do you count it as 1....2......1.....2.........


i wrote the red numbers...to show that someone could see it as 1 2 3 4.....


i don't understand it


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If I understand you correctly then yes, you can count it as either but the example above is counting eighth notes and the one below is counting quarter notes. If the time signature is 4/4 you usually count in fourths but for some rhythms it's easier to think about it in eighth notes or sixteenth notes.

Edit: Maybe I misunderstood your question! No Avengers answer might be what you were asking for

 

The sidestick (x) where the snare is in a 4/4 bar falls on 1,2,3+,4+ then in the next bar 1+,2+,3+,4 .
The accent is important too but...
The kick drum is the key part of this pattern as the bass and core samba groove bounces off that.

If you truly mean cut-time, then it would have a tempo marking something like half-note= instead of quarter-note= because in cut-time this means double the tempo it is counted in at
Cut-time has a specific symbol placed after the clef and time-signature if there is no tempo marking a 4/4 bar can also be written as 2/2 to indicate it.


Theoretically - It's called Alla breve. Double time is different, that is where the physical tempo count doubles say 120 becomes 240. Cut-time the tempo remains at 120 - In notational terms, if it was a 120 count, in cut-time, the dotted quarter-note would be played as a dotted eighth-note. In double-time, it would remain a dotted quarter-note, counted in at double the tempo (240).

The reason is often seems confusing is because it is all in how it is counted in. Cut-time is counted in by 2's - cut-time and double-time can feel the same but they're counted differently.

EDIT NOTE: The reason I said the accents were interesting is because often the accents indicate a clave pattern and this one does not. Generally, a 2:3 or a 3:2 though the sidestick could be considered a 2:3 of sorts. The kick is the core though in this pattern.

 

Last edited: Jun 14, 2021

There have been questions on why have both double-time and cut-time. The short answer is that in a really fast piece of music say 260bpm-400bpm, it is a lot easier to do a count-in at half the tempo (cut-time) - Double-time works better with a slower tune like a ballad where for example the bridge doubles the tempo (e.g. 60bpm goes to 120bpm). You could probably do one or the other, but it's set in musical theory concrete and well before any of us were born.

 

As @BaSsDuDe said:

You have the Cut-time, Alla breve symbol at the beginning. You can think of it this way:

- the upper number determines how many beats are there in a bar, so that would be 2
- the lower number determines the note that is on the beat. That would be 1/2:

so you count on this one, like:


Tried to keep it as simple as possible. Correct me if I'm wrong, ofc.

 

Nicely and simply articulated I get why the confusion because if he goes on how it feels, both cut-time and double-time can feel the same.

 

This is another way of writing both without any symbols - in terms of tempo speed, double-time and cut-time will feel the same.



EDIT: This is an alternative. You do not put the symbol Robert has correctly shown in the image above with the half-note=100 because some musicians might see that possibly as cut-time the cut-time which means they'd be trying to play it at 400bpm

 

Last edited: Jun 15, 2021