Sensible Erection | Irregular Meter in Video Game Music

Friday, 26 June 2009

quote [ Most music theory nerds I know have a certain musical feature that really gets them excited — an unusual harmonic progression, a favorite chord, a particular rhythmic figure. For me, that feature is irregular meter. In my experience irregular meter is fairly uncommon in video game soundtracks, so I thought I’d collect what few examples I’ve come across here. ]

Roughly 30 examples with audio, written score and intelligent commentary.

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[Part one | Part two | Part three]

[music] [by ComposerNate@2:32pmGMT] [+10 Interesting]

Comments

Isosceles Lock™ said @ 2:44pm GMT on 26th Jun
I'm not exactly musically literate, (still trying to figure out the bass.) And I can't find it now, but would High Color by Henry Cowell be an example of irregular meter?

I used to play that on a loop alternating with a live recording of the Best Ever Death Metal Band In Denton. Perfect Quake 3 music.

f00m@nB@r said @ 2:56pm GMT on 26th Jun
irregular meter songs have measures that feel "incomplete" to me. whenever i hear that, i have to stop and count.

f00m@nB@r said @ 2:58pm GMT on 26th Jun [Score:1 Informative]
anyway, i found a downloadable copy:

http://www.epitonic.com/index.jsp?refer=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.epitonic.com%2Fartists%2Fhenrycowell.html
http://beemp3.com/download.php?file=4414833&song=II+High+Color

and it's just 4/4. he slows down a lot at the end of measures, giving you that "holding up" feel.

f00m@nB@r said @ 3:00pm GMT on 26th Jun
the mission impossible theme is in 10/8

ComposerNate said @ 3:10pm GMT on 26th Jun [Score:2 Informative]
It sounds 12/8 to me, with an extraordinarily flexible tempo.
Possible direct mp3 link.

Isosceles Lock™ said @ 3:24pm GMT on 26th Jun
Flexible tempo, there we go.

f00m@nB@r said @ 6:02pm GMT on 26th Jun [Score:1 Informative]
rubato. use italian and impress your friends. :)

KingPellinore said @ 6:11pm GMT on 26th Jun
Domo Arigato, Mr. Rubato

Isosceles Lock™ said @ 10:01pm GMT on 26th Jun
I love it when you have a simple question that you never thought to google or ask and one day you finally do and suddenly your whole world gets opened up just a bit wider!

Isosceles Lock™ said @ 10:04pm GMT on 26th Jun
And by that I of course mean:

f∞m & nate = ♥

f00m@nB@r said @ 3:57pm GMT on 26th Jun
i think it's simple duple, rather than compound. the main motif is basically in 4. sounds like a british/irish folk song kind of tune.

f00m@nB@r said @ 3:59pm GMT on 26th Jun
i take that back. you're right: 3 per beat.

Fat Bastard said @ 4:57pm GMT on 26th Jun

Tirade said @ 2:57pm GMT on 26th Jun [Score:1 Insightful]
Its used to great effect in movie soundtracks as well... first example I can think of offhand is the 5/4 Isengard theme in Lord of the Rings.

Dr. Connor Hea said @ 12:12am GMT on 27th Jun
+1 howard shore reference. heard his "crash" soundtrack? the track "sexual logic" was amaaaaaaazing.

Tirade said @ 2:17am GMT on 27th Jun
Sometimes being good can be a bad thing... if the soundtrack is way better than the movie itself, it ends up distracting you from the movie. :P

Defiance.Falcon said @ 5:50am GMT on 27th Jun
If the movie's that bad, I could use the distraction.

Tirade said @ 6:26am GMT on 27th Jun
The whole movie felt very FORCED. There were good things in it. But the story and plot didn't move naturally. And the characters, for the most part, didn't react naturally. The script forced them along the predetermined plot. I think the first and last half hours were the worst in that respect. The middle started to mesh a little better.

KingPellinore said @ 3:14pm GMT on 26th Jun
The verse in Pink Floyd's "Money" is in 7/4. Hard as hell for me to play and sing at the same time.

Anyone who likes odd time signatures in music and hasn't heard it yet, Dave Brubeck's album, Time Out is dedicated to exploring unusual time signatures in jazz. It's a fantastic album.

Caffysue said @ 12:10am GMT on 27th Jun
For others who like odd meters and are hip to jazz (or want to be) check out bassist Dave Holland. Absolutely one of my faves. His compound time work is great. Pianist Brad Mehldau is also wonderful.

Tirade said @ 2:18am GMT on 27th Jun
Shit, I don't think I'd even try to sing and play that at the same time.

matfei said @ 3:32pm GMT on 26th Jun
The Beatles - All You Need Is Love is in 7/4.

Chrix said @ 5:27am GMT on 27th Jun
uuuuuhhhhhhmmmm....ehhhhhhhh......I'm not sure I like thinking of this tune in 7/4. I know it probably sounds pedantic, but I just think of the verses as 4/4 + 3/4. The majority of the rest of the tune is in 4/4... Stuff like this happens in pop and country tunes a lot, more often with bars of 2/4 as opposed to 3/4 (Johnny Cash and the Carter Family comes to mind).

Or 7/4. Whatever works.

iqqy said @ 3:51pm GMT on 26th Jun
I don't understand tempo, specifically the second number. I've researched it a few times, but it seems to be one of those things that just won't stay crammed in the gray matter. I have to relearn it every time I need to understand it.

f00m@nB@r said @ 3:54pm GMT on 26th Jun
you mean time signature? the lower number indicates the "basic" unit.

2 = minim
4 = crotchet
8 = quaver
16 = semiquaver

Hactar said @ 8:20pm GMT on 27th Jun
32 = demisemiquaver
64 = hemidemisemiquaver
128 = quasihemidemisemiquaver

(If anyone can find any music in these, please let me know)

CapnSilver said @ 3:55pm GMT on 26th Jun
the first number is how many notes per bar.
the second number is the length of the note. 4 is a quarter note, 8 is a quaver.

ComposerNate said @ 3:57pm GMT on 26th Jun
Tempo is just the pulse, quantified by beats per minute.

What you probably mean is the meter, and the second (bottom) number specifies which division of a whole note gets the pulse, usually a 4 (quarter note) or 8 (eighth note), less often a 2 (half note) or rarely other.

For the 11/8 marked in my post pic, the meter (also called time signature) states there will be 11 eight notes per measure (also called bar).

4/4 is standard, also called common time. 12/8 is probably the second most popular, maybe 3/4 or 6/8 depending on genre.

arctan said @ 4:49pm GMT on 26th Jun [Score:4 Informative]
What tends to confuse people is that the second number, the note-value of the beat, isn't an objective measure of anything -- you can easily rewrite a piece where all the half notes become quarter notes, turn a 3/2 signature into a 3/4 signature, play it at the exact same tempo and not change anything.

But musical notation isn't written for computers, it's written for people, and there's a certain *feel* that's different from 3/2 to 3/4. The idea is that generally speaking a piece is "expected" to have the same overall number of whole notes relative to half notes relative to quarter notes, etc. -- quarter notes are supposed to be the "normal" unit, half notes the "long" unit, whole notes only used as the rare "very long" unit, etc.

So if the beat is the half note rather than the quarter note, the song will still be written with quarter notes being the "basic" unit, generally, but those basic units will take up half a beat instead of a whole beat -- in other words, the song will be played twice as fast. In the olden days before specifically putting a beats-per-minute number at the top of the score or even putting a word describing the tempo ("Allegro" or whatever) was common, making the piece 3/2 rather than 3/4 was basically an easy way to tell the musician "Play this really fast". Making it 3/8 would similarly be a way to tell the musician to play it with a languid, leisurely pace -- "give a whole beat to each one of the little quavers", etc.

Fryguy said @ 5:38pm GMT on 26th Jun
Thanks for that one. I've been trying to get my audiophile friend to explain this to me for a while, and I actually understand what you're saying.

I always understood what the numbers each meant, but I could never understand the difference between 3/4 and 6/8. I couldn't see why 6/8 was necessary when you write it the same way in 3/4. My wife tried to explain that it's for organization, such that you don't have illegible 64ths all over the place, and conducting when you have different instruments playing different lengths of notes, but I still don't really get it.

f00m@nB@r said @ 6:01pm GMT on 26th Jun
yeah, a lot of it is for convenience of notation, so you don't have to make too many (or too few) marks on the paper. important if you're writing by hand.

my piano teacher explained it as being a rough indication of tempo. that quavers go faster than crotchets. i.e. if you had 2 pieces, on written in 3/4 and one in 3/8, the expectation is that the 3/8 piece would go faster.

arctan said @ 6:33pm GMT on 26th Jun [Score:3 Informative]
The thing is the unspoken intuitive understanding of it could go both ways, and your understanding is more a "modern" understanding, I think because in modern times we understand the "beat" to be highly variable and set to anything you want it to be (a DJ playing electronic music can artificially set his "bpm" anywhere from 50 to 200) and we use artificial metronomes with arbitrarily set bpms to practice with.

In such an environment, it makes sense to say that a *note* is always about the same length (crotchets are "slow" and quavers are "fast") and so when I change the note I use I'm asking you to speed up the beats (if I tell you to play a beat-per-crotchet I'm telling you to use fast beats).

The old-fashioned original intuition, however, was actually completely the opposite, and this can create huge problems for modern musicians trying to understand older scores.

In the olden days setting beats using an artificial device wasn't common -- metronomes weren't invented until the 19th century and didn't become widely accepted for a long time. The very oldest tradition of Western music, Renaissance music, assumed that you tapped out beats yourself and that each beat was about a heartbeat long (a "tactus" or "pulse"), and so the beat felt like the invariant and the *notes* were what changed when you changed the signature.

As music evolved and different tempos became the norm, there would still be an expectation that the beat-length would be the same for each *genre* of music -- that a dance piece would all have the same relatively high bpm, a "lyric" piece a lower one, etc. But when the time signature changed the signal was to change the length of the *notes*, not of the beat.

In other words 3/2 is *faster* than 3/4, because it was expected back then that all pieces in a certain genre would be played at roughly one beat per second, so a 3/2 piece would have the crotchets be half a beat (and half a second) rather than a whole beat (whole second).

This can trip a lot of people up today, as is the case with a lot of ambiguous shit from musical notation that was mostly held together by tradition, but generally when time signature is meant as a specific instruction to the musician (as opposed to being a matter of tradition or convention) in classical music, it's the old-fashioned concept that's holding sway. If I tell you the music is suddenly 3/2 rather than 3/4 I'm telling you to play twice as fast.

That's why the term "alla breve" means to play *twice as fast* rather than twice as slow -- it originally meant going from "one beat per semibreve (whole note)" to "one beat per breve (double whole note)", and in the old days that clearly meant shortening the notes to match the beat rather than lengthening the beat to match the notes.

donnie said @ 10:19am GMT on 27th Jun
That's only half correct. See below. You've not really touched on the fundamental rhythmic differences between 3/2 and 3/4. You cannot take a piece at 60bpm in 3/4 and rewrite the music as 30bpm in 3/2.

arctan said @ 6:28pm GMT on 27th Jun
Uh, no, donnie, you missed the point. No one said that if all I do is change the signature from 3/4 to 3/2 and kept the score exactly the same that would be the same song.

However, from a technical perspective, if I changed the signature *and the notes* then the song would in fact be identical -- if I take a song in 3/4, *double the length of all the notes*, and then rewrite the signature as 3/2, then technically it's the same song. That's the point -- note values have no objective value other than convenience, and if I double the "length" of all the notes but then double the time signature to match then I've technically changed nothing.

The question is why bother having different beat values for notes in the first place instead of just settling on "a quarter note is always one beat" and only changing the bpm.

And that's purely a matter of convention -- if I wanted to I could do something crazy like say "all double whole notes are one beat" and write the whole song with double whole notes as the smallest unit and make the song be in 4/1 time and it would be *technically identical* to if I had written the song in normal 4/4 time -- it would just look weird and be confusing to any musician who read it.

donnie said @ 10:45pm GMT on 26th Jun
I wouldn't say it's so much a matter of convention based on the average duration of notes, however. 3/4 and 6/8 are different for reasons other than tempo.

3/4 goes : ONE two three ONE two three ONE two three ONE two three
6/8 goes : ONE two three FOUR five six ONE two three FOUR five six

etc. The cadence and emphasis describes a longer phrase. It's the difference between ABAB and ABCB.

donnie said @ 10:49pm GMT on 26th Jun
Examples :

3/4 : Rolling Stones - Dear Doctor

6/8 : Leftfield - 6/8 War

donnie said @ 11:16pm GMT on 26th Jun
And to show that tempo has really nothing to do with it - here's Tom Waits, Innocent When You Dream, at essentially the same tempo as the Stones, but in 6/8. The rhythm is entirely different.

arctan said @ 6:30pm GMT on 27th Jun
3/x and 6/x are different, yes.

The thing is that what x is arbitrary -- I could write your 6/8 song and change all the quavers to crotchets and it would be technically the same. It's just that we have conventional expectations for how many eighth notes you use in a score -- a score looks most "normal" when the most common notes are crotchets and quavers and looks "weird" the bigger or smaller the note values get.

This is why people get confused, because they keep wanting to ask why "3/4" can't just be "3/8" and what *objective* difference in value a quarter note has against an eighth note, and the answer is there isn't any outside convention.

donnie said @ 2:57am GMT on 28th Jun
It's a totally different phrase. It's not about mathematical distances in time - a 6/8 phrase is "pronounced" differently to a 3/4 phrase. Do you see what I mean? 3/4 can only be (strong, soft, soft) or (strong medium soft), etc. 6/8 is more dynamic - it can go (strong soft soft medium soft soft). This isn't written into the notes, it's just how the phrase is expressed.

arctan said @ 12:51am GMT on 30th Jun
I know what you're getting at, but this isn't a rule, just a tendency -- since, after all, in music you're free to use whatever note-values you want. There is nothing preventing a song with a 3/4 signature from having a measure full of eighth notes that goes (strong soft soft medium soft soft), and some sections of some pieces are indeed written this way. (Especially in, say, a waltz, where as a matter of convention the beats match the steps the dancers are expected to take, even if the notes are temporarily faster.)

insanemonkey said @ 11:39pm GMT on 27th Jun



3/4 = ONE and TWO and THREE and

6/8 = One and a   TWO and   a

insanemonkey said @ 11:41pm GMT on 27th Jun
i used PRE tags to get the spacing....

Dissonant said @ 4:14pm GMT on 26th Jun
"Run!" from Final Fantasy IX (Part 2) was always one of my favorite tracks for odd meter (very odd)

I am a huge VG music geek, so I will probably post other examples a bit later that aren't covered here, or better yet correspond with the author.

Dissonant said @ 4:26pm GMT on 26th Jun
There's an oddly metred section (6+7+6+7) in the overture from Vandal Hearts II... I always liked that piece, has kind of an inspired chord progression and dissonance.

It's tough to find on the net, though... here is a link to a supposed RealMedia sample from that track, but I couldn't get to play correctly, might be corrupt or something.

Dissonant said @ 9:07pm GMT on 26th Jun
Oh, that's right, YouTube.

Here you go. Kinda crappy game, excellent soundtrack IMO.

PottyMouth said @ 4:28pm GMT on 26th Jun
I used to play in a band that would do an entire set of songs with asymmetrical grooves, like Rush's "Freewill" (7/4 alternating with a 3/4 waltz), Dave Brubeck's "Take Five" (5/4), and Alice In Chains' "Dam That River" (6/4). There'd be about a dozen or so music nerds that would go nuts for it. Everybody else would leave and go make out at the DJ club across the street.

PottyMouth said @ 4:29pm GMT on 26th Jun
I was thinking of "Limelight" when I wrote "Freewill." We did both. Yes. We were at that level of nerd.

f00m@nB@r said @ 4:34pm GMT on 26th Jun
i had a modern dance teacher who would make us do movements with arms in 5, while walking across the floor in 4. i never did get that one.

i can do 3 on 4 or 2 fairly easily now, because it's a pretty common thing.

KingPellinore said @ 4:47pm GMT on 26th Jun
When I did marching band in high school, we played Holst's, "Jupiter, The Bringer of Jollity", which has sections in 3/4. This was easy enough to play, but pretty much all marching band techniques are based around 4/4 time. Very confusing, especially since we had to switch back and forth between 3/4 and 4/4.

And, since it's one of my favorite classical pieces, anyway, here's a performance of it (obviously not a marching band, though)

swiggy said @ 7:48pm GMT on 26th Jun
stupid resse's peanut butter cups has killed this for me.

KingPellinore said @ 8:18pm GMT on 26th Jun
Why?

swiggy said @ 12:51am GMT on 27th Jun

damn blasted classical conditioning. I immediately associate this peice with that commercial now, despite the commerical being very brief, simply because i've heard it so often.

Chrix said @ 5:30am GMT on 27th Jun
'Mars' from Holst's The Planets is in 5/4...

Dissonant said @ 4:50pm GMT on 26th Jun
Richard Feynman could apparently drum his hands in various strange metres (I never could manage the gross motor skills). 5 in one hand and 4 in the other, but also 7-8 and other ones.

ckfahrenheit said @ 5:21pm GMT on 26th Jun
fripp demonstrating 5 against 4 while talking at the same time

f00m@nB@r said @ 6:03pm GMT on 26th Jun
a lot of accomplished musicians and percussionists, i expect, can do this. oscar peterson would do 5 against 4 (or 8) in a stride style.

Tirade said @ 8:35pm GMT on 26th Jun
I sure as hell can't, but my primary instruments have always been strings. Which means both my hands work in concert (no pun intended) rather than seperately. So I never needed to develop those skills.

Dissonant said @ 9:17pm GMT on 26th Jun
Same here. Many years in piano, although I'm quite rusty. Some in singing. Neither of these lend themselves to practicing those particular rhythms, and I have to confess I didn't really try.

Feynman, on the other hand, played the bongos, so you can see where that came from.

nonsense said @ 4:40pm GMT on 26th Jun [Score:5 Funny]
On a long enough timeline, the time signature for everything drops to 4/4.

spectre853 said @ 4:21am GMT on 27th Jun
You don't talk about quarter notes.

EPT said @ 8:03pm GMT on 27th Jun
If this is your first time in quarter note club, you have to notate!

ckfahrenheit said @ 5:13pm GMT on 26th Jun
some others
Zeppelin - The Ocean: 7/8
Metallica - Master of Puppets 4/4 + 3½/4
must be a lot more popular stuff out there

almost any prog band like Magma or Crimson has a lot of stuff in non-4/4. It's so normal in that genre that 4/4 now sounds weird to me :)

Plague by Doctor Nerve (one of my favorite bands)
http://www.doctornerve.org/nerve/scores/plague.pdf
starts in 4/4 then has a few 23s (it's the simplest song on the album)

RoboRonnie said @ 5:34pm GMT on 26th Jun [Score:1 Good]
Best game, best music.

RoboRonnie said @ 5:41pm GMT on 26th Jun
Best song @ 1:27. I find it very reminiscent of Radiohead's Idioteque... or vv.

ComposerNate said @ 5:47pm GMT on 26th Jun
It's standard 32 Bar Blues at 00:25 and 2:40

pleaides said @ 5:56pm GMT on 26th Jun
Try this;

7/8 intro, the rest of it's pretty straight until the last 2 1/2 minutes, which contains my current favourite riff.

Fucking awesome song though IMHO :)

Menchi said @ 6:11pm GMT on 26th Jun
I really like the way Opeth sounds, but can never get past the Cookie-Monster vocals.

astropig7 said @ 8:50pm GMT on 26th Jun
I prefer those vocals to other death metal bands because Mikael Åkerfeldt tries to implement melody and intelligibility in his death growls. They still sound like His Cookieness, but I can usually understand the lyrics. To me, most other death metal bands sound like pigs underwater.

Spaceloaf said @ 8:51pm GMT on 26th Jun
It's an acquired taste. You just have to listen to it for a while and you get used to it. Trust me, it's well worth the effort.

I used to be like you, but some friends encouraged me to stick with it and now I'm a huge Opeth fan. I even love the growling parts. If it helps, just think of the voice as another instrument adding the the texture of the song.

MDXS said @ 12:16am GMT on 27th Jun
This guy knows what he's talking about.

nonsense said @ 6:13pm GMT on 26th Jun

One of my favorite NIN tracks. Oscillates from 7/8 to 8/8, with a midsection in 6/8.

v21 said @ 6:31pm GMT on 26th Jun
I made a stupid comment and now I can't add another comment.

5thEarth said @ 7:15pm GMT on 26th Jun
Tool does this a lot, and Soundgarden did sometimes too, especially in "Spoonman"--14/8 time. Both good bands.

Radiohead's "Pyramid song" is an interesting case and a matter of much debate--apparently it's officially just 4/4 but the rhythm pattern is so odd, and the playing style so slow and loose, that most people can't figure it out.

Re: the Mission Impossible theme, every time I've seen it written out, it's been rendered as 5/4, not 10/8. Although a lot of bands, when covering it, stretch the main hook to two measures of 4/4, which IMHO takes a lot of the impact out of the song.

Spaceloaf said @ 8:26pm GMT on 26th Jun
While they may be wank-happy, no discussion of irregular meter would be complete without Dream Theater. Dance of Eternity has quite possibly the most messed up meter I've ever heard in a song. It's almost constantly changing; I can only imagine the pain in the ass it would be to transcribe.

KingPellinore said @ 8:40pm GMT on 26th Jun
Petrucci may be a bit of a wank-happy guitarist, but I think he does it without losing the musical narrative and emotion.

I don't, however, even begin to understand Yngwie Malmsteen. Yes he can play fast. So?

Spaceloaf said @ 8:43pm GMT on 26th Jun
And on the opposite side of the spectrum, Oceansize does some really great artistic stuff with irregular time signatures without turning into a wank-fest.

This one starts with an understated irregular rhythm. But what I really like is how the vocals are syncopated on top of that. It brings the song to another level.

Another one that moves between 11/8, 12/8, 13/8, and 14/8.

iqqy said @ 8:44pm GMT on 26th Jun
Commence unnecessary boasting: I saw Dream Theatre at Download.

Sorry to say, WHOOOOOOOOOOOSH.

ZZ Top were good though.

endopol said @ 8:56pm GMT on 26th Jun
I'd never seen the music video for this:

endopol said @ 8:58pm GMT on 26th Jun
Best I can tell, it's 15/4 time.

Dissonant said @ 9:19pm GMT on 26th Jun
It actually alternates between 7/8 and 8/8, from what I can hear (the first part at least)

donnie said @ 10:59pm GMT on 26th Jun
Pink Floyd - Money

Made 7/4 famous.

donnie said @ 11:52pm GMT on 26th Jun
Don't know if this was mentioned, but the Ultima Weapon battle in FFVIII has a majorly twisted time signature :

Two bars of 6/8 punctuated by two bars of 2/8 - count :

One two three Four five six
One two three Four five six
One Two
One Two

theolypse said @ 5:52am GMT on 27th Jun
Which adds up to a power of two. And the tempo doesn't change.

The beat is twisted, at most.

donnie said @ 10:14am GMT on 27th Jun
It doesn't quite work that way. Music isn't mathematics. The object is not reduction to the lowest common denominator, it's a transcription of the musical phrases. Tempo is not really relevant.

KingPellinore said @ 2:14pm GMT on 29th Jun
"Music isn't mathematics"

I belive that's the most fundamentally wrong thing I've ever heard anyone say in the history of me hearing people say things.

13ullet said @ 2:02am GMT on 27th Jun

f00m@nB@r said @ 5:20am GMT on 27th Jun
there's a traditional african, iirc, percussion groove where they count down from 12/8 to 1/8, decreasing the meter every bar.

Vampire_X said @ 12:09pm GMT on 27th Jun [Score:4 Informative]
tool - lateralus
"Counting between pauses, the syllables in Maynard James Keenan's vocals during the verses form the first few Fibonacci numbers, ascending and descending:[1][2]

(1) Black,
(1) then,
(2) white are,
(3) all I see,
(5) in my infancy,
(8) red and yellow then came to be,
(5) reaching out to me,
(3) lets me see.
(2) There is,
(1) so,
(1) much,
(2) more and
(3) beckons me,
(5) to look through to these,
(8) infinite possibilities.
(13) As below so above and beyond I imagine,
(8) drawn outside the lines of reason.
(5) Push the envelope.
(3) Watch it bend.

The Fibonacci sequence shares a relationship with spirals, which are mentioned several times later in the lyrics.

Additionally, Keenan begins singing at 1:37 into the song. 1 minute 37 seconds, or 97 seconds, is approximately 1.618 of a full minute. This happens to be the golden ratio, which is closely related to the Fibonacci sequence.

The time signatures of the chorus change from 9/8 to 8/8 to 7/8; as drummer Danny Carey says, "It was originally titled 9-8-7. For the time signatures. Then it turned out that 987 was the 17th number of the Fibonacci sequence. So that was cool.""

jerv said @ 2:16am GMT on 29th Jun
I am not enough of an audiophile to get *that* anal about timing, but after listening to Seasons in the Abyss and a large number of house mixes, I fail to see why odd timing has anybody thrown off or anything.
To my mind, tempo and beat are things to be played with until you get the sound you want. That is true of those that write the song, those that produce/mix it, and those that play it.