Central to the concept of musical time are tempo and time signature. The first of these couldn’t be more straightforward: tempo is simply speed, expressed as a number of beats per minute (BPM). While it might be easy to understand, though, the tempo of a track plays a huge part in defining its feel and character, and even placing it in a particular genre or subgenre: dubstep at 140bpm vs drum & bass at 170bpm vs 2-step at 130bpm, for example. We’ll come back to tempo shortly, but time signature warrants more of an explanation…
About time
If you’ve been producing music for a while and have never heard the term ‘time signature’ before, you’re probably making all your tracks in the DAW default of 4/4. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with this – indeed, the vast, vast majority of Western music today is in that stalwart sig – but by eschewing ‘odd’ alternatives such as 3/4, 5/4 and 6/8, you’re missing out on not only a wealth of powerful compositional possibilities, but also a whole world of time-based fun.