Come Again?

Today I'm going to talk about Repeats.
Often in music you will hear a theme repeated and while sometimes the music is actually written out twice (or again at the end in) what you may not know is that the musician's actually have a lot less music in front of them than you think.

Bar Line Repeats:
First of all I will show you Bar Line Repeats. This is the most common form of a repeat sign and is a large solid vertical line next to a thin vertical line with two filled black dots resembling a colon up against the thinner line. If the dots are facing to the left then this indicates the end of a section to be repeated. The player, upon seeing the left facing dot-repeat sign will not continue forward in the music but instead will jump back to the beginning of the piece and play the entire section again. Once played through a second time the repeat sign facing left is ignored and the music continues. A difference occurs when there is also a right-facing repeat sign. If this is the case the right-facing sign will always appear before its left-facing counterpart. The result of this is that instead of jumping back to the beginning when the left-facing repeat sign is reached the player will only jump back to wherever the right-facing repeat sign appeared. Once again after the repeat is completed the music will continue. Here is an example of a repeated passage with just the 'closing' repeat sign.

That would be repeated back to the beginning.

Here is an example of a repeated passage with both repeat signs:


Single Measure Repeats:
Single measure repeats may last for much long than the measure and its repeat. The main meaning behind the title is that it is the same measure repeated over and over again without change. This type of repeat is notated with a slash with a dot above and below. It looks like this:

In the example shown above the passage that is written out will be played three more times directly after the initial playing. Here the measures are numbered for convenience but they are not required to be.

In-Measure Repeats:
There are also repeats that take place within a measure. These are rarely used in music because writing the same beat twice is not enough of a hassel to have these be worth it, but just so you can see them this is what they look like:

The notation will change for sixteenth notes and thirty-second notes. Sixteenth note phrases will use two dashes instead of one and thirty-second note phrases will use three.

Very Punny
Musical composers can use lots of Note paper.