#tuplet

Man it’s been some time huh. Anyway, just wanted to draw some of my guys since it’s been a while.

For the majority, I didn’t rlly change much. Aside from few color adjustments/clothing additions. But for the ones that look significantly different:

Made Eschew (Cheat Codes) blue, since I didn’t want confusion if she stayed the dark pink.

Changed Sect’s (Into the Zone) shape type(?) to more resemble the Fresh variants.

guys help literally what the fuck did I make I'm making a song that experiments with nested tuplets and shit and I went to far into theory that I don't fully understand what I did. for example: one of the drum fills is 9 notes crammed into the space of 5 regular 16th notes so it's like a weird 9:5 polyrhythm but kinda not??? another example: I crammed a quintuplet into the first 4 notes of a quintuplet that spans 3 16th notes??!?!?!?!?!?!?! yhubijkdfgyughbjikdfyuhjiknblfg ,muyhjnkibfdguhyjnkbdfsguhjynkblfdgsuhjykbnl guhyjbfnkd syhubjnk gdfsyuhjbnk fdsgyuhjnbki gfdsyuhjbnk gfds am I cooking or not? either way I'm gonna keep it because I think it's fun and confusing and I have been wanting to experiment with stuff like this for a while!

Season 2

páfrányfenyő (Hungarian) /paːfraːɲfɛɲøː/ a ginkgo tree, specifically ginkgo biloba.

DAY 706) Tingle’s Rosy Rupeeland - Uncle Rupee (Final Form)

Composer: Masanori Adachi

Masanori Adachi has an incredibly distinct (and very weird) style that I love and I really wish I could find everything possible he’s ever written in one place but it’s pretty scattered. The more I listen the more he becomes one of my favorite VGM composers. Anyways this soundtrack of his is great!

This one is pretty crazy so there’s a lot of ways you could interpret what’s going on, but I’d personally write this as mostly very fast 9/4.

Interpreted that way, the beginning is 2 bars of 9/4, 1 bar of 12/8, and then 9/4 for the rest of the track.

In some parts that “9/4″ is felt more like 9/8 + 9/8 (the flute ostinato especially), and in other places that “9/4″ is felt more like 3/4 + 3/4 + 3/4 like at 0:15.

On top of all of that you have that crazy tuplet vibraphone layer going over the whole thing and distort your perception of the rhythms of this amazing piece of music that’s already difficult to get a handle on!

The drums are pretty hard to follow too and seem more meant for accenting and keeping it feeling fast paced, rather than keeping a pulse (which is something I adore when I see music do!). There’s always something else keeping the pulse in the music instead of the drums anyways, so it works out pretty well I think.

I’ve already drew Chandra so thankfully I can continue drawin three characters at a time hehe (don’t count Clash)

Marrer is one of the few fully mechanical shapes. Latch is a teen, and is living with Marrer for now. Both work at the Factory, though Latch doesn’t really know how they got the job.

Said screw it to color rules, let’s have more variety

I also just realized Ceta (TLW) is the only one with two eyes hgghghgh

DAY 600) Groove Coaster 3 - Got hive of Ra

Composer: E.G.G. (Hirokazu Koshio)

So I think I literally consider this my #1 favorite piece of VGM now.

It comes from the alias of Hirokazu Koshio, known as “E.G.G.”, which stands for Everything’s Got Groove. This alias of his describes itself as being about “express as it is”, which he considers to mean that the biggest element of the music is the freedom that comes from the lack of binding itself to the constraints of meter that normal music has. These tracks are basically the “final boss” tracks of Groove Coaster, so are the most rhythmically challenging ones to follow in the series, which to me is what I always want from rhythm game music~! Perfect example of musical complexity in rhythm being the actual source of difficulty for the game, something I always crave from rhythm games.

Thanks so much to nitrox72 for sending an ask introducing me to this series of Groove Coaster tracks. I was already familiar with the game and knew it had a lot of complex timesig music, but I didn’t know it had stuff THIS aligned with my tastes, wow. It’s spot on to being exactly the kind of stuff I want to hear.

This track in particular is the newest one of the set and didn’t exist when the E.G.G. music was recommended to me, released December 14, 2016 (technically had a limited pre-release Sept. 28). I’m doing it first though because it’s probably my favorite one of them.

As with most things this complex, there’s a number of different ways one could write this out that would be considered just as correct as each other. I’m personally choosing to write it at a different tempo than marked (134 instead of 268) because I find it more intuitive to think of it with the 16th note as the primary driving force here. I’m also using a bit longer bar lengths, but many people (including myself) might consider it more readable to write it out with shorter bar lengths to break it up. I normally don’t do it this way but I decided to put some “[OR]” markings to indicate a few alternate ways I’d consider using to write out each section (which I’ll talk about in more detail later down in the post after the timesig changes list).

Time for the actual timesig change list (counted at quarter note = 134):

(0:02 - 0:29) 10 bars of 6/4 [OR] [5/8 + 7/8]x10 [OR] 20 bars of 3/4

(0:29 - 0:32) 1 bar of 5/4

(0:32 - 0:50) [6/4, 7/4, 15/8]x2 [OR] ([4/4, 2/4] + [4/4, 3/4] + [4/4, 7/8])x2

(0:50 - 0:55) 3 bars of 15/16

(0:55 - 0:57) 1 bar of 5/4

(0:57 - 1:03) 3 bars of quintuplet-based 4/4 [OR] 3 bars of 5/8 at quarter note = 83.75 (aka quarter note = quintuplet) [OR] 3 bars of 10/10*

(1:03 - 1:05) 1 bar of 5/4

(1:05 - 1:15) 4 bars of 11/8 [OR] [5/8 + 6/8]x4

(1:15 - 1:31) 5 bars of 6/4, 1 bar of 7/4 [OR] [5/8 + 7/8]x5, [5/8 + 9/8] [OR] 11 bars of 3/4, 1 bar of 4/4

(1:31 - 1:33) 1 bar of quintuplet-filled 9/8**

(1:33 - 1:52) [6/4, 7/4, 15/8]x2 [OR] ([4/4, 2/4] + [4/4, 3/4] + [4/4, 7/8])x2

(1:52 - 1:55) 2 bars of 13/16

(1:55 - 1:59) 3 bars of quintuplet-based 3/4 [OR] 3 bars of 15/16 at quarter note = 83.75 (aka quarter note = quintuplet) [OR] 3 bars of 15/20*

(1:59 - end) 1 bar of 4/4, [hold]

*it is extremely rare that someone would write non-4-8-16 in the denominator of a timesig (called “irrational time”) to transcribe that sort of thing out, most musicians will not know how to read that compared to the other alternatives (writing as tuplets or metric modulation), especially if it’s not being used as a transition between timesigs. However, I put it as an option because it really, in context, is felt as a number of quintuplets per bar more than anything else

**The section at 1:31 I tried to come up with a way to break down into a smaller bar between the quintuplet first part and 16th-based 2nd part, but there isn’t really a way that works mathematically at all, so I’d just keep it as 9/8. I imagine that in software that’s how it was written anyways (I’m pretty sure there are no actual tempo changes in the way he wrote this in his head, and that all “irrational time” or “metric modulation” is actually just written as quintuplets at the normal tempo with whatever time signature fills up the right amount of space). You could also, rather than counting the last bar of the 1:15 - 1:31 section differently than the rest of it, consider those 2 8th note beats to be part of this bar, which would make it 11/8 instead. Really this is just a weird transitionary bar so it’s pretty ambiguous the best way to count it.

1:55 - 1:59 is the rhythmically weirdest sounding part of the track to most people probably. For a while I thought it was just tempo speeding up every time the phrase played, but it’s more rhythmically precise than that. It’s understandable as 15 quintuplet beats being played in the space of a 3/4 bar, however, since that doesn’t align evenly the way it would with a 4/4 bar like at :57, it has to be written differently. This chooses to make the last quarter note beat be normal triplets (if still counting at 134), which sounds weird being so rapidly juxtaposed with the quintuplets.

Some might consider it a bit weird to write alternating 5/8 + 7/8 rather than thinking of it as anticipation rhythm in 3/4 (or 6/4 like I have it), but because of other parts of the track (like the clearly alternating 5/8 + 6/8), and how stark some of the downbeats are, I feel like it makes sense to think of it that way most of the time. NORMALLY I would never advocate writing alternating timesigs in place of syncopation like that, but in a context like this I feel it makes sense (at least if you’re using smaller bar lengths and not counting it as 6/4), or maybe I’m just crazy! Of course writing that all as anticipation rhythm-based 3/4 is perfectly acceptable (and probably even more likely to be how someone writes it than what I did)

Beyond all of that, everything is ultra syncopated pretty much the whole time so of course there’s FAR more rhythmic complexity than just crazy meter. There’s still tons of acceptable ways to write this out that I didn’t address as well (especially given that I wrote it out at 134 instead of 268). I didn’t even address breaking down individual meters and the rhythmic groupings within them! (maybe some other time haha)

This was definitely the most challenging piece to write out for this blog that I’ve done so far, so hopefully you appreciate it! (and hopefully I got everything right and there’s not some lingering far better way to write out certain parts that I didn’t notice)