All music is divided into measures, or short units that contain a set number of or “counts,” and

Example

You’ve probably heard musicians counting off 1-2-3-4, 1-2-3-4, in which case the set of four beats is a single measure.

This “measure” structure is the backbone for the song’s rhythm. But not all measures are the same! While most have four beats, they can have any number at all. For example, a waltz has three beats per measure, so you would count “1-2-3, 1-2-3” as you tap along.

Parts of Time Signature

The most common time signature is 4/4, which has four notes, each marked by a quarter note. This is the standard way of writing time signatures:

• The first number tells you how many beats per measure
• The second number tells you what kind of symbol represents a single beat (this only matters for reading music)
• The second number can only be a multiple of two – usually 2, 4, or 8 – because those are the “note” symbols that exist in Western music (half, quarter, eighth, etc.)

4/4: four beats per measure. Each beat is represented by a quarter note (this is also called “common time”)

3/4: three beats per measure. Each beat is represented by a quarter note

6/8: six beats per measure. Each beat is represented by an eighth note

The first number is the most important, since it tells you how many beats per measure there are going to be. The second number only matters for reading music, but makes no difference to how the music sounds.

Time Signature vs. Tempo

People sometimes confuse time signature with tempo, but they’re actually very different. Time signature is the pattern of beats — how many beats you get per measure. Tempo is the speed of those measures. So time signature tells you whether you’re counting 1-2-3-4 or 1-2-3. But tempo tells you how fast you should be doing that count.

Examples

Simple Examples

Here are a couple of easy examples:

Notice how the first example has three quarter notes in a measure, while the second has just two. That matches the 3/4 and 2/4 time signatures for the songs.

In the following song, the singer helpfully counts off the time signature at the beginning: “1-2-3, 1-2-3.” So you know it’s a “3-count” time signature. If the song was written down, it would probably use quarter notes to represent each count, which means it would be 3/4 time!

Tougher Examples

You’ve probably heard plenty of songs with a 3-count, and most of the songs you know are probably 4-count! But what about the other, more unusual counts? These are much less common, and can be very difficult to play, but when you learn to recognize them you’ll be doubly impressed by the songwriters’ creativity in using such a difficult time signature.

5-Count

Let’s start with a 5-count time signature. Howard Shore used one of these in the Isengard Theme from the Lord of the Rings soundtrack. Listen to the drums in the background and count along: you’ll notice that the pattern is broken into 5 beats. This unusual time signature is part of what gives the tune its plodding, mechanical energy.

When this time signature is written, it’s usually “5/8,” with eighth notes representing a single beat. If eighth notes represent a single beat, then quarter notes would represent two beats. So in this example we see a quarter note (2 beats) followed by three eighth notes (3 beats), 2+3=5.

7-Count

You can hear an even stranger time signature in this song by the heavy metal group Alice in Chains. The opening riff is deceptively simple, and at first you might not notice there’s anything odd about the beat. But if you try counting along, you may quickly get lost! That’s because the main riff has a 7-count time signature. Just like with the Isengard Theme, this gives the song a powerful, but dark, sound.

7-count time signatures also usually use eighth notes. Here’s an example of 7/8 time:

Why Are Time Signatures Important?

It’s probably obvious why the first number matters: you have to know how many beats are in a measure so that you know the basic backbeat of a song. Three-count songs have a very different beat from four- or seven-count songs.

But what about that second number? Why don’t composers just standardize and always use a quarter-note to represent a single note, the way they do in the more common 4/4 and 3/4 time signatures?

Unfortunately, there’s no simple answer to this question. This is one of those early traditions that have been maintained in music notation over the centuries, and composers have found their own reasons for changing the second number in a time signature.

One of the reasons might be that it helps keep the page clear. For example, you might have four beats per measure in a relaxed, gentle-sounding song with a lot of half-note and whole-notes. In other words, you’d have four beats per measure but most of them would not be played (you might play a note on the “1” count and hold it all the way through the measure). On the other hand, you might have a frantic, high-energy song where each measure has four beats but each of those beats is constantly being subdivided into eighth-notes and sixteenth-notes, cluttering up each measure. This problem can be avoided by changing the way you write the beat.

Another reason for having different time signatures might be that it helps composers show which notes they think should be grouped together in the performance (this is called “phrasing”) – or it may simply look better to them!

• Down-beat: Beats have two components – the down-beat and the up-beat. The down-beat is best understood by clapping your hands along with a song. You are clapping the down-beats.
• Up-beat: An up-beat is the part of the rhythm that occurs in between the down beats. When clapping along with music, an upbeat is timed with when you pull your hands away from each other.
• Stressed beat: The beat that is given emphasis, be that it is a little stronger, louder, or in some way stands out from the other beats. It is often (but not always) the first beat in a measure of music.
• Non-stressed beat: The opposite of a stressed beat. Often a song is filled with more non-stressed beats. For example, when the first beat in a 4/4 measure is emphasized, the other three beats are non-stressed.

How to Identify Beats in Music

When Reading Music:

There are slow songs, and there are fast ones. The speed can be indicated by either a metronome , or by using traditional Italian music terms such as Andante or Moderato, although there are many others.

Here is an example of sheet music that uses Andante:

Andante indicates a tempo of a moderately slow beat. Think of the speed at which you take a gentle walk.

Here is the other way of showing the tempo of a beat. A quarter note is given a number. This number is the setting on a metronome:

Metronomes are devices that literally keep the beat by making a repetitive sound based on the speed setting of the metronome. A great way to see how this works is to visit an online metronome web site, such as this one – https://www.flutetunes.com/metronome/

When Listening to Music:

Taking beat a bit further, let’s discuss emphasis. We tend to emphasize the downbeats. Imagine you are walking while listening to a favorite song. If your walking is timed with the beats, then each time your foot touches the ground you timed it with a downbeat in the music.

When you raise your feet you are timing with the upbeat. So literally the image of something going down and up is helpful to understand downbeats and upbeats.

Here is a video of a drummer explaining this:

Putting the emphasis on certain downbeats (or even upbeats) will alter the feel of the music. When counting beats in 4/4 time, we might emphasize the first downbeat. Imagine counting in a way in which we say one number louder than the other numbers. For example, saying “ONE – two – three -four.”  It is very common to emphasize the first downbeat. A good practice is to try emphasizing other downbeats, or even more than one. As an example, it is also common to emphasize the first and third beats. In saying this out loud, it would sound like “ONE – two -THREE – four.”

To fully capture the downbeats and the upbeats try saying it like this: “One – and – two – and – three – and – four – and.”  Using this approach, you can emphasize any combination of downbeats or upbeats.  Try placing the emphasis on the first and third upbeats. This would be “one – AND – two – and – three – AND – four – and.”

This can get tricky to achieve. Yet practice will get you closer to doing it in a correct way.

Closing this lesson on beats, here is a video from a percussion specialist in which he shows just how to understand and emphasize the upbeats.  He’s got rhythm!

No matter what instrument you play, or if you are a vocalist, you do need to follow the beat. Even if there are no percussion instruments involved, the rhythm, beat, tempo, or speed is something that applies to any music performance.

The word ‘score’ is used in a lot of different ways in music. In the broadest sense, it can mean any kind of sheet music – these terms are sometimes used interchangeably. More narrowly, it can describe the ‘full score,’ or a single musical document that contains all the different parts for an orchestral performance. A score is usually used for a more formal, coordinated piece, like a classical sonata or a big-band jazz tune. If you’re working in a more informal style like blues or rock and roll, you probably won’t see the music written down in a score.

‘Score’ also describes the cinematic soundtrack of a movie – the background music that plays underneath all the action. Once the movie has been edited, composers ‘score’ it by composing music that will complement the plot and events on screen, as well as punctuating the rhythms and providing an added layer of emotional expression. These film scores are mostly orchestral, so they can be written in a full score.

In this article, we’ll focus on the full score. These documents are mainly used by conductors and band leaders, since they’re the ones that need to be able to look at all the different parts simultaneously. There are also individual scores that you can buy for each instrument – vocal scores for singers, cello scores for cellists, and so on. For the most part, they follow the same rules as a full score, but they only show information for a single instrument rather than covering the whole orchestra. There are also ‘miniature scores’ available from some music publishers, which print the music in small, portable booklets (these usually contain only the score for a single part – otherwise they’d have to print way too small!)

We’ll also be focused on how scores are used in Western music. But of course Western culture isn’t the only one that has developed a system for writing down music. Indian, Chinese, and lots of other civilizations have their own systems – we just usually don’t use the word ‘score’ to describe them.

Parts of a Score

When looking at a full score, the first thing you’ll notice is that the page is broken out into different parts for different instruments. This helps you imagine what’s going on in the whole orchestra rather than just zeroing in on a single instrument.

In this example, the score is set up for 14 instrumental groups and shows all of their different parts:

Notice how some of the lines are very busy, while others have almost no notes on them at all.  For example, the contrabass (bottom line) has notes to play throughout. But the timpani (6^th from the bottom) is almost silent after the first couple of measures. If you know how to read music, you can look at this single page and start to imagine how all the different parts will intertwine, creating harmonies and counterpoints in your mind. Most of us, of course, are not that skilled at reading music.

How to Read a Score

Most of the time, you won’t be reading the entire score for a piece of music. The composer would certainly do that, or maybe a conductor. But for an individual musician, what matters most is your own part. If you’re playing the viola, you might want to look over the violin part so that you know how their role in the performance will intersect with your own. But it’s usually not necessary to read over the whole score – you can just listen to the orchestra when you rehearse with them.

Once you’ve identified your instrument on the page, reading a score is just like reading any other piece of sheet music. You can find more details on this process in the article on sheet music, but for now we’ll just cover the basics.

After looking at the title and author, your eye should next go to the staffs. As we saw before, a full score has several parallel staffs, each corresponding to a single instrument. Sometimes, though, an instrument requires two staffs. This is often true for writing piano music, since pianos have such a huge range of pitches that they can make, and demand two hands working independently to play them. So those instruments get a grand staff, or two staffs tied together with a bracket.

Once you know which instrument belongs to which staff, you need to know what the staff represents. The clef gives you that information. Different clefs give different meanings to the lines and spaces of the staff, so you can’t read anything on a staff until you know what the clef is. Alongside the clef is a key signature, which gives slight modifications to the meaning of the lines and spaces. This example has ‘flat’ symbols (♭) on the space for E and the line for D. So all the E’s change to E♭ and all the D’s change to D♭ on this staff.

So now you have all the information you need to read the lines and spaces of the staff. But what about the actual music? Before you can read that, you have to understand the basic structure of the rhythm, and for that you need the time signature. The time signature tells you how many beats go in each measure, and what rhythmic value is represented by each kind of note or rest. In this case, the symbol c represents ‘common time’ or 4/4. That means four beats per measure, and the quarter note counts as one beat. Finally, the score will also have instructions about the dynamics, or loudness of the music. This example is telling you to start very quiet (pianissimo) and gradually get louder (crescendo).

OK! That was a lot of information before we even got to the music itself. But now we’re ready to look at the lines and spaces and work out what they mean. Remember that the meaning of each line or space is defined by the clef, and there are two main clefs: the treble clef () and the bass clef (). Here are the meanings of each line and space in the different clefs:

Now that you know which pitch belongs where, you can look at the different rhythmic values. Once you have both pitch and rhythm, you’ll have everything you need to play the song!

Whole note/rest: hold for four beats (the ‘whole’ measure if it has 4 beats)

 Half note/rest: hold for two beats (‘half’ the measure if it has 4 beats)

 Quarter note/rest: hold for one beat (a ‘quarter’ of a measure)

 Eighth note/rest: hold for half a beat.

What is a Chord? A chord is a combination of three or more notes played together at the same time.  A basic chord has three notes. Complex chords have 4 or 5 different notes; beyond that, larger chords usually use some of the same notes more than once, in multiple octaves (because much more than five different notes in a chord becomes too much for the human brain to hear meaningfully). Chords are … »