Central to the concept of musical time are tempo and time signature. The first of these couldn’t be more straightforward: tempo is simply speed, expressed as a number of beats per minute (BPM). While it might be easy to understand, though, the tempo of a track plays a huge part in defining its feel and character, and even placing it in a particular genre or subgenre: dubstep at 140bpm vs drum & bass at 170bpm vs 2-step at 130bpm, for example. We’ll come back to tempo shortly, but time signature warrants more of an explanation…
About time
If you’ve been producing music for a while and have never heard the term ‘time signature’ before, you’re probably making all your tracks in the DAW default of 4/4. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with this – indeed, the vast, vast majority of Western music today is in that stalwart sig – but by eschewing ‘odd’ alternatives such as 3/4, 5/4 and 6/8, you’re missing out on not only a wealth of powerful compositional possibilities, but also a whole world of time-based fun.
So, what, exactly, do those two numbers actually describe? Although unofficially standardised in text as X/Y, in musical notation, the time signature (which sits in between the clef and the key signature) is written as X on top of Y, kinda like a fraction. Requiring only the most basic understanding of music theory to get a handle on, the meanings of X and Y really aren’t as mystical or complicated as some may have led you to believe: the top numeral tells you the number of ‘beats’ in a bar, while the bottom numeral (the denominator) gives the note value of each of those beats. OK, we just made it sound more complicated than it actually is. Allow us to illustrate…
A bar of 13/8 could be thought of as three sets of three eighth-notes followed by a set of four
To take 4/4 as the most obvious example, the first 4 indicates that there are four beats in the bar, while the second (the denominator) tells us that the note value is a 1/4-note – also known as a quarter-note or crotchet. Thus, 4/4 means four 1/4-note beats to the bar. In exactly the same way, the time signature 9/8 sees each bar divided up into nine eighth-notes (aka 1/8-notes or quavers) for the purposes of performance, no
