Songs in 6

You know, when I was looking for this image, I could have sworn it was called "I Saw the Figure 9 in Gold." And then I was going to be clever and flip the image upside-down. Du-oh! I spent about half an hour searching my bookshelves and the internet just trying to remember the name of this freakin' painting, and more time trying to find a picture of it, so it's going to stay in this post. You'll just have to pretend it's a 6, because that would have been so artistic and deep and meaningful. I guess my memory is going. Did I mention I celebrated my 30th birthday a few days ago? Yeah. Old.

Now, what was I going to blog about?

So we've been working on a song in 6. What does that mean? Well, it means that it's in 6 time. And what does that mean? There are six quarter beats in a bar. What's a bar? How do you know there are only 6 beats? How do you know they're quarter beats if there are 6 of them? Wouldn't that make them 1/6 beats?Are you seeing what I'm getting at? I have no musical background, and here we are working on a song in 6. I could live in blissful ignorance, playing my way through this song in 6, never knowing that I was playing a song in 6, if only if it weren't for the solo section. Once you start trying to put a solo on a 6 time backbeat, then you definetely know something is wrong when your regular little riffs and ratamacues or whatever just aren't working anymore. People who are more musically inclined than me kept saying that they were trying to figure out where the 1 was, and of course I had no idea what they were talking about. It starts to make sense that you need to know where the beginning of the 6 beat bar begins when you're waving your arms around like you're finished with a line in your solo only to discover that there is something profoundly wrong with everyone else still grooving in the backbeat. It's very peculiar and hard to describe. I guess you can say everyone is counting out loud from 1-6 but you are only counting to 4 and starting all over. Things don't match up.

I asked my teacher if she could tell me what song there is out there in 6 so I could try to listen to it and maybe get a feel for what 6 time sounds like. She said African music is in 6. And I was thinking, Ok, that narrows it down a bit. But then she said she'd bring me in something I could listen to, and true to her word, she did. It's a cd of djembe music and she let me know which songs were in 6. Wow. Djembe music is fast. Djembe players are like superstar shime players--on speed. But it was good to hear and know a song that was in 6. Only problem was, was that the notes are played so fast, I couldn't really hear what was going on. So what I did was that I played the songs at half speed (it's a little trick Windows Media player is capable of. I hate that player, but I think it redeemed itself with that innovation). Djembe songs at half speed are COOL! You have to tweak the sound settings to try to fix the distortion you get from playing a song at half speed, but it's so worth it. I guess in that kind of music you have someone playing a base beat on a deeper sounding drum and it's amazing to hear the complexity of what they are playing--rhythms and patterns at different pitches all going on at the same time. I was blown away. It could totally be translated into taiko music. You should try it. Now I just need to hear something that will inspire another fabulous taiko solo--a solo in 6--and I'll be all set. For now, I'm all ears.