I dont get time signatures...

**This is a long post!**

...And I'm starting to think I never will. :(

This is going to start off in a tedious rant, to get to my point. Here we go.

In a nutshell, here's my beef. I've literally been involved in music in one way or another since I was 7. I'm 22 now. I started with my voice in 1st grade, then elementary school decided we all had to learn the recorder at 3rd grade. That was when i started really learning to read music, ironically, I was unaware thats what I was doing at the time. Just thought I was reading notes on a page.

That ended in the 5th grade, then from the 6th grade until 10th grade i played trombone in band class which I hated, but learned to "read music". I understood all the notes on the page, and whatnot, but never got the whole 4/4 2/4 4/6 thing going on. I asked a lot, but never really understood.

At 16 I started learning guitar, via my history teacher. Weird. He just taught me the open chords, and a blues riff and thats that. Everything since, I've done on my own. I bought a "Music Theory" book at the guitar shop a few years back, but never got past probably page 13 on it...

I can "read music" but I still dont get time signatures, when people are talking about stuff like 4/8 or 8/16 or whatever. When I "read music" in band class, I pretty much just matched the notes to the rhythm to how the trombonists next to me were playing, and it was pretty damn easy.

If you were to ask me about time signatures, all I know is that one of the numbers means how many beats per measure, but I couldnt tell you what the other number means without looking at that music theory book. IF I looked, I'd forget by tomorrow anyway, so why bother... *sigh*

The thing that pisses me off the most, is when I want to talk "musically" with other people, they talk about time signatures and whatnot... and I can read music, but just not those DAMN THINGS!! It just makes me feel like I can read music, but simultaneously I dont know **** about music if I dont know what time sigs are really...

I can look at any notation book, and understand exactly how to play the song, but I cant WRITE notation due to that damn time signature thing.

haha, valid. alot of people have trouble with time sigs, and more still think they know when they don't know as much as they think they know...phew.


anyways, in a textbook or elementary answer, the top number is the beats in the measure and the bottom number determines what gets the beat.

in 4/4, there are 4 beats in the measure and the 4 on bottom symbolizes a quarter note, because it is a quarter value....as in 4's. if you wanted to write a piece of music in 4 beats per measure but with the 8th notes recieving the beat, you would write 4/8, because the 8 symbolizes the 8th notes. make sense? and so forth.



but that's only half of it, because what really happens with western music is that we are split into two tiers. we have "simple" meters and "complex" meters (and "odd" meters if you want to get technical, but those are still based on one or the other of the previous two i mentioned). "simple duple" as it is sometimes called, subdivides the beat into half. think "one-and-two-and". complex meters divide the beat into threes. think "one-and-a-two-and-a". a perfect example of a complex meter is 6/8. from the logic i gave to you above for the simple meter, you will think of this totally the wrong way. what this really means is that there are TWO beats (6 subdivides by 3 which makes 2) and the 8th note gets the beat. 6/8 is typically used for waltzes, but it is extremely common in other styles as well. you can bridge upon that and make something like 9/8, which is the same as 6/8 but with ONE extra beat (6+3=9).

sorry, i'm in a bit of a hurry and i'm late for work, but i hope that helped a little bit.

To put it (fairly) simply, the top number is how many beats per measure, the bottom number is what kind of note is getting a full beat.

So in 4/4 time, there are four beats in a measure (that is to say, you would count to four before moving to the next measure) and the quarter note receives a full beat. Since a beat consists of a number and the "and" following it ('1 + 2 + 3 + 4 +' in 4/4 time), you would count each quarter note as "1 +" (or "2 +" or "+ 3" and so on).

An eighth note is half of a quarter note, so you have to give it only half the count. Count it as just the "1" or the "and." A sixteenth is half of an eighth, so you have to give it half the count. For sixteenth notes, we break down "1 + 2 + 3 + 4 +" even further into "1 e + a 2 e + a 3 e + a 4 e + a." So a sixteenth note would be counted as "1," "e," "and," or "a."

Half notes have twice the count of quarter notes, so you'd count them as "1 + 2 +." Whole notes have four times the count of quarter notes, so they'd be "1 + 2 + 3 + 4 +" (the full measure).

And then you have dotted notes. A dotted note increases the value of a note by one half. So a dotted half note would be counted as "1 + 2 + 3 +" and a dotted quarter note would be "1 + 2" and so on.

So let's say you have a four-bar riff in 4/4 time. We'll let "Q" be a quarter note, "E" be an eighth, an "S" be a sixteenth, "H" be a half, and "W" be a whole. A period after any letter will indicate a dotted note of that type. The italics underneath show the count. You play on the notes that aren't in parentheses, and hold the note as you count the numbers within them.

|-H-----------E----E---S---S---S---S---|-S---S---E---E.---S---Q-----Q----|

..1(e+a2e+a)..3(e).+(a).4.....e....+....a........1....e....+(a)2(e+)a....3(e+a)4(e+a)

|-H-----------E----E---S---S---S---S---|-W--------------------|

..1(e+a2e+a)..3(e).+(a).4.....e....+....a........1(e+a+2e+a3e+a4e+a)



I hope that helps at least a little bit.

I just like to keep it more simple than that.. but for #/8 and #/16 you can't get much more simple than earthman has said..

I just go "1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and..." for 4/4 time.. or "1 and 2 and 3 and" for 3/4 time.. which is what earthman said already.. but yeh.. I am hopeless at reading sheet music.. and my biggest battle with sheet music is the timing.. not so much about what time signatures are but where I am to start the next chord.. I just play it how I think it's meant to be played and listen to the other musicians and it's fairly obvious when I am wrong, so then I teach myself that tiny bit as a memory exercise etc

I personally have a hard time counting while I'm playing unless I know the notes and chords so well that I don't even have to think about them. Maybe I just need at lot more practice -- but at this point, I usually have to have the melody in my head and let my timing match that.