I find time signatures nebulous at best.

Double meter and triple meter is how I break them down.

A 2/2 song can really be a fast 4/4 song. A waltz can be written in 3/4 or even 6/8 or rarely 12/8.

Listening to a song that has a repeating pattern of 7, can you tell without looking at the music if it is in 7/4 or alternating measures of 3/4 and 4/4 or something else?

Listening to a song can you tell if it's in cut time or common time?

Some say bass line, if the bass plays on 1 and 3 it must be cut. But what about those mm=220-330 bop songs with walking bass throughout that are written in cut?

So it must be speed. But then I've played lots of standards with walking bass at moderate tempos written in cut time.

I've played songs that have definite swing feel that could have been written in 12/4 time but were written in 4/4 with even eighth notes that should be played as if they were dotted eighth + eight note triplets.

So I tend to think of each numbered area in the BiaB matrix as a cell.

That cell could be a 4/4 measure, two 2/4 or 2/2 measures, one 2/2 measure depending on the style or even half a 2/4 measure, again depending on the style.

Same goes if you F5 3 beats to the cell. It could be a 3/4 measure, half a 6/8 measure or one beat of a 12/8 measure, again depending on the style.

For 5/4 time I often make a cell of 3 beats for half the measure and the next cell of 2 beats for the rest (or 2 plus 3 depending on how the tune is subdivided).

Thinking of the cells as either a measure or a part of a measure with either 2, 3 or 4 beats in it (determined by F5) and as building blocks instead of complete measures unleashes the creativity to do wonderful things in Band-in-a-Box.

I have no problems with cut time in BiaB, I either find the right style so a cell is one 2/2 measure, or I can F5 it to 2 beats, or I can find a style where a cell is two 2/2 measures. There is an amazing amount of flexibility there.

I've done 36 fake disks from popular music books that have from 100 to over 800 songs in each book. That's a lot of songs. And I've never found a cut time song that cannot be represented in Band-in-a-Box.

It's a very flexible program if you simply treat it that way. And in a way, I know a lot of the reason the way it is today is because of the limited resources of DOS and Windows 3.1 and backwards compatibility, but I find that the flexibility of using cells instead of measures actually lets me do more than if the program supported time signatures instead.

Insights and incites by Notes

Bob "Notes" Norton smile Norton Music
https://www.nortonmusic.com

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