How do you mean ‘very approximate’? 80 beats in 40 seconds (maybe a couple of hundred milliseconds less than 40) is 120 BPM. At 107 BPM it wouldn’t be into the repeat of the third part by 40 seconds.
Could one of us have a computer glitch playing the clip at the wrong speed?
What Mr Gumby says about slower not equally draggy is so true!
Years ago at a fiddle workshop Liz Carroll played a reel at various speeds, to demonstrate how a reel can have lift and swing regardless of the speed. It was amazing. Slow or fast, it made you want to dance.
Anyhow about not slow, this (according to my metronome) is a hair under 132 (132 being the closest tempo my metronome has)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJv9zwttEe0&list=RDPJv9zwttEe0&start_radio=1
It’s actually exactly how I do it when I want a more accurate result than trying to match it with a metronome. I count so many beats, remembering the last beat I count continues to the start of the next beat, for c.30 secs to a minute (whatever length ties in nicely with the bar structure), then work it out.
If you play either an electronic or mechanical metronome along with it, you’ll find that it’s 107 bpm, and nowhere near 120.
Timing the first 64 beats carefully several times (not difficult because there’s a couple of taps to get the start dead on), I make them an average of about 118.5 bpm. Haven’t checked the whole clip the same way, but it’s picking up speed as it goes and ends somewhere on the faster side of 120.
I’ll have to just accept that I’m doing something wrong somewhere …
Out of interest, Peter (Duggan), what BPM did you make the Bothy Band clip that I linked to above?
I hadn’t measured that one, Ben, but I have now…
By the same method as the other one, I timed 29.94, 29.97, 29.95 and 29.92 secs for four goes at the first 64 beats of the opening fiddle tune. Call that 29.9 secs and you’ve got 128.4 bpm, 30.0 secs and it’s exactly 128 bpm.
When I do this, I use an online digital stopwatch and tap foot, left hand or both so I’m clicking the start and stop by ear and not where I want them to be. (Sometimes I count aloud too to keep the place.) I’ve been doing it for years to get tempi for score writing and school studio work.
OK. Thanks, Peter. My metronome method obviously doesn’t work then. Either that or my mechanical metronome, and the online one with which it agrees, are both coming up with results that are too slow. Mind, I also find it strange that the Bothy Band one and the step dancer one are so close in tempo - 120 vs 128 is not all that much. Listening to it, and tapping out the beat, there seems to me to be a huge difference between the two tempi.
I’d say 120 vs. 128 is a huge difference. Even a couple of bpm feels different, and 8 bpm (or 6.7% here) is significant.
I think the main trouble with using a metronome to measure an existing performance is that you have to get quite lucky to match more than a few beats in a row as any discrepancy compounds. That’s why I do it by timing a longer span.
The intro is slightly slower, maybe 113. I’d had assumed it was a perceptual thing but I just timed it to check.
I recorded the audio into Audacity and took the time from that. I sometimes do it Peter’s way but for dance music I find following the parts almost automatic and so I only have to remember to look at the clock again. The unrepeated second part of that tune nearly threw me.
How many country cottages had a long-case clock? Most have a 60 BPM tick and playing slightly out of time with it might be distracting. Ours is currently off level (a problem also with mechanical metronomes) and ticks with a ‘limp’ so I have to stop it when playing.
Yep, recording to a wave editor or DAW obviously works too. But it’s more effort and you’d still have to highlight or top and tail the wave form to the correct length to measure it properly.
One thing I find quite interesting in working with grids in DAWs is seeing what’s recorded with or without click track, either because it predates the widespread use of click tracks or it’s not that type of music (e.g. live solo/group performance or pretty well anything classical). So you can measure the bpm of a modern click-tracked digital recording and work with it on a DAW grid set to same bpm, whereas you’d have to get very lucky there with older analogue and/or non-click-tracked recordings. For instance, I measured Ben E. King’s Stand By Me as basically 120 bpm years ago, but it’s not quite consistent enough to use with a grid.
Yes one of the most significant artifacts of the digital era is the demand for gridding of tempos. Obviously consistency in time was always a thing, but there has always been a relationship to technology–what did you practice against before their were metronomes?
It’s easy to argue that the appearance of cheap clocks (and metronomes) raised the interest in and demand for metrically consistent music. The metronome or clock gave you a steady beat: you practiced with it and steadiness became more of a thing generally as a result.
Now you need the gridded tempo because so much music is assembled asynchronously, parts added later or redone or files sent digitally for someone to add their part, so machine-like precision becomes the norm or the default rather than the exception.
I actually have come to love lack of consistency. Lots of Irish recordings speed up–not just the obvious start slow and then hit the tempo, but lots of sets by famous people have the last tune going much faster than the first. This is great: it’s not a fault. People playing music live feel it live and it goes where it goes.
A dancer’s movements? Or rather, practice with the dancers. A quote that comes up in more than one tradition is “look for the best dancers on the floor and play for them”. Maybe that is what happens in the Aidan Vaughan clip where music changes a little once the dancer gets going.
How many country cottages had a long-case clock?
Very very few. You’d get the ones like the one in the picture below, even if they’d be more often found in shops or pubs, and cheap regulator clocks.
but there has always been a relationship to technology–what did you practice against before their were metronomes?
As david_h points out, I don’t think you’re on the right track there. It was always the dancers that demanded the timing to be right but playing for dancers you always watch them and adjust to their requirements, putting the tune under their feet. Being steady in rhythm was always important but speed could/can always vary a bit to suit the needs of the dancers. I don’t think I ever met a traditional musician who used a metronome to practice.
You know what Junior Crehan said : ‘the house dances were my university’ . You learned to play solid at the dances. If you didn’t they’d spit you out. The ability of a musician to put a tune under the dancers was a measure of the regard they were held in by the old people.
Right but a dancer is not a clock, and absent an external source of steady metrical time a dancer would be no more or less steady than a musician. This seems pretty obvious, no?
I’m told the curly-wig dance competitions require live musicians and require them to play at specific tempos. John Skelton said musicians are often asked to play to a metronome set to a very specific tempo, which I think again makes my point.
A dancer is moving and often swinging many kilograms of flesh and bone so more likely to settle to a pulse than someone twiddling their fingers. They may also be coordinating with one or more others, which will tend to damp out inconsistancies. I am thinking of the main beat, not fancy footwork that may take practice to get steady
I often run through tunes in my head when walking steadily uphill on a evenly graded lane - little reason (other than the tune in my head) not to keep a steady tempo.
I’m told the curly-wig dance competitions require live musicians and require them to play at specific tempos. John Skelton said musicians are often asked to play to a metronome set to a very specific tempo, which I think again makes my point.
I am not sure it does. I don’t think you’d have found competitive step dancers in country house kitchens. Social dancing, sets and half set is the game here. And the dancers don’t take prisoners if the musicianers aren’t steady.
All I know is the dancing I did, and even now, 30 years later, I have the tempos engrained in my body. As I said there’s physics to it, and muscle memory. To check the “right speed” all I need is to dance it a bit.
Musicians can be all over the map, un-dance-ably slow or fast, because they’re not moving their whole body like a dancer is.
About “putting the tune under the dancer’s feet” as Mr Gumby so well says, there are players who are very good at watching the dancers and adjusting their speed to match.
I’m not one of them! I worry about getting the speed the way the dancer wants it.
Here’s a BPM horror story. I was hired to pipe for a group of dancers, their regular piper couldn’t make it. No worries because the teacher is always there to advise, right? Well for this one show the teacher couldn’t make it either.
So I attended their rehearsal, saw the dancers practice their show, and took metronome readings (they were practicing to recordings). As I noted the tempo of each dance I would ask the teacher “is this the right tempo? Is this how they will be doing it at the show?” and the teacher assured me that all the tempos they practiced were exactly how she wanted them done at the show.
So at the show itself I brought a set list with tempo markings, and played to a metronome. Each dance was done to the exact tempo they had rehearsed them to, the exact tempo the teacher told me to use.
The dancers were furious. I was never hired again.
Why? I can only assume that the dancers, at a show, would take dances slower or faster than they rehearsed them, at whim, and that their usual piper follows them. BTW their usual piper is extremely good at playing for dancers- it’s been his fulltime job for 30 years now.
I’ve played many, many times for swing dancers, sometimes up to 100s in a big ballroom. I’m not persuaded that “social” dancers have better time or are more likely to be steady than musicians. The bad starts the tempo. Since most of the time I was playing bass at these dances, I always watched the dancers and reacted to them. Better dancers often want to push the beat, less skilled dancers often drag.
The more serious they are, the more competitive they are, the more they are to want metrical tempos and the more likely they are to specify a tempo. That’s been my experience
It’s pretty a much a truism in the history of technology that there is a close relationship between the invention and spread of mechanical timekeepers and the general interest in metrical precision in every realm of life. Medieval clocks often only had hour hands, because nobody really cared about anything more than “around 2 pm.” Then minute hands, the second hands, then nano second pico seconds etc. It’s been clearly demonstrated that musicians, professional musicians, got more regular in their beat after the invention of records, which could be precisely timed as they were recorded. There’s always a relationship between music and the technology of the day.
In the US, cheap clocks began to appear in the 1820s and by the 1850s mass produced clocks were affordable for virtually anyone. I don’t know how common they were in Ireland by say 1860.
In Highland dancing it’s the opposite: stronger dancers have more lift, can stay airborne longer, and want the tempo slower so they can show that off.
This thread came to mind, my wife was driving and she was playing a Danu CD and a set of reels was at 135.
I have a metronome app on my phone.
I tried, I just can’t play that fast.