Recognizing 4/4 Timing in Music

Video Transcript

Hi, I'm Austin McBride here with Expert Village. I'm going to show you how to recognize different time signatures in jazz, or really any other kind of music for that matter. Today we're going to start out first with 4/4 timing. 4/4 timing is the timing that people are most familiar with, that's the most common. It's the stuff you hear on the radio, it's the stuff that you hear at the grocery store, most likely. Anyway, 4/4, what it's saying is that the quarter notes get four counts for a measure. And that's only in red music but you can hear it without being able to read music. Here's an example of a 4/4 song. I played it earlier but we'll just play it again because it's one everyone knows. It's by the Beatles and this is a 4/4 timing. Two, three. One, two, three, four, one, two, three, four. As you can see, I'm changing notes often at that fourth count and going into a new chord, so the chord changes with each of those four counts. That's probably the easiest way of recognizing how the timing is set up. However, we'll be demonstrating some different timing changes that definitely show that that's not always the case.

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