Learn How Time Signatures Work
Learning to how to count, and how to play in time is your job as a drummer. Then entire band is counting on you when it comes to keeping time. If the lead singer tells you to cut the time in half, would you know how to play? If bass player ever tells you to play sixteenth note triplets would you know what to play? I’m writing this article to make everything to do with note values and time keeping as simple as counting to four.
Time Signatures
Time Signatures tell you how many notes there are in every bar. There is usually a times signature at the beginning of a bar letting you know what to expect. There are two numbers associated with time signatures a top number and a bottom number. They are normally expressed as a fraction.
For example 4/4, 5/4, 6/8, 7/4.
The top number tells you how many notes there are in that measure. So if you are looking at our examples above 4/4 has four notes in the measure and 5/4 has five notes per measure. This is important because in order to properly structure a beat or fill you need to know how many counts are in that bar.
The bottom number tells you what note values are used. Here is a little table I have designed to help make this more simple
| Bottom Number | Value |
| 1 | Whole Note |
| 2 | Half Note |
| 4 | Quarter Note |
| 8 | Eighth Note |
| 16 | Sixteenth Note |
Now, lets use this table to define the bottom numbers to complete the puzzle, don’t worry this will start making sense very soon.
So we know that 4/4 has four notes because of the top number, and we look at the chart above to see that it is made up of quarter notes, so 4/4 has 4 quarter notes per measure.
5/4 has five quarter notes per measure.
6/8 has six eighth notes per measure.
7/4 has seven quarter notes per measure.
Now for simplicity we are going to use 4/4 time in the rest of the examples. 4/4 is also referred to as common time as it is the standard for music. Unless otherwise noted it is assumed that the music is in common time.
Quarter Notes
Now using what we know from above we know that if we are in 4/4 time, there would be four quarter notes needed to fill up the bar. Here is what this would look like.
To count this we would simply count 1, 2, 3, 4. If we were using this to do a Single Stroke Roll it would simply be Left, Right, Left, Right.
Eighth Notes
Now eighth notes are fairly basic, so try to stay with me here. If you are playing eighth notes you can think of it two ways either 8/8 time signature or you can think of it as 4/4 with twice as many notes, so we add one note between each quarter note. Most people generally still think of it as 4/4 basically just because its easier to count. Instead of counting 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8 we count 1 &, 2 &, 3 &, 4 &.
Is this starting to make sense now?
Sixteenth Notes
Sixteenth Notes use the same concept as eighth notes, except they are twice as fast as eighth notes. Instead of their being 8 notes in a measure, there are now 16. To count this without getting our tongue all twisted up we count it 1 e & a, 2 e & a, 3 e & a, 4 e & a.
Conclusion
I hope this was able to help you get solid footwork when it comes to reading music. Feel free to leave comments with suggestions for this page to help make it more simple. Thanks!
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