Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Digital Pianos - Electronic Pianos - Synths & Keyboards OT: Use Triplets or 12/4?

This is a music theory related question. Posting here instead of on Beginners forum (so OT-ing it) as this is my usual go-to forum, I rarely access the others. My knowledge of music theory is reasonable but not too deep so bear with me.

I am transcribing Nicolas Godin's Back to your heart as a learning step to later trying to make some proper arrangement for the piano. I am using 4/4 time signature. It turns out most of the measures have triplets with this signature. So I wondered, could this be transcribed using 12/4 instead so I would not have to make nearly every quarter note a triplet.

Is there a right or wrong here?

For the lazy ones, here is the song:

12/8

OOPS!!! It also makes more sense. Still, is 4/4 with triplets wrong? What defines one being better than the other, if that is the case?

No. My friends and I feel this in 4/4 so go with what seems more natural to you. IMHO.

4/4 where the beats consistently break into triplets is what 12/8 is. This song is counted as "one-and-uh two-and-uh," not "one-and two-and."

COULD you notate it in 4/4? Sure. Technically, you COULD take a song in A major, and notate it as being in C major, manually sharping every every C, F, and G as it occurs. It's more work to notate and more work to read, and implies the wrong sense of tonal center, but in the end, a player playing from such a transcription would still produce the same result. But why would you want to do that?

Another way to look at it: Let's say you want to try playing your piano score with a drummer. Ask him to give you a 12/8 beat at about 77 bpm, and it will give you the feel of this song. Ask him to give you a 4/4 beat, it won't.

That's the definitive answer, Mr. Scott.

Thank you all for your answers.

AS's explanation makes sense. But, like NP, 4/4 feels more right for some reason. My understanding from both answers is either way is OK, maybe 12/8 better technically speaking.

I started transcribing the song with 4/4 signature because I was working on a groove suggested by my teacher (learned by ear) and I made a little mistake as I was transcribing the chords to the groove. It was only when I started trancribing the melody itself I did realize groove and melody dit not fit. After I fixed the groove, everything fit and sounded OK.

Here is the first page of my "transcription", between quotes because only the voice part and the instrument solo bridges were really trancribed. Now the real fun starts, how to make this song sound good on a piano with much less information than the electronic version.

In this case I would use 12/8. In classical music it's very common to just indicate the first few triplets when it's obvious that what follows are triplets too. In this case I think 12/8 would make much more sense and be easier to read.

😉

I lean toward 12/8 in the stated case ... but in other music some respected musicians think otherwise.
Here's a well-known example of an early publication and a modern urtext printing:





He uses cut-time. This gives us the strong beats. The triplets give the 12/8 flavor.