It's About Time!

As you have been learning in your theory lessons, music contains a lot of counting! Now you're going to find out how all the music symbols you've been working with "fit" together.

Music is written on a staff and divided up into units called measures or bars. The lines that divide the music into measures are called bar lines. Look at this example to see what measures and bar lines look like on the staff:

In previous lessons, you learned that notes and rests have certain lengths, or are worth a particular number of beats. Well, each measure contains only a certain number of beats. The composer tells us how many beats are in a measure with another musical symbol called the time signature. In the example above, the time signature is . You would read such a time signature as "two-four". There would be two beats in every measure of a song written with this time signature. You can also have three, four, or more beats in a measure. Let's take a closer look at what the numbers in a time signature mean:

In this lesson, we are only going to deal with three different time signatures:

, , and

Remember: the top number of the time signature is how many beats there are in a measure. The first time signature would have two beats per measure, the second time signature would have three beats per measure, and the third time signature would have four beats per measure.

You will notice that all three of the time signatures shown above have the bottom number of '4'. That tells us what kind of note gets the beat. In this case, the bottom number means a quarter note will get one beat. It is possible to have a number other than four on the bottom of a time signature, though. For example: an "8" on the bottom would tell us that an eighth note would get one beat. A "2" on the bottom would tell us that a half note would get one beat. There are many different combinations of numbers that can make up a time signature. As you have probably figured out by now, a musician must know the time signature of a piece in order to play the notes the proper length.

Recommended Internet Reading

Explore the facts about Counting Time.

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