The Rhythm That Gets Used EVERYWHERE In Superhero Movies
Have you ever sat down to watch a superhero movie, and as you were watching it, you thought to yourself:
"Man, this is exactly the same as every other superhero movie I’ve ever watched, I can see absolutely everything coming, and I’m starting to wonder how long Hollywood can keep feeding me the exact same thing in a shiny new box every six months before I finally go clinically insane"?
Well, guess what?
I have yet another commonality for you to notice between almost every superhero movie you’ll ever see (And I will make examples from both DC and Marvel movies!)
It’s easy to miss if you aren’t listening for it, but there is a rhythm that shows up all the time in superhero movie soundtracks, and once you notice it, you will never be able to un-notice it.
Heck, you may even start composing your own music with it...
What is this rhythm? Check out the link below, and I’ll show you what it is and - bonus! - how to play it on your guitar.
Do you know what else gets used in every superhero movie soundtrack? Chords. They are also one of the core building blocks of music as a whole. If you want to expand your knowledge of chords, check out my Complete Chord Mastery guitar course.
Video Transcription
Hello Internet, so nice to see you! One thing I like to do is to go to the cinema like many of you, but I go to the cinema because I want to listen to the soundtrack. I cannot be the only one out there who does that.
I mean, I would watch nearly any movie, if the soundtrack is good enough, there is one thing I got another thing in the past few years and in the last decade or so, is that the the music of superhero movies is converging around the same rhythm figure. So there is a certain figure that I would call the superhero rhythm.
And you start to hear these everywhere. From all the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the DC Universe to other science fiction movies, as long as there is a superhero around, it's very light in the movies being made in the last 10 years or so, it's very likely you're gonna hear these rhythm.
Now, this will be a moment in the video where I do a montage of different superhero videos showing you all these rhythm in all those movies, starting from Wonder Woman, and ending on AntMan quantum mania, because we've been using both of them with all the movies in between. But I'm not gonna do that.
Because the last time I did that, I got so many copyright checks from YouTube. And I had to mutilate a video and eliminate all the examples. So sorry, I'm not gonna do that. If you have to complain about that, right, a stern letter to Google and YouTube, and they stopped doing this bull**** that if I put 10 seconds of music to explain what it is, they think I am a thief, and they need to pay them, or I need to delete the Delete part of the video, or the video is not going to be shown, or it has been monetized by somebody else.
I don't monetize my video, but I don't want other people to monetize them either. Okay, that's my policy. Okay, so, but I'm going to explain to you, the reader, okay, the rhythm, it's interesting, because it's in seven. So I'm gonna write it down. First, it's gonna work and then I'm gonna, I'm gonna make it easier because we're just by seeing the standard notation, man is just met. So that's the superhero rhythm, and is it in seven eight.
And if I played it sounds this way. Okay, now, of course, again, I cannot put the original examples. But imagine in your mind of a big orchestra orchestra hitting the hitting those notes. This is much easier to understand if you think of it in terms of numbers, and not in terms of notes. Okay, it's equivalent, of course, if you know to read music, but it's much easier for most of us to think in a slightly different way.
Now, this is seven eight, so there are seven and there are seven elements of eight notes. So this is two eighths long, this is two as long as it's three, eight, long, and same here two, to three. So the easiest way to understand these is to think about those numbers and count this way. 12 12 123 12 12 123 12 12 123 12 12 123 and put the accent on the one, okay?
12 12 123 12 12 123. Okay, now it's quite typical on the tree to put a little bit of a feel, okay, so typically when I hear something like that okay, let's play this way with that suspended chords. Okay, and he noticed that the accent seemed to roll around, because you would expect this bar to be eight, eight notes long and now seven, eight minutes long.
So this feels like it's sitting on the downbeat. And this feels like it's sitting on the upbeat pom pom pom pom pom pom, so this feels like it's up as opposed to down and then it keeps rolling this way. Okay, now you've heard the is going to be and go on YouTube and search the soundtrack for a Wonder Woman or AntMan quantum mania or any other any other of the AntMan.
A couple of the Captain American movies a few of the plenty that again, this is all over the Marvel Cinematic Universe, okay, and listen back. And you're gonna hear that you're gonna hear this exact freedom. Okay, you're gonna run into interesting too, in you see the evolution of this freedom.
If you go and listen to the Wonder Woman soundtrack, which, as far as I know, is one of the first if not the first using this rhythm. I mean, I know that now as I said it on the internet, everybody's gonna go out and find all these rhythm much earlier. No wonder woman, when they play this rhythm. They stay on a single chord.
If you listen to the soundtrack in AntMan quantum mania, and you go out there, especially on the end credits it says at the beginning, but in the end the credits they played this rhythm and they start changing the chord throughout these so these see, there's one chord here, one chord here and then a chord into another chord understood or something like that, okay? They change the chord and they and they add different things that you can hear them.
The rhythm is more sophisticated. It's the same rhythm. But the music is not just one chord plus the rhythm. So the thing is, they started to recognize the street and he starts to be a cliche, and we are elaborating the cliche, okay, until it becomes something more interesting. This also means one thing, you want to write music with this rhythm, you have to hurry up because people are already writing music with this.
And so this is not going to be new for a long time. Okay, it's trendy now. Okay, it may not be trendy by the end of the year. Okay, that's the super hero rhythm. I am sure you guys can find many other examples. You want to know more about how to write music and on your guitar and learn all the harmony and chords.
Get a look at my course complete chord mastery on the lane and one of the corners of this video. Click the link go there, read everything buy the course. This is Tommaso Zillio for musictheoryforguitar.com, and until next time, enjoy.