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I've been fooling around with 7/8 time for a while, composing different tunes on it. I've been noticing they're pretty basic (rhythmically) -- I can't seem to get away from the 12 12 123 feel.
Can anyone point me towards a groovy music genre that uses 7/8 a lot so I can glean some rhythmic ideas?
I figured a flamenco forum would be a likely place for someone with a more esoteric musical taste (paco's masterpiece thread notwithstanding)
cant think of anything obviously in 7/8 but Conlon Nancarrow has a Study for Piano No. 41a that is written in, one over the square root of pi and whose denominator is the square root of ⅔., if you want to see if you can make that groove .....what do you do when you see this written at the beginning of the piece ..
It's common in Bulgarian and Macedonian music where they have a lot of dances that are usually very fast - look for ruchenitsa (maybe also spelled rachenitsa) as well as elenino horo and chetvorno horo. There are other names but I can't recall them (I played that stuff a long time ago).
At a more moderate pace, Nenad's example is nice - there's another popular Macedonian song called 'Shto mi e milo' that you can probably find online.
In Greek music there's a dance in 7 called kalamatianos - probably others too.
There's a beautiful interlude in 'El Amor Brujo' by Manuel de Falla which is in 7/8. It's on Paco's Falla album: "Introducción y Pantomima" (it's the Pantomima).
A really great American example is the Grateful Dead song 'Estimated Prophet' which is a kind of reggae in 7/4.
Also North Indian music in rupak tal. (Or in South Indian music, tisra jati triputa tala).
Can anyone point me towards a groovy music genre that uses 7/8 a lot so I can glean some rhythmic ideas?
Check out music of the Balkans, particularly Bulgarian, Macedonian and Greek.
Andy Irvine (of Planxty fame) is heavy into this music, and popularised it considerably in the British Isles.
There’s a well known Irish reel called My Love Is In America (the Dubliners play it, among others). Someone wrote a tongue-in-cheek version in 7/8 called My Love Is In Bulgaria. You should be able to find both of them on the Web in ABC notation: you might find the comparison interesting.
I used to listen a lot to prog rock, so I would like to suggest a song from Genesis live album Seconds Out, a song called Dance On A Volcano. Great drumming from Chester Thompson and Phil Collins. A lot of the song is in 7/8, parts in 4/4 and others as well I would guess...
So much new stuff -- I've definitely got a lot to get inspired from.
Forgot, you can do alternating bars of 4/4 and 3/4 doing any kind of cool 16th note syncopations and it will equal two bars of 7/8 and really make things more interesting if you have some sort of percussive reference to your 7/8 throughout. Same idea, two bars of 2/4 (like two compases of rumba for example) and a bar of 3/4 (like jaleos half compas) can create the same math.
Finally, if what you are after with 7/8 is faster phrasing (like Yanni or riverdance LOL), you can pretend it's 7/16 so then all the above will equal a nice square 4 bar phrasing.