- Hi.
I've got a short extract of music on the board here,
and as you look at it, hopefully,
you're slightly troubled by what you see.
Why should you be troubled by what you see?
Because, actually, the notes all look sensible,
and if you sing that tune,
it sort of makes sense, doesn't it?
All makes sense.
It would make even more sense
if I just made one alteration to this note.
There we go.
But the notes sound all right.
The rhythms all seem to make sense.
6/8 is telling us, isn't it, something.
Time signatures, remember, tell us,
the top number's saying what we've got in the bar,
what have we got, six of something in the bar.
The bottom number's telling us what those somethings are.
So, eight at the bottom, if you know your time signatures,
is telling us that the units that we're counting here
are quavers, so six quavers in a bar.
So, what's wrong with it?
Actually, what's wrong with it is the way
the notes are beamed together,
in other words, how we join things together.
That's where that looks rather bizarre in 6/8.
Why am I talking about this?
Well, there are plenty of people out there
asking for help in this area, because
there are exams in music theory around the world
where you're given these kind of exercises,
where you're given a piece of music like that
and somebody says,
"Beam the notes as they should be organised,"
so kind of grouping things together
in the way that is the standard arrangement.
Other people are maybe writing their own music
and then just sort of not being entirely sure
how these notes do beam together,
so there's a little bit of a query about that.
Other people are putting music
into all sorts of bits of musical software,
some of which is rather better at sorting
this stuff out for you than other bits.
But in my experience, even the best
musical software sometimes does something
rather strange with the beaming of notes.
So we're just going to spend a few moments
looking at this example and working out
how the beaming should be organised.
Well, the first thing is, you need to be sure
you understand your time signatures.
And of course, we've got this thing called simple time,
and we've got this other thing called compound time.
If you need to know more about that, we've got resources
at Music Matters to help explain all that,
so have a look at simple and compound time
on the Music Matters material,
and that will be explained to you.
Basically, it works like this.
If you've got two, three, or four
as your upper number, you're in simple time.
If you've got six, nine, or twelve as your
upper number, then you're in compound time.
So, there's a bit more to it than that,
but as soon as you see that six,
you're thinking, "Ah, I'm in compound time."
What does compound time mean?
Well, it means we start with what it says on the tin.
So we've got six quavers in each bar,
or eighth notes, if you're using the American system.
Well, we have got six eighth notes or six quavers
in each bar, so what's the problem?
Well, the problem is this.
When we're in compound time, one of these time signatures
with six, nine, or twelve at the top,
it's telling us to group things together in threes.
So if I've got six of something in the bar,
it means I've got two lots of three.
So, what are these lots?
They're quavers, or these eighth notes.
So I'm trying to organise each bar
so I can put a group of three quavers together,
three eighth notes together, and therefore,
it's going to flag up two beats.
So when I'm in 6/8 time, there's the 6/8,
so it's telling me that I've got
one, two, three, four, five, six,
but because it's a compound time,
it says, "Organise life into two groups of three."
What does that then look like?
Because if I beam those together in these groups of three,
what I've started with now becomes this.
And then I can take one step further,
because I can then say, "Well, if I'm in 6/8 time,
"here are my two groups of three,
"so what does each group of three amount to?"
Well, the total value of that group of three is this.
So I end up with two beats in a bar.
Because when you see six, you think,
"Well, how can that mean there are two beats in a bar?"
But when you see this, you can see how we get there.
So, by organising them into two groups of three,
there are still six quavers in the bar,
so 6/8 is perfectly true,
but because it's compound time,
one of those things with six, nine, or twelve at the top,
you always organise what you've got into groups of three,
which is what we've done here, and then you say,
"What's each group of three worth?"
Well, it's worth one of these, isn't it?
So I've got two of these dotted crotchet beats,
or dotted quarter note beats.
Therefore, the beaming, joining together
of notes and everything, should reflect this.
So, if I want to know how to beam the notes properly,
what I really need to do is to organise
this melody into these beats.
In other words, like this.
You can see that this amounts to the first beat,
and then this amounts to the second beat.
So I've got the equivalent of these six quavers,
six eighth notes, but I've got these two
dotted crotchet beats.
Okay, if I carry on, well, let's do
the first three quavers, or eighth notes,
one, two, three.
So these all belong together, look.
And then, in the second half of that bar,
I've got one, two, three, or quavers four, five, six,
so they're going to go together.
And then I've got some more complicated looking rhythm,
but if you do the maths here,
you'll see that this lot belongs together,
and you'll see that this lot belongs together.
And we've also got the first bit of the next bar,
or the next measure, and so this adds up
to the first beat of the next bar.
Okay, so, having done that, how do I notate it?
You might want to pause at this moment
and have a go at doing it for yourself
if you want to see where you're at with all of this,
and then you could come back to me
and see what the answer is.
But it should look like this.
Because those three quavers or eighth notes
are there inside the first beat, well,
they should all be beamed together.
Then I can see that those three notes
belong to this first beat.
When I come to this one, this is an interesting one,
because you could say, "Well, there's nothing wrong
"with that, because that's all
"comfortably sitting inside the second beat."
But actually, here's something to think about,
never use a tie when you could use a dot.
Now, that's not the same as saying never use a tie.
Sometimes you need to use a tie
to connect from one beat to the next,
or to tie a note across a bar line.
But if you're inside a beat and you could use
a dot instead of a tie, always worth considering.
So the second beat of the first bar
should actually look like this.
And you see, as soon as you look at that first bar,
or that first measure, you can much more clearly see
this first beat and this second beat.
Why do we divide these things into three?
It's the nature of compound time.
What we say as a definition of simple and compound time
is that in simple time, beats naturally divide into two.
So if you've got a crotchet or a quarter note beat,
it naturally divides into two quavers, or two eighth notes.
But when you're in compound time,
the beats naturally divide into three.
So you can see, if these are the beats,
they're naturally dividing into three.
But you have to sort of do it
the other way round to work it out.
You have to start by saying, "Well, there's 6/8,
"what does that mean?
"It means this.
"Let's organise them into groups of three,
"and then I can see what the beats are."
But now you've got the beats, you can see
that these beats are dividing into groups of three.
Not three notes, but the equivalent of three quavers,
or three of those eighth notes.
Okay, now, going into the second bar,
the second measure, we can see that all
of this lot really belongs together, doesn't it?
So it sort of starts off all right,
but there's no reason on earth
why this couldn't all be connected.
You see why?
Because it's all sitting inside
that first beat of that measure.
And then when I look at the second half of that measure,
well, is there any reason not to connect
those three quavers, or three eighth notes?
No, there isn't.
So let's stick them together.
There we are.
And then we can have a bar line.
Well, we're definitely going to need this tie, aren't we?
I mean, we can't sort of substitute a dot there,
because we're going across a bar line,
so there's nothing we can do about the tie,
so we need the tie.
And then, as I go into the next bar, the next measure,
I can see that this is making up
the first of these beats, so let's have a tie,
and then, let's copy this rhythm,
but let's beam all this together.
So we'll have that and that.
Okay, then, this lot really all
belongs together as well, doesn't it?
So there we are.
That lot all together is going to constitute
this second beat.
So there we are with that one.
And even at the end, when I'm looking at this last note,
I'm thinking, "Do I need to have that tie,
"or is there a note value that equates
"to one of these beats?"
Well, obviously, there is.
It's going to be a dotted crotchet,
or a dotted quarter note.
Now, when you look at this, you immediately see
that this is actually much easier to read than this.
That's not horrible to read.
In fact, it's a bit easier to read now
I've put the circles in.
But what you want to be able to do is to see
where these beats come.
Now, the way that the beaming is organised,
you can see, there's the first beat of that measure,
there's the second beat.
Here's the first beat.
Here's the second beat.
And here's the first beat of the measure,
or the bar, that follows.
So, in this short little time we have together here,
we haven't exhausted this whole agenda.
It's quite a big one, really,
if you wanted to look at every single
time signature and work out what you have to do.
What I've tried to do, however,
is to extol the principles of what you have to do,
and to do that in relation to compound time,
which is usually a bit more of a bother
to people than working in simple time.
So, I hope that makes sense,
and see how you got on with your working of it
compared to this, and see where you were right.
And if you were totally right, well done to you.
And if there was something you missed there,
well, here's a chance just to see what you should've done.
It's very helpful, this.
You know, if you're going to compose,
write, arrange, whatever, you need to have
the beaming right for the time signature.
Otherwise, people get in a pickle when they play it,
and things don't always make sense.
If you're performing and reading music,
it's helpful to know exactly how this beaming works,
because it helps you to see beats
and to keep your rhythm on track.
So there we are, a few minutes
on the topic of beaming.