3:16
Counting bars and phrases in hip hop
On YouTube this video is called Counting a Bar and Phrase in Music Video 4, Hip Hop
What this lesson teaches
Part of a series doing the same exercise across different kinds of music, and the repetition is the point rather than a failure of imagination.
The method is unchanged
A bar is four beats. A phrase is four bars: 1-1-2-3, 2-1-2-3, 3-1-2-3, 4-1-2-3.
He plays a hip-hop track, counts it in bars, then counts it again in phrases, so you hear the same music organised two ways.
Why hip-hop needs its own lesson
The counting is identical. Finding what to count is not, and that is the real content.
In house, the kick is on every beat - four to the floor - so the pulse is handed to you and the only question is which of the four is the one.
Hip-hop does not do that. The kick pattern is sparse and syncopated, the snare usually marks beats two and four, and the "one" is often carried by something other than a drum - a sample landing, a vocal phrase starting, a bass note. There are bars where the first beat has no kick on it at all.
So the skill being practised here is finding the downbeat in music that does not spell it out, and that is a different skill from counting.
How to practise it
Start from something you can hear: the snare on two and four is usually the most reliable landmark in a hip-hop record. Find the snare, and the one is the beat before it.
Then check yourself against the structure. If your count says the change arrived after seven bars, your one is in the wrong place - because it will be eight.
Where this is going
He says it explicitly at the end: the purpose is to mix in time and in phrase, so that you do not end up with basslines over basslines and vocals over vocals.
Counting is not an end in itself. It is how you arrange for the right parts of two records to meet.
Contents of the video
0:00 One, two, three, four
Alright folks, Jonathan here. This is video number four in a selection I'm doing on counting bars and phrases in dance music. In video number four we're going to be looking at counting bars and phrases in a type of music known as hip-hop. Very quickly, that there is an actual musical bar and we count that as follows. One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. Now this guy here is known as a phrase and it's not dissimilar to a bar, the difference being we have one, two, three, Four bars stuck in together. This is drawn freehand, so it's not to scale. And we count this as follows. One, one, two, three, two, one, two, three, three, one, two, three, four, one, two, three. What we'll do now, I'll play some music and we'll count the bar and the phrase in relation to the beat of the music. Let's listen to the track first. Here we go.
0:55 For the name of the track, look to the side of the video
For the name of the track, look to the side of the video. We'll start again, this time we'll just count using the actual bars first of all. So we'll start the music off again from the beginning. Now this time, we'll count using the phrases. Here we go. Start the music from the beginning again. There you go, exactly the same principle but what we're doing instead of counting one bar, we're counting four bars and putting them together in what's known as a phrase. This is video number four and in video number four we're looking at counting hip-hop. In a future video or a future one or two videos, what we'll be doing is utilising this principle of counting in relation to actually mixing the tracks together in beat but more importantly as well in time so we don't have bass lines over bass lines, we don't have vocals over vocals and we make sure it's in timing with regards to the phrases and the actual bars as well. Thanks for watching and as usual, practice and enjoy!
This transcript was produced automatically from the audio of the video and may contain mistakes.
