Let’s get back into transcribing (and writing in general) with the tune “Whalefall” by Sungazer. If you’re familiar with YouTubers Adam Neely and/or Shawn Crowder, you’ll recognize this band, and “Whalefall” is from an album Sungazer just released this past September.
Sometimes it’s hard to know what to make of musicians I get exposed to via the internet — I can think of one internet music theorist (remaining protected by anonymity) whose music simply does not click with me, try as I might. Sungazer, on the other hand, is a very adventurous jazz/fusion project, and is picking up the slack with regard to bands I used to like that have become more… hypothetically intrepid.
To that end, I got a chance to see these guys play live in 2023 when they were touring with Plini:
Appropriately enough, Plini is on this song, although he’s listed as a dual artist on Apple Music, so I’m not sure if he’s supposed to have songwriting credit. (Sorry if I missed you, Plini!)
Anyway, “Whalefall” starts with a driving 5/4 shuffle. After a five-on-the-floor setup, Shawn plays an interesting groove built around offbeat triplets — the cymbal pattern is pretty steady, leading to some fun independence moments:
Shawn makes frequent use of some open-handed hi-hat playing, hence the tom hits with the hi-hat. He also uses the floor tom a lot more than the rack tom, to a conspicuous degree. The band recently shared a live playthrough of another track off this new album, and Shawn didn’t even bother setting up a rack tom for that session.
The first chunk of the song has a chorus with two bars of 4/4 and one bar of 2/4 — it’s 10 beats total, so you could count it staying in 5/4, but it has such a strong 2 & 4 feel that it probably should be counted in duple meters.
However, the last two bars of the chorus are in 5/4, with some fun quarter note triplet hits on beat 4:
There are a lot of offbeat hi-hat barks during the chorus, and I think I got them down accurately, but you can go a little crazy trying to pick up all of these kinds of details. The first ~minute “Whalefall” then repeats with some minor alterations.
There’s a tempo change after the second chorus (around the 1:40 mark) with the song slowing down from 136 to 82 BPM. As always, I did some math to see if there’s any potential for a metric modulation. 136 ÷ 82 is 1.65853, which is clearly not any sort of recognizable rhythmic ratio. However, it is very close to 1.6, which is steering us to some sort of triplet modulation.
In fact, since 1.6 is essentially five-thirds, the math suggests that every fifth 8th note triplet becomes the beat. That might sound quite demented, but… check this out, while tapping your foot along to the accents:
That being said, it might just be a coincidence, and this could simply be an ice–cold tempo change. The math doesn’t quite work out, as the resulting tempo is actually closer to 81.92 (it’s another repeating decimal, albeit a 41-digit repeating decimal).
The band may have rounded up; I know Adam does not dig decimal BPMs, even though metric modulations are the one opportunity for a decimal BPM actually to be useful… if you want to be a mathematical stickler. (Of course, programming a click track with a repeating decimal seems to run contrary to the laws of physics.)*
I will fully admit that I might be way off here, but considering the musicians involved, this modulation is nevertheless entirely possible — maybe even probable. It does stretch the limits of music notation since there is no such thing as a single note lasting five of any subdivision; I used a quarter note tied to a quarter note triplet, which would last five 8th note triplets total (three for the quarter note, two for the quarter note triplet).†
Anyway, this movement is built around quintuplets and morphs into something of a little drum feature. There’s a cool moment where Shawn moves from quintuplets to sextuplets, and then to septuplets:
I normally would have used 16th note triplets, but this was one of those fleeting moments where a sextuplet honestly felt more appropriate.
This section climaxes with a hip three-note quintuplet lick before more dense septuplet playing:
I find septuplets to be a very fickle subdivision — while I’m pretty comfortable with various patterns of 5s, it’s tough to make 7s feel right, but Shawn uses them quite well.
The movement finishes with a heavy half-time feel under a bellowing sax melody — this groove has a really interesting lope to it:
Some of the tuplets in the section look quite gnarly, but I notated everything with 8th notes, dotted 8ths, and 16ths, so just remember that you can count all of these phrases with combinations of 2s and 3s; many of the quintuplet licks are felt as 2 + 3 or 3 + 2.
As we go back into 5/4, “Whalefall” returns to its original tempo. To “undo” the modulation, we need the opposite of five triplets — three quintuplets:
(This time, I can at least use a dotted note in the tempo change.)
Back in 5/4, Shawn plays a five-note triplet pattern, using some familiar cymbal phrasing of 2 + 3:
The pattern of kick • snare • snare does give a waltzing 3/4 feel, but it doesn’t seem accurate to call it polymeter, as it resolves on the downbeat of each measure (like most of the syncopated things drummers play, it’s also probably not a polyrhythm).
The last thing I look at is another five-note waltzing pattern on the ride:
Speaking of cymbals, although Shawn has more of a minimalist shell setup, he has at least three cymbal stacks, and I tried my best to differentiate between them.
Whew… and with that, we’re a little over halfway through the song! Unfortunately, that’s all the time/energy I had for this one. Shawn also transcribes his playing, so if he ever gets around to this record, I wouldn’t want to give the whole song away.
Just to broadly talk about what I didn’t cover, the rest of “Whalefall” (surprisingly) sounds like it’s entirely in 5/4. There’s another heavy half-time feel (which kinda sounds like it’s in 6 but missing a beat), and after comes a section with some horn fills and string stabs. During this movement, Shawn sounds like he’s playing a traditional shuffle cymbal pattern. Finally, we get to Plini’s solo, which climaxes the track atop another five-on-the-floor drum groove before an ambient outro.
Sorry for my lack of posting lately. I’ve been pretty busy. As in, horrifically strung out. I actually got caught up in the middle of a pretty big story in the music world; I’ll write about it sometime soon… when the time is right.
(PS: Shawn, if you happen to have found this and have any feedback, shoot me an email. I’m a little unsure about some of those septuplets.)
* ^ It really cracks me up that DAWs like Logic let you program a BPM down to the thousandth spot (i.e., 1.000). I guess someone might find that useful… apparently more useful than setting a BPM with a dotted quarter note, which you often cannot do!
† ^ Whenever I write out a metric modulation, I always include the resulting tempo, for redundancy. Any arranger should do so as well, so long as there is a fixed starting tempo. If there is not… good luck to whoever tries to play something like this.
