Understanding Time Signatures & Measures When Reading Sheet Music

Video Transcript

" Hi! I’m Will, I’m going to teach you now about time signatures and measures. When you have a sheet of music you’re going to see a whole bunch of staff lines running across it and they’ll be divided to make sense of the music essentially. The way they’re divided are in what’s called measures, measures are just basically blocks of notes and the way you determine the size of blocks of notes is based on the time signature. For instance the most common time signature is as I mentioned before four four time and what this represents, the top note the bottom note rather represents what kind of note gets the beat and so for instance when it’s 1 2 3 4 that’s a quarter note getting the beat. The top note represents the top number rather represents how many there are to any given measure, so for instance in four four time you’ll have four quarter notes per measure it goes 1 2 3 4 and then I repeats every new measure. So here another measure you’ll have four more quarter notes, so four more quarter notes and it just goes 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 there’s other time signatures besides four four like six eight, six eight time signature an eighth note gets the beat instead of a quarter note, so if this was six eight it’ll be…so you have six eight notes in a measure cause of the six and then the eighth notes gets the beat so it’s 1 2 3 4 5 6, so 1 2 3 4 5 6 2 2 3 4 5 6 and so forth. Any type of note can receive, can be made the kind of note that gets the beat but the most common ones are quarter notes, eighth notes and half notes."