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Making Music - Computer Music Software and Hardware - Time Signatures Part 1

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Home > The Studio - Hints & Tips > Making Music Quick Guides > Time Signatures

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Quick Guide To Time Signatures

 

Time signatures are used to describe the beat and pulse of the music. Wemake sense of the figures and see how the numbers add up...

 You don't have to be able to read and write notation in order to make music - but it will helps. SirPaul McCartney apparently says he doesn't read music although it's difficult to believe that hecould write so many songs over so many years without picking up a few basics.

The two main components of music are pitch and rhythm. Time signatures tell the musician whatthe rhythm and pulse of the music is. You can probably enjoy a lucrative career as a rock starwithout knowing anything other than 4/4 time but we'll assume you want to be a little moreadventurous than that.

On the beat

Most music has a regular beat or pulse which we can generally hear because certain notes areaccented or emphasised more than others. If a musician was presented with a string of notes likethis:

 

it would not be at all clear how to play it. If the notes were accented as in one of these examples:

 

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then you would play the first example with a three-beat and the second with a four-beat. Insteadof accenting notes in this way throughout an entire piece, we place a bar line in front of the mostheavily-accented notes. Time signatures are added to give us more exact information about thebeats.

 

The numbers racket

Time Signatures consist of two numbers, one above the other. However, they are not fractionsand to think of them as such will be confusing. The top number tells us the number of beats in abar while the lower number tells us the type or value of the beat. There are four beat values incommon use:

The American preference for naming notes as a fraction of a whole note or semibreve is moreintuitive than the English nomenclature and many modern musicians tend to use that now.

The upper number, the number of beats in a bar, can technically be any value from 1 upwards(depending on how avant garde and controversial the composer wants to be) but it's unusual tofind values above 12. There are two types of time signature called simple and compound.

Simple time signatures

Simple time signatures have 2, 3 and 4 as their upper number and academics refer to them as

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duple, triple and quadruple time. Here are the most common examples:

4/4 is sometimes written as and sometimes called Common Time.

2/2 is sometimes written as and referred to as Alla Breve or Cut Time. To avoid

possible confusion, the modern preference is to write these time signatures out in full.

Tech terms

The big O The C alternative for 4/4 time is not a capital letter for'Common'. In old music the letter O was used for 3-time as it

was believed to represent the trinity and the circle was held tobe the symbol of perfection. Music in 2- or 4-time wasrepresented by a broken C representing an imperfect orincomplete circle.

Probably 90 percent of western music is written in4/4 time - and 99.9 percentof rock and pop! 3/4 is waltz time, much popularised by Johann Strauss who wrote the mostfamous waltz of all time - the Blue Danube - which gained a second round of fame in the film,2001: A Space Odyssey.

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