Double-time

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Basic time signatures: 4/4, also known as common time (C); 2/2, also known as cut time or cut-common time (¢); plus 2/4; 3/4 & 6/8

In music and dance, double-time is a type of meter and tempo or rhythmic feel. It is also associated with specific time signatures such as 2/2. Contrast with half time.

In jazz the term means using note values twice as fast as previously but without changing the pace of the chord progressions. It is often used during improvised solos.^[1]

Rhythm pattern characteristic of much popular music including rock, quarter-note or "regular" time

play (help·info)

Double-time: notice the snare moves to the "&" beats while the hi-hat begins to subdivide sixteenth notes.

Play (help·info) Note also, for example, that the eighth notes 'sound like' quarter notes in two tiny measures.

"Double time [is] doubling a rhythm pattern within its original bar structure."^[2]:

1   2   3   4
1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 [x]

Sources

↑ Randel, Don Michael (2003). Harvard dictionary of music, fourth edition, p. 253. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. ISBN 0-674-01163-5.
↑ Gray, Acia (1998). The Souls of Your Feet: A Tap Dance Guidebook for Rhythm Explorers, p.?. ISBN 0-9667445-0-0.

[0] Randel, Don Michael (2003). Harvard dictionary of music, fourth edition, p. 253. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. ISBN 0-674-01163-5.

[1] Gray, Acia (1998). The Souls of Your Feet: A Tap Dance Guidebook for Rhythm Explorers, p.?. ISBN 0-9667445-0-0.

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Double-time

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