KVR Audio

rbarata · Post by **rbarata** » Mon Jun 28, 2010 10:59 am

Hello my friends

A simple question....

Context is guitar playing with a metronome

If you are playing a sequence of 4+4+4+4....notes with a 120 bpm pace how do you count it? What is the correct way?

Two possibilities... 1st note (1st beat) => 2nd note (2nd beat) => 2rd note (3rd beat) => etc

or

1st note (1st beat) => 5th note (2nd beat) => 9th note (3rd beat) => etc

I'm asking this because I'm playing a sequence like that with 120 bpm and I'm playing each sequence of 4 notes in the time between the first and second beats. Am I plying it at 120 or 240 bpms?

Thanks

kara · Post by **kara** » Mon Jun 28, 2010 11:08 am

If your metronome is at 120 BPM you're playing at 120 BPM
The difference is that you can play 1/4,1/8,1/16,... notes but it stays 120 BPM

C00kie · Post by **C00kie** » Mon Jun 28, 2010 11:11 am

You can count like this:
One two three four
Two two three four
Three two three four
Four two three four

rbarata wrote:I'm asking this because I'm playing a sequence like that with 120 bpm and I'm playing each sequence of 4 notes in the time between the first and second beats.

So that's "One and Two and Three and Four". Just eighth notes or "quaver", not quarters.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eighth_note

rbarata wrote:Am I plying it at 120 or 240 bpms?

That would still be 120 bpm. 240bpm is just silly.

rbarata · Post by **rbarata** » Mon Jun 28, 2010 11:12 am

So it depends on how that staff is written....I can also say that I'm playing it at 480 bpms

Isn't there some convention? I'm following a guitar exercise book with tablature only and it doesn't specify where each beat should fall. It just says 120 bpm, nothing more.

annode · Post by **annode** » Mon Jun 28, 2010 11:45 am

Music notation is not my thing, but i'll try to help.

Assuming your in 4/4 time.
Your count is 1,2,3,4,1,2,3,4 you know that.
Your tempo is how fast you count that. As a trance kick is a 1/4 note which will sound on each beat.
A whole note would sound once through all 4 beats.
A 1/2 note through 2 beats.
1/8th notes divide the 4 count into 8 divisions...and so on.

I believe this is right.

Yeah, like cookie sez above;

So that's "One and Two and Three and Four". Just eighth notes or "quaver", not quarters.

The 'and' signifies doubling the count tempo into 8 beats 1,and,2,and,3and,4,and.

C00kie · Post by **C00kie** » Mon Jun 28, 2010 11:52 am

rbarata wrote:So it depends on how that staff is written....

Indeed.

rbarata wrote:Isn't there some convention?

It's kinda conventional to have BPM values between 70 and 160 or thereabout.

rbarata wrote:I'm following a guitar exercise book with tablature only and it doesn't specify where each beat should fall. It just says 120 bpm, nothing more.

The metronome beats are always steady quarter notes: four beats in a bar / measure. Simular to how you'd tap your foot to the tempo, that's where the beats are.

rbarata · Post by **rbarata** » Mon Jun 28, 2010 1:39 pm

I've been searching about this and, as far as I understood, it should always be specified at the start of a musical piece, which is the beat unit. It can be a whole tempo, half, a quarter, whatever....

In this book that I'm using it doesn't says nothing....I really don't know if playing my exercises at 120 bpms is considered as difficult or not, i.e., I don't know where I stand, and in my oppinion it's important to know that.

C00kie · Post by **C00kie** » Mon Jun 28, 2010 2:00 pm

rbarata wrote:It just says 120 bpm

And that's all you need to know. The BPM figure always indicates the tempo of quarter notes, of which there are four in a bar.

rbarata wrote:I've been searching about this and, as far as I understood, it should always be specified at the start of a musical piece, which is the beat unit. It can be a whole tempo, half, a quarter, whatever...

Like this for instance?

(better viewed in original context: http://www.aboutmusictheory.com/tempo.html )
I think your book doesn't want to confuse you with half notes, quarter notes, dotted eights and such, but just gives the BPM value not to add confusion. Don't make it more complex than it needs to be.

rbarata · Post by **rbarata** » Mon Jun 28, 2010 2:28 pm

Yes, like that!

So, in conclusion, if nothing is specified, each beat falls in to a quarter note.
In my particular case, because each note is a quarter note, I should play a note evreytime the beat sounds.

annode · Post by **annode** » Mon Jun 28, 2010 2:36 pm

If the book sez 120bpm ... this chart cookie posted sez you count two 1/2 notes per 4 beats. Isn't this the equivalent of setting his metronome to 60bpm?
So if you were tapping your foot, you would cut in half, to 60bpm?

Now i'm confused.

jancivil · Post by **jancivil** » Wed Jun 30, 2010 12:00 am

annode wrote:If the book sez 120bpm ... this chart cookie posted sez you count two 1/2 notes per 4 beats. Isn't this the equivalent of setting his metronome to 60bpm?
So if you were tapping your foot, you would cut in half, to 60bpm?

Now i'm confused.

In a sequencer, the denominator is a quarter note, period. If you tell the sequencer it's in 2/2, the quarter note = 120 anyway in this case. If the groove *is* a 2/2 groove, yes, you'd tap your foot every other beat that's "a beat" according to the machine's way of computing.

The times that you'd use the other time sigs that add up to the same difference, are meaningless to the machine.
That's something you WILL need to know to convey the ideas to musicians, however.

Such as, 16/16 (again, if you set your sequencer to 480 BPMs, that's a basis that's 4x faster, because it computes *a beat = quarter note*.), that's helpful when you subdivide by accents; such as if it's 9+7 = 16 or something. But understand that the sequencer is not taking a 16th as a beat, but as a 1/4 of a beat.

BPM question