feel like 8/4 would be the most intuitive time signature for this...
I hear 16/4
I hear 8192/4
I hear *123165787973/68719476736*
I think 4/2 would be best with the slow tempo.
This song is in 0/0 time.
*error*
Oh boy this Channel is a good addition to my collection of amazing music channels
Your videos are really great. Keep it up!
Hi David! I would love a break down of “Daydreaming” - Harmonic, Motivic, Rhythmic analysis :)
Amazing song! Maybe I should! I’m planning on learning it in full for my next livestream 🙂
Yes please! Daydreaming is a masterpiece
great video!
*Clapping in swung quaver*
LMAO suuuure
Years I’ve been trying to figure this out! Brilliant video, thank you
Awesome video again, David. You’re the best thing on TH-cam!
"Swing" was my first thought when the drums entered
Another Perfect video!
Great video! Your channel is top quality.
This is just brilliant. Great job sir.
Subbed.
Amazing job.
Interesting that its 4/4 and the rhythmic stuff underlying. Great explanation
aweee can i just say how much i love your accent. the way you say rythem and everything else just makes ur videos so much better. anyway, keep up on the great work 😊
really great video man. thanks for that
This could be the reason for avoiding metronome practicing in my piano class
Maybe a video about Tristan chord in Ideoteque?
@Fergus McGregor the synth "riff" is sampled from a 70s experimental piece based upon the tristan chord, if i recall correctly.
Eugh. I had to analyze the overture in college.
@@akahige8967 That's correct! The piece you're thinking of is "Mild Und Leise" by Paul Lansky.
Really great explaination...well done young lad
Oh God I just love how you explain it!
How brilliant. Pyramid song uses a bossa nova rhythm. This is beautiful to know.
I always thought he was just winging his playing to be all drunk like that and yet staying generally in 4/4
Great video. Thank you!
great video man, really top notch
Slowed down bossa nova in an alternative (?) song; I like that. I also like how you used Água de Beber as your example.
Also the drums, man.
Awesome video :) thank you very much. I’m not too technical but felt I got it when you made that swing metronome example, aah. Also very nice with some history behind it. Cheers
Thanks for this! Very informative!