6/8 Time Signature For Dummies?!
Question: I'm really confused with the 6/8 time signature. I've been told:
6/8 = 6 beats per measure and the 8th note gets one beat.
Does this mean that the 8th note becomes a 6th note?
Also, the examples I've seen with a 6/8 time signature are in 3/4. For example this site
http://www.musicnotes.com/sheetmusic/mtd...
This piece of music says its in 6/8 but there are only 3 beats per measure.
Please help.
Answers: I'm really confused with the 6/8 time signature. I've been told:
6/8 = 6 beats per measure and the 8th note gets one beat.
Does this mean that the 8th note becomes a 6th note?
Also, the examples I've seen with a 6/8 time signature are in 3/4. For example this site
http://www.musicnotes.com/sheetmusic/mtd...
This piece of music says its in 6/8 but there are only 3 beats per measure.
Please help.
When you look at a time signature, you should think that the bottom number is the type of note that gets the beat, and the top note as how many of those there are per measure.
Most music is in 4/4 time -- the bottom "4" indicating that you're looking at quarter notes (a quarter is 1/4th), and that there are four of those per measure. The same thing applies to 6/8 time -- the eighth notes get the beat, and there are six of them.
Much of the music may look like 3/4 time, but there are subtle semantical differences. Listen to the intro to this song, called "A Song for Kelly Huckaby" by Death Cab for Cutie (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=021g4AOtu... ) and notice how the drums to the song go as follows:
KICK - hihat - hihat - SNARE - hihat - hihat
You can write this as two sets of three eighth-notes stemmed together, breaking down the feel of the rhythm. You can't do that in 3/4 time without violating transcription rules; and visually you don't get the impression that the beat the snare falls on are important. Instead, you'd read it as
KICK - hihat - HIHAT - snare - HIHAT - hihat
... which, if you try to accent those beats while listening to the song, seems very, very awkward!
Also, to help clear something up from your question: there is no such thing as a "sixth note" in notation. You have whole notes, half notes, quarter notes, eighth notes, sixteenth notes, and so on (multiplying by two each time), but no other variations. If you need to write weird timing things within beats (say, you want to put three notes in where two quarter notes would go), you would write three quarter notes in their place and mark them with a bracket with a "3" over it to indicate that it is an odd tuplet -- but still is marked with quarter notes.
Hope that helps.
EDIT: Just addressing the first answer to this question. Some music in 6/8 can be counted in 3/4 without a problem; but by no means can you always treat 6/8 like 3/4. Like I said, it would be inordinately awkward to put the heavy snare beat in the example I gave on the "and" of 2 in a piece in 3/4.
6/8 time can be counted like 3/4 time
First off, there is no such thing as a "sixth note". There are whole, half, eighth, sixteenth, thirty-second, and (shudder), sixty-fourth notes. In 6/8 time, there are six beats per measure and the eighth note gets the beat. This means that there can be 6 eighth notes in each measure.
6/8 can also mean that there are 3 quarter notes per measure, so, in a way, it's like 3/4.