Download Double Bar Lines and Final Bar Lines

Double Bar Lines and Final Bar Lines
Double Bar Lines
A Double Bar Line is used to indicate the end of a section of music:
The division of the piece of music is left to the composer or arranger’s discretion. A double bar line
could signal the end of a verse, a chorus, a pre chorus, a middle 8 or even smaller 4 bar sections.
There are no hard rules as to how a piece is divided. Double bar lines are used mainly to help with
navigation of a piece and outline cadence points for the performer. In this sense they are similar to
paragraph divisions in literature.
Final Bar Lines
Final bar lines signify the end of a piece of music. They appear similar to double bar lines in that
there are two ‘lines’ but the right bar line is thicker:
Repeats
A repeat sign indicates that the performer should jump back and repeat a section of the music. The
section to be repeated is often enclosed within a pair of repeat signs. The right repeat sign indicates
a jump back to the left repeat sign:
Once the section has been repeated, the performer continues with the music beyond the repeat as
normal.
If no left repeat section is written, the performer should repeat from the beginning of the piece.
Tempo Marking
A tempo marking is usually written at the start of a piece of music and can be written as text or a
combination of text and symbols.
In classical music, tempo is often indicated by Italian terms such as Adagio, Andante, Allegro etc.
These are very expressive terms that indicate more than a basic metronome.
Modern music tends to use accurate markings measured in beats per minute. These are written as
the beat in effect followed by the number as follows:
This would indicate that there are 120 crotchet beats (or quarter notes) per minute.
Tempo markings are not limited to the start of the piece. They can occur at any point and provide
indication of tempo changes. The following example shows an indication of 120 beats per minute,
but then two bars later we have an increase of tempo to 160 bpm: