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You’ll end up contextually understanding the way these work by continuing through the examples below:

1) Understand your time signatures.

Music is divided up into measures or bars the same way a day is divided into hours. Measures are essentially groupings of beats into regular intervals. A time signature or meter signature shows how measures are divided up into beats (like an hour is divided into minutes) and the duration or note value of a single beat. This flow chart explains the hierarchy of a piece of music from largest (lengthiest) value to the shortest value.

Song Section (groupings of measures) Single Measure Beat Subdivision of the Beat

Time signatures are usually represented by two numbers that look like a fraction. This is how a few popular time signatures are represented on a staff:

The bottom number represents the type of note that gets the beat. For example a 4 represents a quarter note, a 2 represents a half note, and an 8 represents an 8th note and so on. Now even though they may be called a quarter, half, and 8th note does not necessarily mean that there are 4, 2, and 8 respectively in a measure. That number of beats in a measure is represented by the top number of the fraction.

For example in 4/4 the measures are divided into four quarters as the regular beat. In 3/4 the measures are divided into three quarter notes as the beat. In 6/8 there are six 8th note beats per measure. Now this does not mean that these are the only types of notes you can use, just the regular division of the measure. Quarter notes can be divided into 8th notes or 16ths, or extended into half notes or whole notes and so on as mentioned above.

There are three broad types of time signatures. Simple time signatures are groups of beats that can be divided into two equal notes. The top number of the time signature expresses such times as 4/4, 3/4, 2/2 etc. Compound time signatures are groups of beats divided into three equal groups such as 6/8, 9/8 or 12/8. Complex, or odd time signatures can not be divided into equal intervals such as 5/4, 7/8 etc.

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