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I have a saxophone piece I have to learn that is in 6/8 time. It has 2 groups of sextuplets in each measure but they don’t have the 6 over them. How do I count this and how fast is it supposed to be.

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Tetsujin
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Marissa
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    They're not sextuples, they're just groups of six. A tuplet "involves dividing the beat into a different number of equal subdivisions from that usually permitted by the time-signature" (Wikipedia). 6/8 time easily allows 12 subdivisions. – Kilian Foth Nov 12 '21 at 11:21

3 Answers3

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Are we talking about what's in my picture below? (Yes, now you've added the picture, I see we are.) Two groups of six notes in a bar of 6/8 isn't any sort of tuplet, it's just normal notation. Six 8th notes, each split into two.

enter image description here

Laurence
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They don't need the '6' above them! They're already correct. I guess you're counting 123 456 for other bars in the piece.These notes are just twice as quick, so the 1st, 3rd, 5th, 7th 9th and 11th of them will correlate to 123 456. Just need to fit the even numbered notes in between!

You don't need that '6', just like you don't need '3' for the basic quavers - in 6/8 time.They're not technically sextuplets.

Tim
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  • Thank you! If I were using a metronome that was counting the six beats in the measure, do I just play them as eighth notes? – Marissa Nov 11 '21 at 17:45
  • Twice as quickly as you play the quavers. Eighth notes are quavers, so twice the speed of them. – Tim Nov 11 '21 at 19:17
  • But to really know how fast to play them, we'd need to see the tempo marking. – nuggethead Nov 12 '21 at 00:20
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A 6/8 time signature usually indicates a compound duple metre. This means that each beat contains a triple pulse (compound) and there are two of these (duple) in a bar.

The bar you showed, conforms to this pattern and is perfectly normal notation for 6/8.

Had the bar contained tuplets, you would have seen a different number of notes with the same note value. Now there are 12 sixteenth notes in the bar.

Had there e.q. been one quadruplet somewhere in this bar, you would have seen 10 sixteenth notes and a 4 over that grouping of notes that forms the tuplet.

Niels Hoogeveen
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    There are lots of terms in the answer that will likely be unfamiliar to the OP. I'd suggest that if the OP found concepts like "compound duple metre" helpful then they probably wouldn't have posted this question. Could you refine this answer, expressing it without using terms like compound, duple, triple, pulse or tuplet, to make the answer more useful to the person who raised the original question? – Brian THOMAS Nov 12 '21 at 10:08