Syncopation

I thought this week's track "The New Me" was a fairly straightforward, 8 to the bar, latin jazz tune - until a musician friend asked what time signature it's in! Because I've been messing around with rhythm since I was a kid, half the time I don't even realise I'm "syncopating" things. Technically speaking syncopation is whenever a "weak" beat is accented. If you get a room full of people and ask them to clap in time after a count of four, most will clap on the first and third beats. A minority of the room (often jazz or rock enthusiasts) will clap on the "off beats" two and four; they're natural syncopators.

The tune of "The New Me" has the following accents; 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 / 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 for the first six phrases. Then in the middle section the pattern is 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 / 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 six times over. These are quite confusing/interesting to the ear, particularly the isolated accents on beats 2 and 6. This was all subconscious as I wrote the tune and words - looking back I'm surprised how consistent it is.

"Take 5" is the biggest selling jazz record of all time and is particularly special in this regard; not only is it syncopated and swung and in the rare time signature of 5/4, it manages to sound totally natural, almost as if it's always existed. Beethoven was also a brilliant syncopator, for example in the 8th Symphony, as of course were Stravinsky, Scott Joplin and Thelonius Monk, and some of my favourite South American composers like Alberto Ginastera, Antonio Lauro and Manuel Ponce.

The lesson from this is that people often don't hear the same thing in music as the person who created it. I'm much too close to my tunes to hear them in an unbiased way, even a few years later. So please do let me know if they work for you, or if they make no sense at all! “The New Me” has gone down surprisingly well with listeners but a couple of people weren’t keen to sing it…………