Time is a funny thing . . . .

hollywoodrox

When I’m listening to drum beats  for a composition  85bpm can sound quite fast depending on how busy it is . 

When I listen to a song  say Cyndy Lauper , time after time  at 130 bpm you think of it as a slowish ballad , but it’s quite busy at times underneath  but her vocal delivery gives it a slower feel .

Rick springfields Jessie’s Girl  sounds much faster paced with his vocal delivery  but at the same 130 bpm it sounds a faster song .

I know it’s all in the subdivisions but you so get used to thinking of songs as slow or fast  from the vocal delivery even if you think you are listening to the music .

Somebody get me a Doctor is a fast 130bpm
compared to Are you lonesome tonight 

Cranky

RHCP’s “Could Have Lied” is listed as 141 bpm, but I have to set my looper’s beat to 70.5 for it to sound right.

viz

hollywoodrox said:

Somebody get me a Doctor is a fast 130bpm
compared to Are you lonesome tonight 

Well, AYLT is 65bpm rather than 130 and is in 3/4 rhythm with a bar therefore lasting 2.8 seconds, whereas a bar in Someobody get me a Doctor, despite having four beats, only lasts 1.8 seconds, so it’s much quicker. 

You could even argue SGAD is in 2/4, with a bar lasting 0.9 seconds. 

Musical_Mystery_Tour

hollywoodrox said:

When I listen to a song  say Cyndy Lauper , time after time  at 130 bpm you think of it as a slowish ballad , but it’s quite busy at times underneath  but her vocal delivery gives it a slower feel .

Rick springfields Jessie’s Girl  sounds much faster paced with his vocal delivery  but at the same 130 bpm it sounds a faster song .

Yes, Run Through The Light is at 131 BPM, but it only feels like that when Trevor Horn is playing the more up-tempo bass parts and the bass drum and floor tom kick it up a bit. When it's the more open bits with the Fairlight stuff, it seems a lot slower than 131 BPM.

An interesting thing which makes that happen - which is pretty unusual for a rock band, and especially a prog rock band - is that there are literally no cymbals on that track at all, not one. At times it makes you think it might have switched to a different time signature. It does shift keys a few times with that Les Paul guitar though. At the time, everyone in the studio thought there was way too much treble on Steve Howe's guitar, but when you listen to it, and particularly these days, you can hear that he was right to have it that way. I suspect that sound was influenced by the fact that he had one of those Fender Teles with the very treble-ish humbuckers.

Genius track from some great musicians, and like the album it is from, way ahead of its time, as evidenced by the fact that Yes fans who were miffed about Horn replacing Anderson on vocals and the departure of Wakeman, initially slagged the album off, but these days it's among a lot of the fans favourite Yes albums, with Into the Lens possibly being the most well-known song from them of all.