Measures/Time Signatures

Alrighty! Now in our music, we may have noticed some weird vertical lines on our musical Staff. The staff is just the 5 black lines and white spaces in between and is what we write our notes on! Bar Lines are what separate the Staff into smaller segments called Measures so that we can work on chunks of music at a time as shown below:

At the end of the piece, the very last Measure will have two Bar Lines that signify the end of the piece. Now off to the left of our photo you may see the fraction 4/4 to the left of our staff at the very beginning. That is called our Time Signature and is found at the beginning of every piece and sometimes throughout. The best way my students have applied this concept is to look at the Time Signature as a fraction. The top number shows how many Beats are found in a measure. The bottom number explains what we classify as a single beat. For example!

As shown in red above, our time signature is 4/4. So we have 1/4 note (Quarter note) that counts as a beat. And the top number shows that we have 4 beats per measure. So our measure is full with 4 quarter notes.

Now not all music will have a Time Signature of 4/4 and in fact, the next example I'll show is a 6/8 Time Signature:

Now from the bottom note we can find the fraction 1/8 (Eighth), which means an Eighth note signifies one beat. Now if we look at the top number (6) we know that there are Six beats in our measure. So up above we see that the measure is full with six eighth-notes. And that's about it! 'Till next time :)