Source
r/musictheory•
archetype4

75bpm Eighth Notes and 50bpm Eighth Triplets. Played the same way?

Question

I am admittedly not well versed in music theory. This is likely a fairly basic thing that I'm not understanding but I'd like to know if someone who's familiar with this issue could weigh in or point me in the right direction of what I should be searching for thorough answer.

There are two bars below, which when played back by a computer without the metronome, sound exactly the same.

Example 1

Example 2

What I want to know is, alongside just a metronome to count in and no music surrounding it for context, will a classically trained guitarist play these two bars differently simply because one is composed of triplets and the other is not?

I've seen people state that swing and shuffle feel can be recreated with triplet groupings of quarter and eighth notes, but I imagine the effect here would be more subtle than that and not necessarily something that you could show with notation.

Posted Dec 12, 2020, 5:23 PM UTC

15
voodoohandschuh•

will a classically trained guitarist play these two bars differently simply because one is composed of triplets and the other is not?

Yes. The implied accents in 3/4 eighth notes are:

*♪ ♪ *♪ ♪ *♪ ♪

And the implied accents in 2/4 triplets are:

*♪ ♪ ♪ *♪ ♪ ♪

On that note, the beaming in example 1 is either wrong, or meant to imply a cross-rhythm against the background pulse.

3
Jsmithee5500•

The main difference would be a slight emphasis on the downbeats (1, 2, and 3 in ex 1, 1 and 2 in ex 2). Otherwise, they are effectively the exact same as they’re the same notes played with the same amount of time between them.

2
archetype4OP•

Thanks, I hadn't thought of that. So if these were quarter notes, rather than eighth notes, stretching the bars to 6/4 and 4/4, you would expect that emphasis would be gone or at least lesser, right?

1
ChuckEyebass, Chapman stick, keyboards, voice•

No.

1
Jsmithee5500•

It depends on the context at that point. In an isolated bar, the canned answer is “where are the downbeats”. If you start throwing more hypotheticals in, especially less-common ones such as 6/4 time, I’d have to ask what the rest of the piece looks like. If the rest of the piece has a very prominent triple subdivision (ie ONE-two-three FOUR-five-six), then the emphasis would remain the same as in your 2/4 example. If the rest of the piece has a more duple (ONE-two THREE-four FIVE-six) or sextuple/even (ONE-two-three-four-five-six) subdivision, it changes it to your 3/4 example.

Honestly, one of the big secrets of music is it doesn’t actually matter what the bottom number in the time signature is. 2/2 at hn=120 and 2/64 at sixty-fourth note=120 playing the same pattern will sound the exact same. Granted, they’re used in different contexts; if your basic subdivision is the sixty-fourth note, you’re not likely to play anything smaller than that, but if your basic subdivision is a half-note, there’s a lot more room for you to put faster notes in.

1