Music Theory For Beginners (2025)

1. Course Introduction: Hi, I'm Je ellis, and welcome to my skill share course on music theory for beginners. I'm a professional guitar player, and in that time, I've toured across the globe, played with named artists, and working with some of the country's best studios. Whether you're a complete beginner or you're looking to hone in on your fundamentals of music theory, this course is for you. Music theory can help you grow as a musician. It not only helps you to understand your instrument, but also how to effectively communicate with other musicians and actually be more creative in your field. Now, in this course, I'm going to break down all of the basics from notation, rhythm, harmony, melody, and I'm going to make this really digestible for you to understand. You can pause each video and go back and rewatch them if you can't quite understand a subject. I'll break everything down into a nice and easy to follow step by step guide so I can guide you along your journey. Don't worry if you get stuck. You can always go back and rewatch some of the videos until you master these exercises. I've also included diagrams and support and resources to really guide you through this journey. By the end of this course, you'll hopefully be more confident in music theory and be able to apply it to your own projects. You'll effectively be able to communicate across how music theory works and understand how it applies to your instrument. So if you're looking to get started, I'll see you in the first lesson. 2. The Musical Alphabet: Is a language in itself, and it's really important for us to learn our musical alphabet. Now, I've written that on the board right here. We only use letters A to G, so that already simplifies things. But in the spaces, we have these extra little notes, A, sharps and B flat, for example. Now, we've got two little symbols here. We've got a sharp, which is indicated by a hash tag, and I've got a flat, which is indicated by lowercase. B. Well, that basically means if you sharpen a note, you raise it. If you lower a note, you flatten it. But let's talk a little bit more about this musical alphabet. In between these two notes, we'd call that a semitone. It's the smallest space we've got between notes. And on a guitar, that's just one fret apart. In between this A and B note here, we'll call it a tone. Now, we can use a combination of semitones and tones to build scales, but we'll get more into that later. One really important thing to note is we don't have B and E sharps. It's one thing that people often forget as beginners. 3. Notes On The Stave: Now, as a musician, it's really important to be able to read sheet music. And unfortunately, as guitar players, it's not often taught. As I move from a hobby guitar player into a more professional setting, I quickly found that I had to read sheet music. And unfortunately, it was never something I was properly taught. Now that's because the guitar can be really difficult to sight read with. Unlike on the piano, where Middle S is actually in the middle of the piano, hence its name. On the guitar, we can play Middle S in various different places. And that's why it's so difficult to sometimes read on guitar. You're not just going, Oh, there's this little passage. It's here, like you would on a piano. You go, Oh, I can play it here, but I can play it. And I can play it here. So they all sound slightly different, and they've all got various different finger ints, causing an absolute headache when you're trying to sight read from a guitar player's perspective. Now, Save has built up a five lines, and I've got a few little rhymes to help us remember which notes are which. So let's start with the notes in the spaces. Now this spells face. So we've got F, A, C and E, notes in the space spell face. Now, for notes on the line, we've got a little bit of a longer rhyme. I'm a poet, and I didn't know it. Right, here we go. So we've got every good. Boy deserves football. It really is that simple. Sometimes, though, we do have to venture outside of the stave. So to do that, we're going to use ledger lines. Now, down here, I'm going to draw in middle C. That's always middle C, and that just sits one line below the stave. Hence on a line. If we go further down, I've got an A, and that's how it would be notated, just like that. If I go higher, let's do it here. That there would be a C. Now, unfortunately, I don't have any rhymes for you for notes outside of the stave. It's literally just a case of learning them, but start slow and build up. I usually would just go, What note is this? Oh, that's a D, one below, one above, would be a G. Learn those for today. Tick, done. A. Oh, okay, let's add two extra notes. The note below D was a C. The note above G, Oh, it must be an A because we're foling up through the musical alphabet. You'll eventually fine, you just recognize them. And, I mean, if you're reading a piece of music, it's got thousands and thousands of ledger lines on it, shoot the man who wrote it because it is just stupidly difficult to read and not necessary. Now, as we know from the musical alphabet, we've also got sharps and flats. So to show those on the stave, if I show up right here with a C, We use a little hashtag symbol to indicate C sharp, and it sits before the note. Well, if I rule one here, and I want G, I'd use a little lowercase B to indicate that G is flat, that'd be G flat and C sharp. 4. Understanding Dynamics: Dynamics is a musical term for volume. We use volume in music to both increase and decrease intensity, as well as sort of build up a section and sort of bring it back down. So, for example, like a quiet verse, and then we'll build up to a loud chorus. Now, on sheet music, we've got these various symbols, and they all have various meanings. Now, it's really important to understand those, so let's have a quick chat about them. At the top, we have very, very loud. That's the F symbol there, and that's fortis emo, Fortis sim. Getting quiet to them, we've got a double F, very loud, fortissimo, forte is loud. We've got mezzo forte mildly loud, mezzo piano, mildly quiet, piano, quiet, PanissimoV quiet and paniissimo for very, very quiet. But I'm sure you're already wondering how loud is loud, how loud is very loud, how quiet is very quiet. Now, unfortunately, it's all left to the musicians interpretation. So there's kind of no real sort of benchmark as to, Oh, I need to play this loud or I need to play this soft. Sort of it's a unit for a band to sort of decide for themselves how loud they want to make that forte and how quiet they want to make that Panissimo. But it's really, really important to be able to understand these as they'll appear quite frequently across sheet music. We've also got two extra little bits of direction. We've got this symbol, and this symbol. Now, this is a crescendo. I mean, you're going to get louder. You're starting quiet and you're building up. Sometimes you'll then see these symbols as like a start and end point. So it could be P to F. And then you sort of can gauge how much you're going to crescend, you know, how quiet you're going to get and how loud you're going to take that piece. Then got the opposite diminuendo, where you can start really, really loud, and then you're going to gradually get quieter. And again, you can have various symbols either side of this to sort of dictate where is your starting point and where your ending point begins. 5. Understanding Key Signatures: In music, we have keys, and the key is essentially a group of notes that give off a specific tonality. Here are all the different keys we have in music. Boom. Okay, as you can see from the diagram, each key is made up of a combination of different notes, different sharps, different flats. And what we need to do is be able to recognize really easily which keys contain what notes. Before we do that, let's first take a quick look at the order of sharps and flats and how they appear on the stave. Oh, let's first take a look at the order of sharps. I've got a little Ryme to help us remember this. So, Father Charles goes down and ends battle. FC GD, A and B. That's the order in which all of our sharps will appear on our stave, but we'll take a better look at that shortly. Our flats are ordered like so, and I'm sure some of you have already noticed that the rhyme is exactly the same, only flipped in reverse. So we've got battle ends, and down goes Charles' father, BEA, D, G, C and F. So now let's take a look at how those would appear on a piece of music. So let's build out some key signatures using our stave and our rhyme of sharps. Now, our first sharp would be F sharp, father, we draw that right up here. Now, that on its own would be G major. This would make a little bit more sense when we've got the circle of fifths as well, but we'll get there. Charles will be the next one. So we'll add a sharp. Goes G sharp, down, D sharp. A, A sharp. E, and B. You can see I've kind of written them in a slight diagonal sort of form there. And all of those sharps sit on the note on the stave in which it corresponds to. So B sharp is on the B line of the stave. Now, when you look at a piece of music and it has sharps or flats at the start of the stave, this means any notes you see throughout the piece will be altered by this right here. So if I see a C later down the line, I always need to check back and remember, Oh, is it sharp? Is it flat or is it natural, which means it's neither sharp or flat. Let's have a look back. Let's have a look back. See, it's a C. So there's C sharps in this song throughout unless stated otherwise. Now, an easy way to work out what key we're in when we're using sharps is to actually take the last sharp and raise it by one semitone. So this key here, I've got three sharps. My last one here using our order of sharps, Father Charles goes is a G sharp. Let's raise that by one semitone, and that gives us then of A. And that tells us that our music is in the key of A major. Now, this is a great little trick that a lot of musicians use to help them work out keys in a really quick pinch, rather than having to memorize the entire circle of fifths. Now let's take a look at the order of flats on the stave. Remember, we go backwards with our rhyme this time, we're starting from the bottom down here with a B flat. And we're going to add an E flat for our next key. Battle ends. A, D, G, C and F. Now, a little trick to work out what key you're in using flats. If you take the penultimate flat, this one right here, the second to last flat, that will tell you what key we're in without having to remember, oh, it's got five flats, it's this key. It's two flats, it's this key. With all of these flats here, this key would actually be C flat major. 6. The Circle Of Fifths: Okay, so here's a really arbitrary drawing of the circle of fifths. Now, basically, as we progress this way around the circle, we're going to increase in increments of five. So C, five notes up from C is G, five notes up from G is D, and so on. Working this way, we move around in fourths. That's why sometimes you might hear circle of fifths, cycle of fourths. Same thing. Depends on which way around the circle you go. So what we've got here in black is all of our major keys. And in green, I've drawn all the sharps and flats that correspond to those keys. So G major has one sharp, whereas A major has three sharps. You can either memorize this or you can use the little hacks that we talked about in a previous video. In red, I've got the relative minor to every major. That basically means is for every minor key, we have a major key with exactly the same notes. And if we're going to talk about sort of modes later on, it always corresponds to one in six. So C major, the sixth of C major is A minor. That's your relative minor. G major, car up six E E minor. That's your relative major and minor. But we've also displayed it here on the circle of fifths. 7. The Major Scale: So let's take a look at the major scale in a little bit more detail towards the theory side of things. So, as we've already talked about, the major scale consists of eight notes. So if I just draw on the board, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, right? In the key of C, we would simply have C, D, E, F, G, A, B, and C. Now, there's your C major scale. Now we're going to use this throughout this course as a nice reference point when talking about other scales the major scale, we'll sort of call that our home scale, right? And everything else we'll refer back to is a nice easy comparison because we've got no alterations at all in that major scale. So we'll call each of these notes scale degrees. So, for example, the G here, that will be the fifth degree. The third E here, that'll be your third degree, for example. And then we can compare those nice and easily as we go through. So now we understand about scale degrees, and we've got a major scale written up here on the board. Let's take a deeper look at the construction of the major scale itself using tones and semitones. So CTD is a tone D to E, tone, semitone, tone, tone, tone. So tone, tone, semitone, tone, tone, tone, be the construction of a major scale. Now, when you look at your fretboard, you can use that sort of pattern to work out the major scale. Obviously, in the scale shapes that we've already used, but also along one string and all those sorts of things. If you can internalize that pattern, no matter what, if you're in a jam and someone goes, Oh, we're in the KAC and you're going, Oh, what was me scale shape? What was me scale shape? Well, I know it starts on C. Oh, what was the pattern? Oh, tone, tone, semitone. Tone, tone, tone. Oh, okay. Oh, I can work out. Oh, bang. You're in. You're jamming. You're happy days. Let's take this further, and we'll harmonize our major scale and turn it into chords. It's really important to remember the major, minor construction of a major scale, as you know, when you're songwriting, you can recall chords really easily. If you're on a jam and someone goes, Oh, it's 161645. What? One, six, four, five, one, six, four, five. You got your chords. Great. They major or minor? Oh, I can't remember. This is why it's really, really important to remember all of this key information here is fundamental to everything else. So C is always major. We're in the key of C major, and I'm going to draw that there with a triangle. Triangle will be major. I'm just gonna pop that right up there. Major. I'm going to use a little dash for minor. And I'm going to use a seven if it's dominant. And if you've seen our seventh chord video, you'll understand what dominant means. So major, minor minor, major, dominant, minor, half diminished. Really important to remember that because as I said, if someone goes one, four, five, six, that's our chord progression, 1456. What they mean by that is we're using one, four, five, six, and you then know that is C major, F major, G seven A minor. You're able to recall chords in a key straightaway right off the cuff. It's that. It's that. It's also known as the Nashville number system if they start using numbers like this. Really, really important, rather than going, you know, it just speed things up. If you're a jam or you're trying teach someone a song. Oh, it's A major, or it's G major, or it's this. It's that 14, five, six, one, two, three, four, five, all that sort of stuff. Really, really easy way of recalling chord progressions. If you've seen our video on keys, you'll understand what relative major and minor is. And we talked about how the relative minor always comes from the sixth degree. And you can see that here as well. C major, the relative minor is A minor. It's that sixth degree. So always the sixth of a major key is always the relative minor. So if I was to construct an A minor scale, you'd quite simply just start from the sixth degree, and that's why the Aeolian mode is a mode of the major scale. Uses the same nodes A, B, C, D, E, F, G, A, that'd be your A minor scale, for example. And you would simply with the chord progression, just start from Cord six. So this would now be one, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, rather than going CD EFG. And rather than me right now, again, just explains that a little bit clearer. 8. Understanding Chord Construction: So let's understand how we sort of construct chords. Now, I've got a C major scale written out here and I've got my scale degrees written just below. Now, a chord in its simplest form is called a triad. It's built up of three notes. Now, if I was to go back to my major scale, I could turn any one of these scale degrees into a triad by simply choosing one notes. Let's take D. You take D, and then you skip one, and you say F, and you skip one, and you take A. So it's always play one, miss one, play one, miss one. So if I want a C major triad, I can go C, I can go E, and I can go G. Now, we've obviously got major and minor chords. Remembering that major is a happy sound and minor is a sad sound. So from the major scale, if I want my C triad, I would take notes one, skip one, note three, skip one, note four. So that would give me C, E and G. So let's write that here. C, E and G. And as we've said, that's notes one, notes three, and note five from major scale. That, that major third is what defines whether a chord is major or minor. Let's now turn this into a minor triad. So we've got C, E and G. One, three, five, again, here's my major triad. To make it a minor triad, you have to flatten the third. So a minor triad would be C. We flatten a third, that becomes E flat, and then we've got G. Let's do that. That's E flat. Flat three. Lovely. So there's our major triad, and there's our minor triad. So let's take a look at the theory behind the construction of a seventh chord. We already understand that 135 is a major triad and one flat 35 is a minor triad. What we can do is we can add additional notes on top of this to create seventh chords. So to make a C major seven chord, we simply have our 135, C, E and G, and then we continue stacking on top of each other in that sort of process. The next one would be B. So a major seven chord, C major seven chord would be CEG. And B. And that's our seven, one, three, five, seven. So for a minor seven construction, we've got our one flat three, five, and in using the same pattern we did here, we'll take the seven, but because it's minor, we want a flat seven. So we've got one, three, five, flat seven, which in this case, would be B flat. And that would be our C minus seven chord. Now, we've also got a dominant chord. Let's take a look at that. Our dominant chord would be C, E because it's a major third, G. And for that dominant sound, we want a flat seven. So we'd add a B flat. So one, three, five, flat, seven. You can see, obviously how each cord has got its own sort of characteristics. You've got the major third and the major seven and a major seventh, the minus seventh chord, you've got a minor third and a minus seventh. And in the dominant cord, you've got a major third. And a minus seventh interval. Now, our final one is a minus seven flat five. I'm sure you can work this out already. Minus seven, but flat five, minus seven, flat five. So let's take this. We've got a minus seven chord, C, E flat, G, B flat, minus seven, flat five, so we have to flatten the fifth. So there will be our construction of a minus seven, flat five chord, one, flat three, flat five, flat seven. Now, harmony doesn't stop at just seventh chords. We can add extensions such as ninth, 11th, and 13th so adds an extra color to our harmony. So what do those ninth, 11th, and 13th actually mean? Well, as we already know, our scale only has eight notes. But if we were to continue counting past the octave, we continue increasing our numbers. So we go eight, nine, ten, 11, 12, for example, right? And this sort of letter sequence would just continue. So eight is C, nine would be D, ten would be E, 11 would be F, for example, basically just a ninth is basically the second, 11th is basically the fourth, and a 13th is basically the sixth. But because they're an octave height in the city, we're continuing to build on top of ourselves in that sort of extension structure. That's why we sort of call them ninth, 11th, and 13th. So we've got our major seventh chord here. Let's add a ninth, which would technically be a second, so it would be a D If we were to add an 11th, that would be our fourth, which would be an F. And then if we were to add a 13th, that would be a A. So that there would be the full construction of a major 13th chord. We have one, three, five, seven, nine, 11, 13. Now, on guitar, especially because we have a limited amount of fingers, we don't always play all of these notes. The fifth is the first to be removed because it doesn't actually add any sort of specific characteristic to a chord. We can also then sometimes remove an 11th if we've got a 13th or we can remove a ninth if we want an 11th, because sometimes between these intervals, we create tritons, which are a little bit clashy. As long as you've got your fundamentals, your first, your third, and your seventh, which will dictate whether it's a major, minor or dominant, you can then extend further with one of these optional ninth, 11th or 13th. Let's take a look at how we take this major 13th chord, and we could turn it into a minus 13th chord, for example. First of all, we'd flatten a third to make it a minor chord. We'd then also have to flatten the seventh and make it a minus seventh. And all we do is add our upper extensions. So that would be C, E flat, B flat, and then we could add our upper extensions as we please. 9. Transposing Music: As you progress on your musical journey, you eventually start playing with various other musicians in bands. And you occasionally have to transpose songs into other keys. It's often due to the singer. If they have a bad day, if they've got a slight cold or quite simply, if they just can't quite reach those high notes, they'll sometimes ask you to either raise or lower the song by a few keys just to make it easier for them to sing. It's really important for you to understand how to do that quickly in a band setting. So, let's take this chord progression of C major. I've got C, A minor, F, and G. And the singer says, I'm struggling in that key. Can we put this in the key of G instead? Not a problem. How do we do that? First of all, let's work out what our chord progression actually is. C would be our root. That would be chord one, A minor. We know that's chord six. F would be chord four and G would be chord five. So we now understand that we need to transpose a one, six, four, five chord progression from C into the key of G. But to do that, we need to know what these chords would actually be in G. So let's write out the G major scale. So now I've got my G major scale, I can very easily work out how to transpose from C to G. All I have to do is take cords one, six, four, five from C, and instead play them in G. So that would be Cord one would be G. Cord six would be E, that'd be E minor, because obviously it's a minor chord from six. Chord four would be C. And then chord five would be G. Chord five, sorry, would be D. It really is as simple as that. I've now taken a chord progression in C, and I've now learned how to play in G. It's really important to practice this as the faster you're able to transpose between keys, the more time you have in your rehearsals to get down to the actual important work of rehearsing with other bandmates. So take some songs that you're familiar with and transpose them into other keys. Use a circle of fifths to help you if you get stuck. 10. Reading Basic Rhythm: Let's take a look at how to write and read Rhythm. Now, we've got a couple of basic rhythmic notation things that we can use here. I'm going to start with this one here that you've probably all seen. Now, that is a crotchet. I'm going to write that just here. Crotchet. Now crochet is worth one beat, one singular beat, and it also comes with a rest, which looks like so. So if you see a beat like this, you play. If you see a rest like that, you stop playing for one beat. Su explanatory. In fact, I'm gonna even write one beat there. Now, we can take this crochet and we can make it smaller for faster rhythms. And I'm going to draw that for us right here. I'm sure you've all seen these. These are quavers. Now, these have a rest that looks like soap, and they're worth half a beat. Let's right quaver. Right there. Okay, we can split these again for faster notes, and we'll call them semiquavers. And they look just like quavers, but they've got an extra little line just there. A rest for those. Looks like so, and they're worth a quarter of a beat. So that is a semiquaver. So four of these makes one B on their own, quarter of a beat. Two of these makes one beat on their own, half a beat. And if the crotchets up there, it's worth one beat. So what I'm going to do next is I'm going to draw a few different rhythms on the board using these right here just to explain how we then count them in the bar. Okay, so we're starting right at the beginning here with four crotchets. Now, we would commonly count in music, two beats of four. This isn't always the case, and it's indicated by time signature at the start here, but we'll get more into that later video. For Nile, we're just going to count these four crotchets, and it would quite simply be one, two, three, four. So I've now got a full bar of quavers. Now, as we've already talked about, these are worth half a beat individually. But what we do when we write them in a bar is we beam them, so it's very easy to see each individual beat. So these two together make one beat. So up here, I'll just put that's beat one. There's beat two. There's beat three, and there's beat four. And that just helps us count things. It just makes everything a lot easier. There are some other beaming rules that will get to later on. But when we count quavers individually, we want to be able to split up those half beats. So we'd usually count them one and two, and three and four. And like so. So this could quite simply be one and two and three, and four and easy as that. So let's now combine crotchets and quavers together. So we can work out how we count with different rhythms. We've already talked about beaming them, so we can clearly see our different beats, beats one, beat two, beat three, and beat four. And we've also talked about counting quavers, and we're splitting them into two, one and two, and, et cetera. So here, we've got beat one, and then we count two and three, four, and. To help keep us in time, we can add little ones in here as well. So we can count this one and two and three, and four and. But in terms of actual clapping, we're going to go one, two, and three, four, and. Let's now introduce a few crotchet rests. So, as we've already talked about, you don't play on the rest. So we'd still count it as normal one, two, and I've got a quaver here, so three and four. We just don't play on beat two. So, one, two, three, and four. So now let's get into some quaver rests. Now, this can get a little bit complicated, and I find a lot of beginner students really struggle with this sort of concept, but it's honestly not that hard. When we count normally in music, and we count on the strong downbeat, one, two, three, four. If you listen to a song, you tap your foot, you're always going to tap it on that downbeat. One, two, three, four. But we can also play on the offbeat, and that will be the spaces in between those downbeats. And I've indicated that here with some quavrests. Now, we already know we count these Quavo rests, one and two, and three and four. And our numbers one, two, three, four, or our strong downbeats, or offbeats, or these these spaces in between. So if we were to count this on the offbeats, one and two, and three, and four and. And that's used a lot in sort of scar reggae, funk, that sort of stuff, where it's all on the offbeats, a little bit funny. We can also call it syncopation. Now let's take a look at semiquavers. Now, semiquavers can get a little bit complicated, and these are where a lot of the more advanced rhythms revolve around. But we first need to understand those fundamentals. Like with crotchets and quavers, we have a specific way of counting them. So you can see here I've beamed into my four beats. Beat one, beat two, beat three, and beat four to keep it nice and easy. And we're going to split those up into one, E, and, uh, two, and, uh, et cetera. You can quite clearly see on the and one and two, and there will be our quaver beats, right? One and two, and, but we've just split it a little bit further. One knee and two we anda, three, and four anda. So just type that out. One knee and. To wee and a, three, and four y anda. Two final notes to learn are semibreves and minims. Now, these are longer notes than what we've currently looked at. A minim looks a little bit like a crotchet, only they're not colored in. So this would be a crochet with the colored in dot, and here's a minim, so you can see the difference. Now, minimums last for two beats. So we've got one, two, three, four, and a rest looks a little bit like a colored in box. So we'll see our stave, one, two, three, four, five, yeah. On a minimum rest is a little colored in box, and it sits on line. That's really important when we now look at semi breves semibreves. I'm gonna draw underneath so we can compare. A semi breef looks like so. It's just an empty circle. And that lasts for four, four beats. So that will fill our bar. Now, a rest for a semibreef actually sits underneath the line. It hangs. So it's really important to be able to differentiate between these two wrists because they're so similar. A minim rest sits on the line. It's above the line. A semibreve rest hangs below the line. 11. Understanding Time Signatures: Now, as we've already discussed, we commonly count in groups of four in music. A lot of pop and modern music is written in four. We dictate that with a time signature at the start of our piece of music. Now, what you'll often see at the start of a piece of music is one of these, and this is your time signature. Four, four common time is when you count usually in groups of four, one, two, three, four. So what you're going to see in a lot of songs. Now, what do these numbers actually mean? Well, this top number tells us how many beats there actually are. So we've got four. So how many beats? This bottom number tells us what type of beat it is. So it's a four. So you can get four. It's a crotchet. Four crochet. What type of beat. So with that in mind, let's expand on this a little bit further. If I have two, four, I have two crotchet beats per bar. Whereas in 44, I have four crotchet beats per bar. We can also get five, four, where I would have five crotchet beats per bar. You'd be counting one, two, three, four, five, one, two, three, four, five, for example. Now, as you get into these hard as you get into these harder time signatures, they can get a little bit complicated to count, so it's always worth giving them a really good practice. Let's now change this bottom number and see what other sort of time signatures we can find. So here are a few common time signatures. Now, three, four, as we've already discussed, there are three crotchet beats per bar. You're going to see this a lot in sort of balllads and most particularly waltzes, one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three. It's got to sort of, sort of feel to it occasionally. Six, eight is a little bit like three, four, but we're going to build out on it a lot. Again, ballards use this all the time. One, two, three, four, five, six, one, two, three, four, five, six. 128 is, again, a further extension of that. And we'll often use 128 when we've got a lot of triplets involved in our music. It just helps clean things up rhythmically. I often find that when counting 12 a, I like to group it into two groups of six, one, two, three, four, five, six, two, two, three, four, five, six, and that would be 1 bar of 12. Seven, eight, most commonly seen in money by Pink Floyd. Little bit of a funny one to count and play along to because you naturally want to go for that eight beat to keep yourself in four. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, one, two, three, four. Give that tune a little listen just so you can see if you can count that. As you progress in your musical career, you're going to come across a lot of difficult time signatures. You may even, especially if you go into musicals, find that time signatures are changing every other bar. So it's really important to be able to count them accurately and quickly.