Jesse Mullan

There is no such thing as a one sixth note

Written on Friday, the 16^th of March, 2007 at 7:18 pm and was filed under: Music, Nerdity

I keep listening to various performances of the Super Mario Brothers theme music, and I keep hearing some weirdness. I decided to pull out a tracker and get the timing down right. I was sort of right about the internet notation being wrong. The time signature is 4:4 with a nice triplet in there. To notate it in step notation I had to use a 96 line block, with each beat encompassing 6 lines.

So, in sort of “Time Unit Box Notation,” except with pitches (the capital A is a sharp):

c........g........e........a.....b.....A..a.....
X...........X...........X...........X...........
	
g...e...g...a.....f..g.....e.....c..d..b........
X...........X...........X...........X...........

Oh, the humanity.

What was throwing me off?
A: I’m really terrible at reading music.
B: Since the rhythm is “syncopated,” it makes use of a tied note that threw me off
C: The rhythm is gonna get you, rhythm is gonna get you, rhythm is gonna get you

If I were going to rewrite the notation, uh, wow. I tried an online thing for doing so, and, uh.

“Doo doo doo, doo doo, DOO! Doo. Doo doo doo, doodoodoodoo, doodoo doodoo doodoo doo doodoodoo…”