Simple Time Signatures
Senior 1 · Music
Simple Time Signatures
Lesson 5 of 5
22 min
Open a Rwandan choir book or a church hymn book and you will often find no staff at all: the music is printed in tonic sol-fa, as lines of letters, colons and bar lines. Sol-fa shows rhythm as well as pitch, so a choir can learn a whole song from it. In this lesson you learn to read and write rhythm in sol-fa, to connect it with staff notation, and to perform simple songs accurately in time.
Tonic sol-fa has no note shapes. Instead, the space a letter takes up in the bar shows how long it lasts. Every beat has its own slot, and a few signs mark the slots:
| Sign | Meaning |
|---|---|
| | | bar line: comes before the strong first beat of each bar |
| : (colon) | separates one beat from the next |
| . (full stop) | splits a beat into two halves (two quavers when the beat is a crotchet) |
| – (dash) | holds the note before it through another beat |
| an empty beat | a rest: nothing is sung |
| || | the end |
In four-four, some choir books draw a short line in place of the colon in the middle of the bar to show the medium accent on beat 3. Here are the same two bars written both ways:
Worked example
Write Frère Jacques from the last lesson in sol-fa. Each bar has four beats, so each bar has four slots separated by three colons:
| d : r : m : d | d : r : m : d | m : f : s : – | m : f : s : – |
| s.l : s.f : m : d | s.l : s.f : m : d | d : s, : d : – | d : s, : d : – ||
The minim G in bars 3 and 4 becomes s : – (soh, held for a second beat). The quavers in bars 5 and 6 become s.l and s.f, two notes sharing one beat.
The two melodies from Lesson 3 look like this in sol-fa. Two-four: | s : m | f.s : l | s : m | d : – ||. Three-four: | d : m : s | l : – : s | f : r : t, | d : – : – ||.
To find how many beats are in each bar of a sol-fa tune, count the slots between two bar lines: the number of colons plus one. Sol-fa does not say which note value is the beat; when you copy it onto a staff, the beat is usually written as a crotchet.
Worked example
A tune begins | d : r : m | f : – : m |. Each bar has two colons, so three beats: it is in triple time, and on a staff you would write it in three-four.
Given a time signature and a rhythm with no bar lines, add up the beats from the start and draw a bar line each time a bar is full.
Worked example
In three-four time the rhythm above is: three crotchets (1 + 1 + 1 = 3, bar full), a minim and a crotchet (2 + 1 = 3, bar full), a crotchet and a minim (1 + 2 = 3, bar full), then a dotted minim (3, bar full). That gives four complete bars.
Use these steps whenever you learn a new song:
A good class exercise: half the class taps the beat while the other half claps the rhythm of the melody, then the two halves swap. If the two groups drift apart, someone has lost the beat.
Tip
One slot per beat. In sol-fa, colons separate beats, a full stop halves a beat, a dash holds the note, and a blank is a rest. Count the slots in a bar to find the time.
Try each question first, then check the worked solution underneath.
In the bar | d : – : r.m |, how long does each note last?
Solution: d lasts 2 beats (its own beat plus the dash); r and m last half a beat each, sharing beat 3. The bar has 3 beats.
Write this bar of four-four in sol-fa, with doh = C: a minim C, a crotchet E and a crotchet G.
Solution: | d : – : m : s |. The minim takes two beats, shown by d followed by a dash.
Which time signature fits the tune | s : m | f.s : l |?
Solution: Two-four. Each bar has one colon, so two beats, and the beat is written as a crotchet.
Add bar lines to this rhythm in two-four: crotchet, crotchet, quaver, quaver, crotchet, minim.
Solution: | crotchet crotchet | quaver quaver crotchet | minim |. Each bar adds up to 2 beats.
In the bar | d : r : m : |, what happens on beat 4?
Solution: Nothing is sung: beat 4 is empty, so it is a crotchet rest.
Remember
Sources and credits
The lesson text, the notation diagrams, the performance steps and the practice were written by Ganzaa.
This lesson adapts CC BY-SA material and is shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.
