Subdivisions
by Rush
- 133
- BPM
- B minor
- Key
- 10A
- Camelot
- 52
- Danceability
- 5
- Acousticness
After the success of Moving Pictures, Rush began developing new material between tour dates, often using soundchecks to try out ideas. Alex Lifeson recalled informal writing exercises and early ideas captured on cassette. "Subdivisions" came out of those jam sessions, with Geddy Lee's synthesizer playing as its foundation. With Lee on keyboards, Neil Peart and Lifeson became a dedicated rhythm section who could tune in to each other's parts.
By late 1981 the band was at Le Studio in Morin-Heights, Quebec, working on the live album Exit...Stage Left, and Peart started on the lyrics there. He first heard the musical idea when Lee and Lifeson came back from the studio and played him a demo on a portable cassette player. The song was nearly finished when Rush previewed it live on the last leg of the Moving Pictures tour in late 1981.
When the band returned to work on Signals in the summer of 1982, Lee's synthesizers moved to the front and Lifeson's guitar was pulled back. Lifeson said he raised the guitar fader himself during mixing, only for producer Terry Brown to lower it again. "Subdivisions" was the album's second single and charted at No. 5 on the Mainstream Rock Tracks chart in the United States.
Subdivisions runs at 133 BPM, the tempo of techno, trance and big-room dance. In classical terms it sits in allegro territory. A bar of 4/4 lasts 1.8 seconds, and a quarter-note delay is 451 ms. It is in B minor, Camelot 10A, which shares its notes with D major and mixes cleanly with E minor and F# minor.
We use multiple sources as part of our online research for the song story including Wikipedia.