How to count one bar in your music

What this lesson teaches

Short, and the foundation of everything structural in DJing.

Count in fours

One, two, three, four. Almost all dance music is counted this way, and each group of four is a bar.

That is the unit. From here on, when anybody says a mix happens over eight bars, they mean thirty-two of those counts.

Bars gather into phrases

Count for a while and you notice the bars themselves come in groups. A group of bars is a phrase, and a phrase is the block the music is actually built from - the verse, the chorus, the instrumental break.

This is the useful part: the changes happen at the ends of phrases. The new element arrives, the drums drop out, the vocal starts - and these events do not land anywhere random. They land on the boundary.

The magic numbers

His figures are the ones to carry around:

• A radio edit, around three and a half minutes, works in twos and fours.
• An extended mix, which is what a DJ usually plays, works in eights, sixteens, twenty-fours and thirty-twos.

So his instruction is to think in groups of eight, and that is the single most useful habit you can build at this stage.

Why it matters more than it sounds

Because it turns listening into prediction.

Once you can count a track and know you are six bars into an eight-bar phrase, you know exactly when the next change arrives - and you can have your hand on the fader before it happens rather than reacting afterwards. Every well-timed mix you have ever heard was somebody counting.