HI!
In this post, we’re going to revisit our Introduction to 12/8 Time video, which is our attempt to explain what the term ’12/8 time’ means, and how it relates to African drumming – you can find this video in the Technique > Rhythmic Concepts section of African Drumming Online:
https://africandrummingonline.com/technique/rhythmic-concepts/
If you haven’t already watched our Introduction to 4/4 Time video, or read the blog post, I recommend doing so before reading this one!
We thought it would be a good idea to develop a blog series where we take some of our most popular free videos, and distill the info into text form as best we can. Different people learn in different ways, so we hope this helps some of you!
Not yet a member? You can sign up free to get access to this video, here:
https://africandrummingonline.com/
12/8 time is a common thing that new students are mystified by, and often have trouble getting their head around. The theory isn’t too complicated, and I’ll try to explain it here – what’s a bit more complicated is becoming familiar enough with different time signatures and feels so as to be able to recognise them by ear. You’ll get there…
To reiterate what we covered in the video and blog post on 4/4 time, a ‘Time Signature’ just tells you how many of what length note there are in a bar. So, 12/8 means that there are 12 eighth-length notes in each bar. In a sense, that’s simple, but understanding what it means is a bit trickier.
In African drumming, I generally feel 12/8 in a way similar to 4/4 – I generally hear each bar as having 4 main beats, 1, 2, 3, 4. This is just the way I hear it, and I think it makes sense, but there a lots of different ways to count and understand the music – all of this abstraction is artifice applied after the music has been around for thousands of years anyway!
Since the pulse is the same between 4/4 and 12/8 – both are felt as 1, 2, 3, 4 – how are they different?
In short, it comes down to the subdivisions, or offbeats. As mentioned earlier, the main beats in 4/4 time are generally divided into groups of two or four. In 12/8 time, the four main beats are divided into groups of three – this is counted 1 and a 2 and a 3 and a 4 and a:
This gives us the 12 hits of 12/8 – 1 2 3, 4 5 6, 7 8 9, 10 11 12.
That’s pretty much it! To start learning to hear the difference between the feels of 4/4 and 12/8 rhythms, watch this bit of the video:
Maybe I will come up with an interactive quiz to help you practise differentiating between 4/4 and 12/8…? If that sounds good, let me know!
