Trash
p.b.m. Lyrics

Jump to: Overall Meaning ↴ Line by Line Meaning ↴

Girl! Why not take out the trash?
And once you get him out, tell him not to come back again
Girl! Put that cat in the bin
After what he said, after everything he did

You had him figured out a while ago
And I know it's not exactly breaking news
But it's all been a little like a trial for you

And a bunch more talking won't make him true

Ah, c'mon, Girl! Why not take out the trash?
And once you get him out tell him not to come back again
Girl! Why not give him the slip?
Get the crooked straight
Get the go-getter good and gone

Why? It's so plain that he's just makin' it up
And he's still got you coming back for more
Why you never ever think of breaking it up
Tell me, what bad deal's gonna close that door?

Ah, c'mon, Girl! Why not take out the trash?
And once you get him out, tell him not to come back again
Girl! Why not give him the slip?
Get the crooked straight
Get the go-getter good and gone

I'm not saying all the boys are the same
But some boys are the same and it's Thursday now
I'm not saying all the boys are the same
But some boys are the same and it's Thursday now
I'm not saying all the boys are the same
But some boys are the same and it's Thursday now

Girl! Why not take out the trash?
And once you get him out, tell him not to come back again
Girl! Put that cat in the bin
After what he said, after everything he did

Girl! Why not take out the trash?
Girl! Why not take out the trash?
Ah, come on, Girl! Why not take out the trash?
And once you get him out, tell him not to come back again

Girl! Why not give him the slip?

Get the crooked straight
Get the go-getter good and gone

Overall Meaning

The song "Trash" by p.b.m. is a song about a girl who is in a toxic relationship and needs to get out of it. The lyrics suggest that the boy is not good for her, but she keeps coming back to him. The chorus "Why not take out the trash" is a metaphor for getting rid of the bad things in her life, with the trash representing the boy who is not treating her well. The song acknowledges that it's not easy to leave a relationship, but it's important to recognize when something is not good for you and take steps to move on.

The first verse encourages the girl to take action and get rid of the boy, telling her to put him in the bin and not let him come back. The second verse acknowledges that the girl has already seen through the boy's lies and deceit, but she is still struggling to let go. The bridge reinforces that not all boys are the same, but some are and it's time for her to take control of her situation and get rid of the bad influence in her life.

Line by Line Meaning

Girl! Why not take out the trash?
Why don't you get rid of him?

And once you get him out, tell him not to come back again
Don't let him come back after you throw him out.

Girl! Put that cat in the bin
Get rid of him like you would with garbage.

After what he said, after everything he did
After all the lies and harm he caused you.

You had him figured out a while ago
You knew what kind of person he was for a long time now.

And I know it's not exactly breaking news
I know this isn't new information for you.

But it's all been a little like a trial for you
It's been a tough experience for you to handle.

And a bunch more talking won't make him true
Talking won't change the fact that he's a liar.

Why not give him the slip?
Why not sneak away from him and leave him behind?

Get the crooked straight
Make him change his ways and become a good person.

Get the go-getter good and gone
Make him leave and never come back.

Why you never ever think of breaking it up
Why don't you consider ending the relationship?

Tell me, what bad deal's gonna close that door?
What negative situation will finally make you end it?

I'm not saying all the boys are the same
I'm not generalizing all men.

But some boys are the same and it's Thursday now
Some men have similar behavior, and it's been going on for a while.

Girl! Why not take out the trash?
Why not throw him away like trash?

Ah, come on, Girl! Why not take out the trash?
Seriously, why not get rid of him?

Lyrics © O/B/O APRA/AMCOS

Lyrics Licensed & Provided by LyricFind

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Most interesting comments from YouTube:

Mr Ewan

2y↑9

This is the sort of stuff I addressed in my Grad Dip thesis, "The Communication of Type-Setting". I came up with:

"The purpose of typeset music is to let the reader recreate the composer’s intent under the worst performance conditions. Printed music is a set of instructions for the performer, not the composer. The printed document can be used in two distinctly different ways: either for slow time-relaxed consumption (such as for practice, memorisation or analysis), or for time-critical events, such as sight-reading or live performance. The music has to be able to meet both uses."

But. Maybe there's another purpose for written music — to record aural objects. But I think a sound recording would be better.

Thanks for the thought-provoking discussion.

--------
I was at a rehearsal this week and the drummer wondered why ♩=69 rather than ♩=70. We all agreed that while 69 was "nice", 70 would probably be simpler to comprehend. I thought it was either to do with gears in mechanical metronomes (numbers of teeth on cogs, etc) or to make simple ratios for changes between 2-based time and 3-based times, such as 3/4 to 6/8, or hemiolas. Now I know it's the minimum perceptual distance from the previous marking. I presume the datum is ♩=60, and the rest were derived – probably empirically – from there.

--------
I sometimes add stuff to amuse future-me. In my thesis, in the section on timbre:

"Timbre also seems to miss out in the typesetting world. This is paradoxically because there’s too little to say, or too much to say. It would be extremely difficult to get a clarinet quartet where:

· One clarinet should sound like the second flautist of the Berlin Radio Orchestra in 1963.
· One clarinet should sound as though it’s using a split number 1½ reed where the player is used to playing on a number 4.
· One clarinet should sound like it was invented on Neptune, at Easter.
· One clarinet should sound like it’s being played by a trombone player, who had to quickly borrow any instrument that was available, because his own instrument was stolen by a gang of fake portrait artists on a tram in Rio di Janeiro.

It would be impossible to get a second quartet to play the same music.

Although rather extreme, the example shows that timbre cannot be made too specific. Rather, “four clarinets” has to suffice."

Studies in Plink

2y↑1

I often use decimal values for the bpm in my music. Specifically to match the key I’m writing in. I actually got the idea from you.
It allows me to roll percussion to the point where it is perceived as a tone and stay in key.
If anyone is interested here are bpms with corresponding keys
C 122.62
Db 129.93
D 137.65
Eb 145.82
E 154.51
F 163.70
Gb 173.45
G 183.75
Ab 194.67
A 206.25
Bb 218.51
B 231.51
Note that you can get fourths and fifths by playing dotted notes or triplets.

All comments from YouTube:

Adam Neely

2y↑1K

Decimal point tempos also might be necessary for calculating/programming metric modulations, (polyriddim, lol) but honestly, you could round up or down and nobody would notice.
Watch this video ad-free on Nebula!
https://nebula.tv/videos/adam-neely-this-tempo-is-trash-and-should-never-be-used

A C

1y↑2

I could see them for very slow tempos. 16.5 bpm feels reasonable, well, as reasonable as anything that slow can.

manictiger

As a former quick trader, you guys haven't seen real fun until you start doing 112.3748

JazzyFizzleDrummers

My looper would notice. The recording knows all

Andrew Cook

I just like decimal tempos because they’re funny to look at. Totally useless, but funny

fhhsvnggbh

just like the y2k bug, no one will notice, Till domething happens and everyone needs to notice lol.

38 More Replies...

ANDREW HUANG

2y↑866

Absolutely agree with you regarding notation, but within the DAW I’m an ardent decimal points tempo person since I use tap tempo to “feel” where I’d like my recording to be. I’d also point out that if you’re only measuring the just noticeable difference of quarter notes, you overlook that we can perceive differences in durations of longer notes within that tempo :)

Yuulian

@Connor Seunninga Haha

野龍

2y↑2

I forgot whether it's from your advice or somewhere else, but there's an idea is that the tempo shouldn't be a set value but rather a constantly changing one, that goes slightly faster when the music is going into the more intense part, which means decimal or even nonrational BPM should be used in DAW. But that's just in DAW and probably shouldn't happen in sheet music scoring (which is supposed to be an abstraction) still.

Liam Plunkett

@Santiago Ramones so true lol i always do that without even considering that it's a pointless thing to do

John Paul Buce

2y↑2

making music with 114.57bpm

dry lentil lizard

2y↑1

Was thinking the same thing

5 More Replies...

jawor. jr

1y↑21

Decimals are very useful in gradual changes in tempo. they are also useful in soundtracks when you want the music to go well with the scene. Also sampling something might be easier if you have decimals in your tempo

dip doop

1y↑2

he makes these points in the video

ApsDoesStuff

1y↑26

For a song that I made long ago, the melody fit the best at 120.10 bpm and i left it that way

The Hardcore hiphop

Same with me

kris?

1y↑10

i like your perception of sheet music :) i think of sheet music as a story book, and me playing it is reading aloud. Eventually, i may no longer need the book to portray the story verbally anymore, and i can tell someone else the story and they can tell it after hearing me

Хэллдик / Helldick

1y↑42

i always write my music in tempos with decimal points. First, i think of it as of some kind of watermark. Second, it's like why japanese put beautiful drawings on the inner side of a cloth for me; nobody knows it's there but you. This is just completely different philosophy - a little detail that doesn't make sense in a practical way, but very meaningful theoretically. For me it also serves as the representation of how we sense the surroundings - our perception isn't ideal so we always will miss something, and so in music as well there might be a sound you don't hear, speed difference you couldn't realise, maybe even an image in songs spectrogram you don't even have idea about. So doing such dumb things in a first look as setting the tempo with decimal points in it for me is like making the music honestly, the way it should be done.

Хэллдик / Helldick

1y↑1

@My New Account 2 welp i can sure refer to my music as "cringe" (and im ok with that (kinda))

My New Account 2

1y↑5

This is probably what Adam meant by 'cringe' - and I don't mean that in a bad way. Every 'personal' thing is 'cringe' from a certain perspective, and vice versa; what matters is how each person views that personal thing

Idefilms

2y↑5.2K

That opening one-take is an incredibly effective intro, Adam. Crazy how the lack of a cut makes such a big subconscious difference in our attention.

Artur hedlund

Watch lindybeige. Gives a 3 hour lecture about a roman battle almost no cuts.

Ben

@fikradas Jesus Christ loves you ❤️

Ben

@Allen Jesus Christ loves you ❤️

Ben

Jesus Christ loves you ❤️

Ben

Jesus Christ loves you ❤️

15 More Replies...

ballhawk387

2y↑803

"If it sounds right, it is right" - groundbreaking British recording engineer and producer Joe Meek. I wonder what the precise tempos (and how unsteady they are) of many of the most highly regarded songs are? That would be an interesting analysis.

ballhawk387

@Geeeee8 Often anything but slightly. And often that works

Geeeee8

2y↑1

Older music recorded without a clicktrack doesn't have a consistent precise BPM. It'll vary ever so slightly

Brick Nolty

2y↑3

@Shiomusic until you take the 2 seconds it takes to make that google doc public, I don't think actually compiled any of that - you're just making shit up.

Dave D

2y↑1

@Dennizje I think one was tuned A440 and the other A435 or something

Dennizje

2y↑1

@Dave D That's downright hilarious lol. I wonder which was the faulty one. A certain amount of HZ is a certain amount of HZ defining a note. One of them had to be off right.

10 More Replies...

Sombrero

1y↑3

I'm not saying it wasn't a shot in the dark, but I did guess the 5ms one was late, because it definitely didn't sound early.

Have you heard about how the brain syncs sounds to images, but only when they are late not early. Because the speed of sound being so much slower than speed of light it's an everyday task for the brain, it's why you don't hear sound being late up to from about 30 meters(or 100ft) away.

Also the reason why TV broadcast are(or at least used to be) purposefully a bit late with the audio, because if there is a minor desync and the sound is a little bit early it becomes incredibly irritating for the listener, but it being late there is a relatively long window before the listener notices anything.

Now I kind of want to compare the 5 note example to one that's 5ms early, should be much more noticeable in theory.

Max Limit

2y↑626

Strange example of decimal BPM: Hurricane by Kanye West is 160 BPM on the dot, but its earlier leaked versions are all 157.61 BPM, since they all use the older Yandhi beat. Since Moon was initially created as an outro to those earlier versions, it, too, is 157.61 BPM, even though Hurricane isn't anymore.

PaulTube

theres Never Gonna Give You Up, with 113.333

Alex Karpenter

@野龍 well, honestly I don't know, I've done reductions of so many filmscores and I've seen that kind of tempos pretty often, but I've never even thought about it...

野龍

@Alex Karpenter If it's transcripted then it's transcripted wrong. If the original score is written as so, the composer or the engraver was lazy. Either way, that tempo isn't intentionally chosen, but rather auto generated based on important time markers. In reality the exact number doesn't matter, and it's the job of the conductor to keep the pace right on par.

Alex Karpenter

@野龍 find some filmscores on the internet, tempos like 157.26 are quite common...

saboss

80 degrees

7 More Replies...

ultrawow65

2y↑210

I once went to a percussion show.
Everything was amazing, the musicians were incredible, all up to the point where they started shifting towards playing some "native tribesman music" which sounded as racist as you read it.
But what really set the tone, was the one poor attempt of playing Brazilian rythms. One of the performers set up a less than basic drum set at the front of the stage, put up a notation on a stand, and started smacking the drums.
From the transcription point of view, every note was performed with perfectly, maximum accuracy and care. From a soul point of view - it was the anti-thesis of Brazilian music. It was tasteless, soulless, empty, robotic. Again, great musician, you could not argue that he lacked any skill. But the techincality of how perfect music can be played, made him blind to the beauty of sometimes imperfect play.

347Jimmy

1y↑2

Brazilian music tends to have the fourth beat land slightly late, you won't get a genuine feel if you're "on" every beat

eristocrates

reminds me of medaka from the manga\anime medaka box. she had perfect execution yet was unable to express

Gurriato

Another moron who calls everything "racist". How very tiresome.

ballhawk387

2y↑6

This brought to mind Keith Moon. I was puzzled when a neighbor described his drumming as "very precise", but have come to understand what was meant. While Moon hardly ever played anything with a steady volume, his dynamics were exceptional, indeed very precise, to the point they defied notation, in a fluid and soulful way. He made the drums sing, whisper, and shout, smoothly and seemingly effortlessly.

Ectochrist

2y↑1

*antithesis.

David Bennett Piano

2y↑7.3K

I think perhaps the ultimate example of western notation just not being able to represent something is SWING! Of course, you can try triplets, dotted eighth notes or other tuplets, but the best solution is just to notate the music as if it were straight, and just tell the performer “swing!”.

In other words, if you micromanage the swing, the swing dies.

The Scene Time Continuum

@thatchinaboi USA "they got it from africans' HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA KID WHAT???

thatchinaboi USA

White people call it swing, but white people got it from Africans, and African Americans call it "groove".

The Scene Time Continuum

@Jordan Scott ayo shieeet dose wypipo be doin stuff
also sounds 100% false

pyrioncelendil

No, it honestly isn't. The ultimate example of western notation not being able to represent something to any degree of usefulness are "black MIDIs." There's absolutely nothing you can do, as a musician, with sheet music that's just an incomprehensible wall of solid black.

Stoned

From my experience with former bands mates...western transcription is not having a clue about the note, timing, measure, etc.

Or maybe I'm just expecting to much from them. Lol

94 More Replies...

sPercyboon

2y↑153

Talking about tempo and perception, it might be fun to look into the music genre "Extratone", where the BPM is so fast it becomes an, you guessed it, extra tone

sPercyboon

2y↑1

@Rykehuss I've never heard this before, interesting. I was just going about what was told to me before, I stand corrected

Rykehuss

2y↑12

Thats not why its called extratone. DJ Heinrich invented the term, from german words "extrahieren" (to extract) and tone which is the same in german.

Gabriel V.

2y↑2

Isnt that called weirdness?

blah blah

2y↑4

this is called granulation. welcome to the club

Pirenfly©

1y↑2

I'm actually quite impressed that I got that fifth late pulse right

NidusFormicarum

2y↑28

There is also the issue of consistency: How often do we actually play a piece in EXACTLY the same tempo from start to finish? I find that I often have to change the tempo on the playback from say 80 to 79 to 82 in another passage, but I see no point in writing it down that exactly. The thing is that the "right" tempo mgiht also depend on the performers and how they percieve the piece, accentuations, dynamics etc.

james_minecraft0 *Formerly Gabriel Liam Ryan

1y↑32

Decimal point tempos is actually a really big problem for people who do mashups because for a little while it seems normal and then it becomes a mess…… #JusticeForMashupMakers
Also i love the music that comes before you talk about a topic, i want a full version please!

just10 tyson

Hilarious 🤣

Trentin Martinez

1y↑1

Lol hope this blows up

Carl Ayotte

1y↑5

Sometimes you piss me off and I avoid your videos for a while. Then you make a masterpiece like this and I’m drawn back in. Nice work.

mcaeln

How could he possibly do that???

The Hardcore hiphop

Normally i use 128 bpm because of my house musics and thats really feels good

Sebastian Mathew

2y↑22

As an admirer of the existential philosophy, I would say, this thought he is sharing is actually saving music from mechanical objectivity and justifying the randomness of human actions, like a slightly delayed note that brings all the beauty.

改善zen_Kai

2y↑19

This video is pure entertainment and learning combined.

Great video Adam!

MLGaeming

2y↑1.6K

To me it seems kind of like comparing 29.97fps to 30fps. Your eye can't tell the difference between the two and it generally doesn't matter which frame rate a video is in, but it becomes extremely important when combining and syncing audiovisual content.

It is the same for music, an accurate bpm is sometimes very useful. If the source audio is at 100.25bpm and you add 100bpm audio to it, it gets out of sync and sounds absolutely awful. This is something that I occasionally come across when creating mashups and it is terrible to see people mark down the bpm incorrectly without the decimal point.

fickle Fox

@MLGaeming You are hilariously wrong. Go watch Linus' Tech Tips tests on this subject; the human eye can detect well upwards of 130fps. 30fps is now very old, antiquated rumor-mongering.

ひっかもりいDaniel

@YEs yep, that's exactly my point. Although I have not seen an option to switch from 50 to 60 on any of the games I have for gamecube and ps2. Also worth noting that PAL-M exists, which is has the same specifications as NTSC (including refresh rate), but with PAL way of generating color.

YEs

@ひっかもりいDaniel PAL and NTSC refresh rates haven't mattered for a while now, it'd only be relevant with older games on older platforms using older displays. Modern displays can do 60Hz just fine, so modern software aims for 60Hz. You may recall PAL 6th gen (around 00-06) games having the option to choose between 50Hz and 60Hz, and that's because the PAL standard was slowly being updated and adopted.

Radha

you wouldn't be able to tell if the screens always played the exact frame rate. unless you are using a CRT or screen with adaptive refresh rate, screens update at fixed intervals. most screens (60hz) update every 16 milliseconds, a framerate which isn't an integer division of 60 results in noticeable stutter

EebstertheGreat

2y↑2

@NiamhNyx No it isn't. The refresh rate is a constant here, only the frame rate changes. So every frame will be stale for 0-4 refreshes plus whatever other latency every time you see it. That's the case regardless of whether you use 29.97 vs. 30 fps. Only a single refresh difference over more than 30 seconds. You won't notice it.

Now, if you're talking about the difference between 144 fps and 288 fps, sure, you might notice that, because your frames will only be at most 0.5 refreshes stale instead of 1. That's a factor of 2 difference though, not a factor of 0.001

39 More Replies...

Scouting

2y↑12

a few years ago when I first getting into music production, I made this melody that had a super wack temp like 135.27 or something like that. it happened after I accidentally messed with something and I was to inexperienced to know the difference. A year later I revist the project because I like the melody. Noticing the wack tempo, I go to fix it, and for some reason the synth sound I was using on the melody sounded super different and not nearly as good when I fixed the tempo. So somehow I have this melody that only sounds good at a wack tempo lol

tribudeuno

2y↑13

I recently listened to a lecture given by Brian Eno, where he spoke of his collaboration with Italian tenor, Pavoratti. The first time that Pavoratti entered a studio with Brian Eno, Eno and the musicians present started to attempt to throw something together, to write something new using the studio techniques and equipment they had available. Each musician probably arrived with a few ideas that they had developed on their own, and the group started to try and see how they could get these ideas to gel together. Eno said he looked at Pavoratti, who had a look of surprise and incredulity on his face. He said something to Eno like “You are making this music right now?” He had never in his life experienced anything like that. A recording session to him was where you got together with a symphony orchestra, broke out some old warhorse, e.g. Bizet’s Carmen, and started to rehearse and record. He just never realized that it was possible to make music on the fly. And he was amazed, and Eno and Pavoratti began to have deep discussions on the topic.

tribudeuno

@psykeeq …
Pavo is turkey in Spanish, and Pavorotti was a turkey whenever he attempted to lipsync a concert instead of rendering a live performance like the people were paying for…

psykeeq

Pavarotti, not PavOratti...

STØLACE

2y↑19

I generally agree with the sentiment of this, but sometimes when I'm trying to transcribe other people's music from an audio source, setting that exact BPM helps keep the music synchronized with the Logic session as I'm transcribing things digitally.

Teimo

2y↑20

When I make music on FL, I always put a set tempo that ends with .00 (like 140.00), but once I find a tempo I'm proud of, I like to spice it up and just flick the numbers up and down on the decimal points, cause I find it fun and interesting, and in the end, like you said, you won't even be able to notice it. I definitely do agree though, that tempos DO NOT need to be ridiculously accurate, unless the song was originally made like that. You can always just cut up the song to fit it to the tempo.

Spiritman Productions

2y↑373

I love this video and I agree wholeheartedly with it... apart from one little caveat: When creating a video animation that moves to the beat, I compose a piece of music (or time-stretch an existing one) to match a beat to a whole number of frames. That means, at 25fps, if I want a beat every 12 frames, I need 125bpm, or for every 15 frames it's 100bpm. But if I want a beat every 14 frames, it's 107.142857bpm to stay in time. 16 is 93.75, 18 is 83.333333 (or 166.666666). 🎶

BAMUZ

2y↑1

@Spiritman Productions
I def understand that, I guess that imo is the only time to use decimal tempos lol

Spiritman Productions

2y↑1

@BAMUZ Well, 7 minutes into the video, it would be out of sync by a whole beat. In fact, you would start to notice much sooner than that. ;)

Visassess

He explicitly talked about that at the beginning of part 2

BAMUZ

But realistically, is 107.142857 really thhhhaaatt much different than 107??
I def understand what you’re saying and definitely good on you for using the brain hahah !

Adisander

@Stuart Conner Decimals are easier, yeah, but allowing input and display of fractions would still be trivial. Make it take a string (only accepting numbers and basic arithmetic operators, or even just . and /) and parse it as a float. If parsing fails, return to the last previous parse-able string (saved separately). The rest of the program then uses the float as previously, as it's effectively the same number, it's just what's ideal for computers to handle and what's ideal for human legibility isn't always the same.

Multiples/dividends of video frame-rates would mostly be fractions, when shown in relation to seconds or minutes. Only 1/25 is a decent number (and even then less obvious as a decimal than as a fraction), 1/24, 1/30, 1/60 are all pretty disgusting decimals.

12 More Replies...

Jussi Rissanen

2y↑22

Two points as a musician creating and recording my own music and doing these in parallel:

a) Decimal point tempos are trash playing and performing music. It really doesn't matter, even if it's own piece. Also, performing live without metronome tempo may anyway fluctuate. And it should.

b) Sometimes, just sometimes having 89.5 rather than 89 or 90 bpm can help create just the right atmosphere during that specific moment of creation process. I've created few songs that seemed to require .5 tempo, but it wasn't for the performance and arguably for the song (the transcription etc), but rather for setting just the right mood for the mediator-creator. There's not much difference between 89.4 and 89.5 thou.

Mr Ewan

2y↑9

Jona van der Pal

i enjoyed reading this, thank you

Andrew Stump

2y↑5

The food recipe analogy was so perfect, I absolutely love it. I think it’s so true that the notation is merely a recipe for us musicians to make the musical story come to life, and it is incomplete as well. And I completely agree that there are times when notation is not at all helpful, and it would be used as analysis or even something more trivial. However, I find myself so grateful for music notation and desiring to keep using it all the time, I love it so much. I don’t feel the need to rely on notation, but just the sight of a five-line staff, clefs, key signatures, time signatures, and notes on that staff bring me such a joy that I cannot describe. I love music notation, I just love it.

James Earp

Adam Neely - subtle nuances don’t matter in music 🤦‍♂️

It’s not about the listener’s perception, it’s about how the tempo feels to the performer when performing their original music.

No listener gives a s**t about tempo, let alone guessing it, so this is a study into absolute nonsense.

Ruthie Wadzinski

i think decimal tempos are stupid, but i totally would have put the 16th rest in the bass solo

Adam Watts

2y↑12

Tempo differences of 1bpm and in rare instances (at slower tempos) of .5s are absolutely noticeable and important when choosing the tempo of pop songs especially (songs with sung lyrics over a groove). The one BPM up or down can make all the difference in the energy of the song. I've noticed that almost always, there's a target tempo realm that a song feels "right" at... I've noticed that most songs have a 3 bpm range where the song works, but ONE particular tempo where the song finds it's home; the tempo in the center---then it can be pushed to have more energy, or dragged to lay back... I think one of the central reasons for this has to do with the specific rhythms played in the song (it's groove feel) and how this juxtaposes with the way the vocal is performed/phrased (which often has varying sweet spot tendencies for laying back certain notes---like that bass note that you laid back in your solo---how that moment feels relative to the tempo will feel especially pronounced up or down a bpm.

Thiago C.Rocha

2y↑4

I love the inteligence curve that happens when you start to apply "human logic" to art and you find that the peak artistic behavior of every fucking genius in every medium off all of time and space you find the most abstract answer possible "It's just cool to me, man"
it hurts to say this but expressing abstraction requires notation but thatnotation serves abstraction not the other way around.

Nards

poignant and poetic

GOICOBA

I'd like to see you react to notations of Stockhausen

Ryan

2y↑467

I loved this. As a linguist, I wanted to say "yes, in language, too!" to literally every section of this essay. Phonetic transcription is similarly lossy and sometimes overly detailed without being able to tell you the difference between whether it sounds like Steve Urkel or Darth Vader. The term for overspecificity changing the meaning of something is called "Gricean Maxim violation" in linguistics/pragmatics, and it might be interesting to look into more with respect to music.

Holland Vance-Wright

@Haoming Li I agree that modelling should aim to match complexity, but the simpler a model is the easier it is to make it work with a different material/concept. In most sciences, there's some level of sacrifice to accuracy. For example, the far end of a rod struck by a hammer doesn't move until after all of the matter on the close end does. Regardless of how much that goes against Isaac Newton, his discoveries are still valid and accurate

Ryan

2y↑2

@Kurobród Różnodzioby I think that's not the level of narrow transcription Cosmic Penguin was talking about. Instead of saying something like [tɹænskɹɪpʃən], we could write down something like [tʲɹ͋æ̃n͉skɹɪ̝pʃɵ̆n̩] with all sorts of diacritics to show precisely how someone pronounced a word, but it quickly becomes unintelligible and implies that the difference between, for example, [æ] and [æ̃] is meaningful in English, which would only make sense in a special context, e.g. comparing accents.

Sam Alvarez

2y↑3

Ooo I love this insight, I recently picked up a book on linguistics and am fascinated with it all. It runs so much deeper than I thought

Ferociousfeind

2y↑1

Yeah, the notation should capture the feel, rather than try to be a midi file printed on paper

Envy May

2y↑2

i feel like IPA gets more specific than what is perceivable to a lot of people in the exact same way – and also the "meaning" of sounds, like, an english speaker might pronounce the vowel "a" differently enough in the same word between different times saying the word that it counts as a different IPA character but it's not like they're actually saying something different

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Shermanbay

1y↑3

I was faced with the dilemma you mentioned here when I was writing thousands of lead sheets for music publishers in the 1970's, mostly for copyright purposes. We were forced to fit contemporary musical performances into notation that was more suited to 1940's Tin Pan Alley, not to mention 18th Century convention. I often had to decide if I should notate the "laid back" feeling accurately or how it might best fit on paper, simplified. To do it accurately might mean an unnecessarily complex appearance but to write it in a simpler fashion meant I was second-guessing the composer's intention. 'Tis a puzzlement!

Rollo Maughfling

2y↑3

My guess was that in the second set of clicks, the 5th note was a tiny bit late, but by more like 15-20ms. Then I second guessed (npi) myself, thinking it was probably dead-on, and was surprised to hear it was actually late. Strange how our brains work. Like how that bass solo note totally feels like it's on the one, or how you can see your nose if you close each eye, but your brain "fixes" it out of sight (and compensates for the optic nerve blind points).

Cine de Confinamiento

2y↑3

How good is this guy’s content that despite talking deep musical topics to the point of making them almost philosophical he’s got 1’6 million subs. Hats off Mr. Neely, hats off

REZynthesis

2y↑1

This is great. I make a lot of music based off how I want it to sound. I very rarely have to write anything down but when I do, many songs look pretentious or overly complicated. Specifically because I’m incorporating the exact recording so you can follow the song, not really to play the song. I find it fun to make the sheet music as overwhelming as possible too.

Robert Knutzen

2y↑856

Theres one very good reason I sometimes use decimal points in BPMs. I hit the tap tempo button 4 times and it was 93.2 and I said "cool whatever"

Brandon Sapp

I agree with you 100%.

Tomie

Ok. That's a very dinosaur attitude.

Morrison Productions

2y↑4

@J Hutt I stretch real instruments all the time. Unnatural is sometimes the aim of the game and a simple bass note and electric guitar chord can become a minute of strange tones especially depending on effects you use alongside that stretch. For instance I often reverse a guitar chord and stretch it out to build up during 8 bars of a crescendo or I may want to use the stretch as a lead instrument over a section (I find works well for bridges)

J Hutt

2y↑1

@LeoTheHuman_ I meant in a general sense...

LeoTheHuman_

@J Hutt No, you don't get it, I make my tempos like that so that the people who sample my songs are the ones who will get the unnatural sound you said.

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j

I freaking love your videos. The preparation, the info, the delivery, the editing, the everything…it’s all so enjoyable and interesting every single time.

IdiotOnTheInterwebs

I love the maths of music. I highly recommend the series “Music and Math” on Wondrium/Great Courses. I can’t remember if they covered this, but there’s a lot of similar lessons. My favorite shows the mathematics of “just tuning” vs “equal temperament” and other tunings. It’s very interesting to see the math behind why we run the way we do.

Eric Hale

2y↑1

Fascinating video. Two things come to mind, the first being that I've read that people can sometimes detect ultrasonic frequencies because they cause interference patterns in the frequencies we can hear - so maybe those minor differences, for lack of a better word, flavor our perception somehow. The second thing that comes to mind is that, when presented with messy data, the first thing we do is smooth it out, as in statistical regression. Thanks again for a very interesting video.

Ngã

2y↑2

The part about notations and how it legitimize the musical aspect of a sound really resonates with me and really speaks about the marvel of humanity in my opinion.

Like the quote if a tree falls into the forest, does it actually make a sound? We are surrounded by arts in everyday of our lives and simply by just opening our mind creatively, you'll find endless sources of inspirations.

You can be the one who legitimize arts from the most mundane or unexpected matter in this universe.

Jesse

2y↑682

In college composition class I used a tempo that wouldn't be found on a metronome marking, and my professor called it pretentious.

Grimonas GD

What was it?

Ryan O.

2y↑1

@Brice Lory Oof... I feel that! If I had a dollar for every time nerves got me in trouble with tempo! ...sometimes not even my own nerves! lol

Kevin L

@Tyrgannus Gaming Two pretention people can disagree with each other and both be pretentious.

Bob Blue

2y↑1

@Cody Truesdale Well obviously I agree. My teacher didn't.

Cody Truesdale

@nathan papp 4:33 is brilliant for the simple fact no one thought to capitalize on it before, like Tenacious D's "One Note Song."

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Nicholas Graves

2y↑2

Transcriptions are neat because they are like subtitles to sheet music literate audiences. Sometimes you might miss a word in a TV show due to room noise, background noise, whatever, but the subtitles bridge the gap and give you a stronger understanding. I think of it in a similar way. They are also just really helpful tools for visual learners to have a stronger connection to the material being consumed.

Hardcrafter

2y↑1

It's funny to me in my own work with tempos is that sometimes the 1-digit differences in tempo can make a song feel too slow or too fast. Like I made a song at 72bpm because 70bpm felt too slow to me, but 75bpm felt a little too fast.

Though I'll be honest enough to say that I'd never use a decimal point tempo unless it was just for shits and giggles.

Neil Kelly

nicely done, Adam, as usual! I'm pretty fond of markings that match my old wooden metronome. If I do a metric modulation from one (regular) tempo i try to use whole numbers that work... occasionally though fractions result (in which case I have been known to write - for example 33&1/3bpm, to make it clear, but generally still prefer to go with the approximation of 33bpm - and assume the performer is smart enough to do the Math! (oh and I see I just saw that you pinned a related comment above!)

Philip Vaughan

1y↑3

My favorite bit about the food analogy is that sometimes you might add more or less salt, or a little seasoning, or you might put it in the oven a couple seconds too late (or too early), but in the end you have something original, that may taste even better than the recipe. Signature guitar playing is like having a signature cooking style :)

KiwiRawks

2y↑535

I DJ electronic music and I always told people and beginners, that you can easily change the tempo of a track by about 3 BPM without the crowd noticing and even 3-5 is ok. I never had any sientific base for that, it was just feel. But it makes total sense

EMS 76

2y↑7

I would say watching entire rooms of people not notice, while not quite scientific proof, is nonetheless a form of evidence.

Kristine Urban

2y↑11

I love finding transitional tracks where I can go from 140 to 170bpm. I do it all the time. It’s def noticeable but meant to be and gets the drum and bass heads excited.

lxxwj

2y↑5

changing tempo in dj sets can actually be pretty cool if done right. it feels weird if you do a small amount (like 3 bpm) slowly, because the groove is lost. but if you cut the previous track entirely and then play the next track +/- 3 bpm, it sounds super dope. also it can be a good way to transition into slower/faster stuff when you dont have enough room on the pitch slider to beatmatch it with what youre currently playing

Matias8823

2y↑9

Yep. 3 BPM increments will never be noticeable and you can change genres over the course of 6 or 7 songs due to this naturally

Goat Magic

2y↑26

@Jesse for musicians for sure I agree. Even 2-3 is noticeable if it's something you've spent time playing. But for the general audience that can't clap on 2 and 4, I'd argue you could push it abt 6 bpm lmao

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Green

Great video and I really agree with your explanation. Syncing up with secondary things, analysis, and figuring out what to feed into a computer so that it plays something "right" is something I can agree with, but anything other than can be a bit much.

jestersudz

2y↑2

Some of my favorite music inucludes spoken parts and/or 'ambient' sounds. i love hearing people talking or just different non-instrumental sounds, and i think they work very well when mixed with instruments to create so much more emotion to a song.

its always hard to find on like spotify but there are songs out there that are like, 1-3 instruments and some dialouge and some like enviormental sounds that can create such a picture. theyre always my favorite 2 hear

trystan black

2y↑11

The first music I ever made were beats on an MPC 1000 in my high school because one of the interns was big into hip hop. He told me to ALWAYS set your bpm to a decimal number so that if a dj is using it in a set they have to work for it instead of just putting two songs together they know are the same. Of course, with bpm match on CDJs nowadays that doesn’t matter but I still do it just for fun!

Studies in Plink

2y↑1

Doff

2y↑753

Adam's channel, at this point, is an extended series convincing people that music is generally overanalyzed in all the wrong ways and underanalyzed in all the actual interesting ways.

Treeblight

very important comment

Paul Joseph

2y↑1

@mistybabe5489 No, just pasted once: in this thread because it pertains to @TheDofflin 's comment. And the only other place it comes up is in my original stand-alone comment. If you can apply any of Adam's overeducated theorizing to your own music creation, I'd be interested to hear the results. Until you apply it to the real world, it's just an abstraction (and distraction). Music theory (and its application) is not all that complicated and there's really nothing there that needs to be decoded by geniuses like Adam - but the education system tries to mystify into being some esoteric religion. Once you understand the true simplicity of music and the obfuscation of, it may liberate your own music creation process. And that's the relevance of my comment.

Paul Joseph

2y↑4

And WTF is this video about? it starts with one irrelevant observation about irrelevant tempo markings only to segue into other irrelevant observations about notation. This is the pseudo-intellectual jibberish that has nothing to do with the creation of or the practical application of music and its accompanying theory. These videos are falling further and further into the rabbit hole of theoretical nonsense.

Aylbdr Madison

What I got from this video: I really wanna jam with that chimpanzee! ^-^

Kevin L

2y↑3

This is a human brain failing in general, I think.
I'm also a sports fan. And this same phenomenon exists as sports have embraced all different kinds of technical analysis. Especially related to the idea of precision vs. saying something meaningful.
There was a controversy in baseball about pitcher's using sticky substances to get a better grip on the ball, which meant it would spin more when thrown, and thus curve or dip or move more making it harder to hit. Everyone would get really fired up when a pitcher added, say, 30 rotations per second. But, like, the bpm thing in this video... while 30 rps was precise... batters wouldn't notice the difference.

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AudioGibbs

Hmm, I’ve thought about this before and there are a couple reasons that I believe decimal tempos are essential. 1. Sampling (no matter the length of the sample, it may take fine tuning the tempo to feel right, especially if the sample itself was not recorded to a click) and 2. Tap tempo (I start by making something on an instrument and then tap tempo the DAW and go from there). I’ve found that some people feel strongly about this issue yes/no lol

OfNder Αστυδρόμος

2y↑1

I would like to add that sometimes weird decimals in tempo are essential in music which uses samples from other music so that u get the right cut creating the desired glitch

Bill Baran

This is a perfect video. It's meta and clear and can apply to so many things. Thank you and nice work.

ShinerCCC

1y↑2

I've written a lot of charts for Stepmania, the open source clone of Dance Dance Revolution. You have to know the BPM of the song you're charting precisely so it stays in sync with the game.
I always imagined finding anything with a decimal BPM was either:
1. software error (a track I made with a friend with a backing track made in ModPlug Tracker ended up coming out as 159.80 BPM even though we set it for 160, weird)
2. some kind of wacky "copyright protection", like the electronic producer who made the track didn't want it to end up in a DJ set because the BPM was too weird. or maybe it was the opposite and it was averaged to fit into a longer set.

the players aren't going to see it or care anyway, they'll round up to the nearest whole number and then do their math for "yeah I can read a 160 BPM song at 4x rate so it scrolls effectively at 640" etc. I don't think we can feel a difference beyond 5 BPM increments anyway.

Colby Savary

2y↑1

Even though modern western music notation can't really get across timbres and extremely specific things about a piece, I think this limit upholds one of the most important part of being a composer - being at rehearsals to tell them what you are hearing/want! If every possible aspect of music could be written down and understood completely, the collaboration between composer and players would be a lot less or non-existent, and that's my favorite part!

Joel I

I’ve been playing music for a few decades without much education. Thanks for this. It’s been enormously insightful.

Echa

2y↑3

There are a few songs that have decimals in their BPM. And they sound good. Best example being Nhelv by Silentroom

ManMadeThings

When I was playing the Standing Bass in my high school orchestra, we were playing New World Symphony and at the Bass solo, every time I tried to play on rhythm, it just sounded wrong. There's no other way to put it. I just said screw it, I'll practice by ear and when I did it sounded so much better and I know why

Stanos Herkanor

Fantastic video. Great job explaining some things I've thought were odd about notation!

Elliott Le Guéhennec

1y↑3

I actually enjoy very much having imprecise music notations, whether it regards flavour, exact tempo or whatever. This allows for a total reappropriation of the music, and allows full creativity.

Jacob Christensen

This video made me feel more comfortable with some of the tweaks I made to the rhythm shown in my tattoo. Of course it's more likely I was just making mistakes than intentionally delaying a note, but nonetheless it's a more accurate representation of my solo even if it's not a more precise one.

bas

1y↑2

what i find interesting is that on the second delayed example, it became less clear to me with time. on the first listen it felt like it was clearly late and i was certain of it. when i went back to confirm that, it became less and less clear with every replay to the point where i doubted that i had even actually heard anything in the first place. maybe i had a lucky guess but it felt so clear on the first listen. maybe it has something to do with anticipating a greater delay than there was after initially hearing a delay that was too fast for my brain to fully replicate? like i couldn’t mentally repeat the delay because it was more subtle than i could calculate. i don’t know but it’s incredibly interesting to me.

Patrick Collins

I had the same experience. When he played it again at the end, I didn't notice it. I think the reason is the first time you hear it is after the -200ms example. So the +50ms example is going to feel late from the start (since you just heard one that was early) and is amplified by it also being +50ms.

The Ape Machine

2y↑1

So I make these covers sometimes that as a concept can be perfectly overlaid onto the original songs, whether they used a clicktrack or not. To do this I obviously have to precisely tempomap the timeline, and it will go into the decimal point time as a rule that way. Even with a song like Prince's Erotic City, which uses a LinnDrum for the drum track, so you would think it's stable, but it is recorded to tape, so not entirely stable. While you may not be able to detect from a few clicks what is the difference, overall you can definitely hear the "feel" vs the "grid" that way.

Gregor Wünsch

2y↑1

To continue the party analogy: giving a precise time might not be practical and would be perceived as strange in real life, but it can also be a fun stylistic device in true-crime shows or something like that. Even there you don't need it most of the time, but it just has a special meaning in this sort of shows. Maybe it's the same with musical notation. Sometimes it's just for fun, not meant for anybody to be taken too serious.

R B

Such a great topic for discussion, thanks for making this video. It seems like this is a matter of "transcription" vs "notation". They have different end goals and utility. Notation is more for performability and readability, how the music is to be made (prescriptive), while transcription is for an exact description of how a performance actually sounded (descriptive); preservation. (Christopher Roberts, "Music of The Star Mountains: A Naturalists Guide to the Composition of Songs in Central Papua New Guinea", editors introduction by Don Niles, xxi).

So if one is using transcriptions in place of notation, then that is trash (too complicated for performance sake). But it is equally trash to use notation as a means of describing/preserving more nuanced music.

Saunder Choi

The only time I’ve ever encountered decimal tempos is in film scores, where it is often necessary to hit sync points. Not a problem for session musicians bc we typically record to click.

Strange Guy

2y↑336

Sheet music never lies. I remember getting a sheet from another student (Rachmaninov Prelude), and there was a note made with a pencil: 'You can't play this'
Guess what... they were right

Kurumi

2y↑5

To be fair, most people need to omit the top and/or bottom notes of Rachmaninoff's chords to even start playing his pieces

JesusGS

2y↑5

😂😂😂

Eric Rabb

2y↑1

I feel the same way a bout sound musicality! I swear when I explain how I see rhythms in every day life people look at like I’m crazy bro, but it definitely is what it is, sir! Excellent video, I also did detect .5ms difference.

Cerulity

2y↑1

I make mashups. It’s infuriating dealing with decimal BPMs, as for one, TuneBat and other websites don’t display decimals, and manual tappers don’t work because of human inaccuracy. So I have to tweak it every time until i nail it, which is extremely tedious.

Please don’t use decimal BPMs, and when you’re making the software that renders and exports songs, make sure they’re accurate.

Karim Tohmé

Hey Adam, hope all is well! Question: at 9:58 When you talked about notation relying on the transcriber's perception, did you intentionally position you Real Book at an angle on the shelf for it to be visible in the frame as a visual pun? Cause it was funny either ways! As always thanks for the beautiful content; I look up to you, and always rejoice in watching your videos!

HumanTechnician INVD

Great advice! I am now going to use decimals in my music tempo.

J.P J

2y↑353

In fighting games it's common to have combos that require one or multiple 1 frame links, meaning you have a 1/60th of a second time window to hit the combo. Always found the rhythms of combos interesting especially when played on an arcade stick

FiNiTe

@Henrix98 In geometry dash theres a challenge level called "Paraballa", it is meant to be played on 60 FPS, and has 30 frame perfects which have to all be hit in a single attempt to pass the level.

Pedro Scoponi

@PlataOPlomo look for "akito bass" on youtube or twitter!

glooiealooie

@Endie End uh yeah they do

Buster Beachside

Kinda reminds me of the musicality they added in Killer Instinct, particularly the Ultra Combos

M ZR

2y↑2

@Jitse Kuilman I can understand the idea behind making things easier but too often devs do too much. I kind of have jittery hands and I mash a lot so I hate big buffer cause it makes me do misinputs.

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Fabi Villa

2y↑2

The problems with western music notation are abundant, for many performers who don’t make music tonally, like noise artists, ambient music, sound art. Whether or not the use of decimal points makes sense within the context of music notation, or if those values actually communicate anything replicatable, I’m happy that scores are being transformed in one way or another on the internet, democratically, pushed to accommodate new experiences, new music, new people, difference. That feeling of unease, of change, a threat, suspicion, SUSpicion, gay, queer vanguard, is the feeling of progress, decentralizing our status-quo notation. I feel as though your opinion is reactionary and authoritative; what SHOULD our scores look like? It seems to me like the page of a score is a space for the composer to imagine new realities and include the information they, personally, feel is relevant to their point of view. The rules around what should or shouldn’t be included in a score are antiquated: score follower isn’t saying writing decimal points on a score is the way everyone should do something—
It is simply their way, their solution to a problem. I can insert those numbers into my pure data patch and be as precise as I’d like, thank you very much

Fabi

David Elser

I’m so glad I watched this whole video. For a multitude of reasons. One I completely agree and was honestly curious and constantly continued to enjoy hearing your opinion on this matter, Adam (as always)
Secondly, I WAS RIGHT ABOUT THE 5th PULSE. It was late. (Wasn’t a guess…. Or was it?)

Pasquale Romano

2y↑1

14:14, that delay, compared to the beat line, it's the true secret of the "groove"

Subzero K

2y↑1

On the five milliseconds to late note… I guessed it perfectly. I mean, I was watching the video, and I literally said to my friend: “You know… I think this is 5 milliseconds late” It might be my imagination, or it might be my reflexes trained over the years, but I nailed it.

Three Colored Squares

2y↑264

A perfectly detailed 1:1 terrain map would be totally unusable despite being correct.
The lack of unnecessary details is what gives notation meaning.

Jan Švanda

2y↑3

@Anton Nidhoggr Yeah, I agree, those "scores" look just like output from mass spectrometer or something.

And to the "recreation" part - I used to own a phone which could play polyphonic MIDI files as a ring tone (Siemens C55 - yeah, I am old :-)) and I tried to convert some of MP3 files to MIDI files and... it sounded kinda like the music... but also really wrong ?!? Suffice to say, I did not used it for my ring tone. And maybe the transcription software is better now, but I don't really want to repeat the experience... :-D

Anton Nidhoggr

2y↑5

@Jan Švanda it makes sense. However I wonder: have someone tried to recreate cows or sticks glissando using that notation alone and have they succeed? I think it was made rather for entertainment purpose. It's more like: "Okay, we took dog poo samples from 50 different states and analyzed it for traces of plutonium. Well, there's no plutonium in there... Anyways here are the spectra."

Jan Švanda

2y↑3

@Jenny John A "map" which contains all of the features of the "terrain" is basically a definition of a hologram ("holos" + "graphos" = "whole drawing") - which is needed when you want to recreate something perfectly . So there is an obvious use. (And it does not necessarily need to be as large as the terrain, you can do compression and stuff...)

However, you would still need to simplify it, "dumb it down", if you want to have some insight from it. I mean, analysis is pretty much trying to find out what is interesting and should be kept, and what is superficial and thus can be safely discarded. And yeah, I agree that if you don't need the exact replica of sound wave , decimal points don't matter.

Or, to use the cooking analogy - it is a difference between a recipe and a full chemical analysis. There are obvious uses for the second one, but most people would not need it and I doubt a chef would be very happy if you came to him with a list of elements and chemical reactions for "the dish".

Jenny John

2y↑7

@Nathan Jasper A 1:1 map of one square mile would have to be one square mile in size. How would that be useful?

Leah

2y↑3

Jean Baudrillard strikes again

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hadrien hartgers

2y↑2

Food analogy is always on point. It also translates to the way we cook : jazz/improv vs classical/recipe. Both can be interesting in their own ways, and as long as it tastes good, there is no issue about it. But it definitely implies some compromises if you wanna cook with someone else ;-)

The Pity Party

1y↑1

I mostly use decimal points in BPMs on account of my mild OCD. I have obsessions with certain numbers, and often base my songs around these numbers in note intervals, synth settings and tempo. Basically, I have a weird obsession with the number 8 (and numbers divisible by 8), and using decimal points in the tempo allows me to shove more 8's into my song by my making it 128.888bpm or something.

CJ O'Neill

This whole video makes me think about AI generated music, and how if we keep quantifying every sound as precisely as we can, at some point there will be no room for naturally created music anymore. And taking the human aspect out of something so innately, inarguably human, has a layer of horror behind it i wasn't expecting this early in the morning

Alastair Bishop

Absolutely fantastic video. A properly profound piece on what music is and what it *means*. It strikes me as interesting that a high definition digital recording is an almost perfect record of what something sounds like, but in itself tells you absolutely nothing about what it means. As you say, for that you have to listen.

from the MOON RACCOON

I dunno, man. I incidentally find great value in decimaled tempo in a DAW that I'd agree is pointless for sheet music. Like, I record my guitar without a metronome, and afterward set accurate tempo markers for each bar. That provides a tight basis for MIDI, while the song keeps an organic feel. Later, it is completely reasonable for a recipe/transcription of the song to indicate the closest whole number as its indicated tempo.

Zergling

2y↑1

I think I get it. The notation should be just concrete enough to capture the song's identity (the minimal stuff needed to recognize the song between different covers and remixes for example), while abstract enough to leave everything else open to interpretation (e.g. stylistic choices).

Nick Louloudakis

Drummer here, speaking for our species. Although we practice with the metronome to learn keeping the beat as perfect as possible, it is almost impossible to achieve perfection to the decimal point (OK maybe Thomas Lang can, but that is another story).

On the other hand you can use a drum machine having the beat set to the decimal point. It sounds, cold, inhumane in a sense.
And you can feel it. It certainly fails the imitation game.

This small, indistinguishable difference of 1-2 bpm, gives a more humane character to music. It is not an excuse to practice less or not to use a click on a recording, but on the other hand, such imperfection is just beautiful.

Warren Garabrandt

I thought it was late, I felt it was late, but I had very low confidence on it and I can't explain how I arrived at that determination. I suspect it was a coin flip chance. I'd really like to listen to a bunch of samples with various differences in timing to see how precisely I could actually reliability detect tempo differences.
I will say that when listening to music, I can easily distinguish the very slight variations in tempo and the slight jitter in players. It's one of the subtle things I miss when listening to some kinds of music that is highly produced music that has had corrections applied. That said, some music really is better if the tempo is bang on and the jitter is essentially zero. Techno is a good example of this, as is a lot of EDM.

Sound production and advice.

2y↑1

Back in the late 80s early 90s, I was in a studio with Big George Webly and we had a track at 132 BPM. When we saved off the session, I noticed he went to the tempo and started adding decimal places to it. Curious about this I asked him why he replied, "...to stop people sampling the hell out of this track. Good luck to them matching the BPM..." Obviously, times have changed with accurate BPM counters and also my lesser successful older self would now be entirely happy with a major artist sampling my stuff. Thanks for the videos, Adam, always interesting information here.

Stefan Wessel

2y↑1

HI Adam! I really love your recipe comparison for music notation! So true.

Neil Gupta

Like you mentioned somewhere in the middle of the video, decimal tempos make sense if you're trying to sync a score to something. And I don't think that's useless to peformers , you just need to set a (non-mechanical) metronome to that tempo and then have the performers perform, and the score will end up syncing properly.

ksrele

Thank you for this video. It is little to complicated for me but I understood some parts.
I'm not musically educated, I know basics about notes and notations but until now I didn't know how musician, who needs to play a song from notes that he didn't hear ever before, knows how long is one note - what is the tempo of the song. Because many of notation that I have seen didn't have written tempo in it.
Sorry for my English it's not my native language. ;)

Joe Epperson

2y↑410

I think your recipe analogy is right on the money. I'm part of the chef team of a restaurant and we have discussions all the time about how much detail to put into our recipes. It seems intuitively obvious that the more detail you put in, the more consistent and accurate the final dish will be, but if you make the recipe too detailed it gets in the way of people using their experience, judgement, and ultimately taste. The feel of a decimal tempo is kinda the same as the feel of an exact number of grams of salt; I appreciate the effort but I'm mostly going to use this as a rough guide and adjust to make it the best I possibly can.

Joe Epperson

2y↑2

@Amora This is going to sound really glib and shallow, but honestly just find a good chef and work for them. School is useful for teaching the general principles but nothing can really show you how those principles apply in the real world besides doing it in the real world under a chef that wants to see you grow. When it's time to move on, find another chef to learn from and work for them. And the whole time make sure you're making it worth their while to teach you. Best of luck!

L. Y.

2y↑1

Yes exactly! I see the decimal notation things as goofy recipes that are intentionally outrageous. Like Allegra chicken. No one wants to make that, especially not via the recipe. But it's really entertaining to make jokes about it and write unusable recipes for it.

Amora

2y↑3

Also, got any tips for this field of work?

Amora

2y↑4

I hope to some day own a restaurant and am studying at a cooking school atm, I agree that too many details get in the way of a personal touch and can even make it a bit bland

Evergreen Music

Soo cool to get some actual words and explanations for stuff that we just been feeling out all this time 🤙🤙

Jason Hopkins

2y↑1

I hear what you're saying, but my "satisfaction" with the "performance," in this case the music teacher's video - is enhanced by the notation upon further listening with my eyes closed. This is particularly the case for me when listening to crazy, fast drumming. My human ear might disregard much of the drummer's precision in the same way your ear disregarded the precise intonation of the teacher's boom-whackers because of the outrageous tempo, but having a visual representation of that precision most certainly increases my appreciation upon further listens. Then again, I enjoy djent.

Hub!

2y↑2

14:00 and the recipe analogy are things I really needed to hear lol
I’m someone who both because of my brain and because I so thoroughly learned percussion in band, struggle with “properly” learning music and wanting to play/make music because I’m so focused on playing notes “on time” at the precisely written time above all else. The few times I’ve messed with music (beyond percussion) so far, I did best when I just kinda felt it and played by ear, not worried about perfect timing and not (as) worried about all correct notes

The recipe analogy really made it click cause I’m someone who really likes cooking and constantly switches between following recipes to a T and throwing a bunch of my own stuff in there to see if that’ll make it better

Eli Hoene

Love your videos man! At 05:50 in this video there was a comment that I went back several times to try and process. Are they talking about matching a tempo to a songs peak resonance/key, or is this more about adding effects?

This reminds me of a cool idea I had for a music video. Since light is also vibration I thought it would be cool to figure out what color frequency match music notes at a much lower frequency/octave. So the colors of the footage match the frequency of the music.

I had the idea a long time ago and never had the time, knowledge or resources to accomplish it. I still think it should be done!

Pianoman8125

2y↑490

As a musician, I was glad, that you revealed, that the fifth note was slightly late. I "felt" it. It is like the ear trainings for pitch. I can tell if the next note played is 0,7 hz higher or lower. But I don't hear it anymore. It is just a feeling. But in the end, I am right. I love these challenges!

kasman1980

2y↑1

I felt it. Not on the high klick but in the lower klick that appears after

Jyrik Morgul

I noticed it through "feel" and arm tapping

P0PG03S

We are One.

Hyperplayability

being a drummer I'm glad I got it :)

tumtuaresagitur

I was quite sure it was late... ; )

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