Hi All,

Apologies for anyone who has already read this but I put it in the wrong forum, genuine mistake! Thanks to Maggie for replying tho!

Im going over grade 4 theory stuff as it has been a few years since I took my Grade 5 theory exam. I am struggling with time signatures, especially where they want me to rewrite the given time signatures without changing the effect. So for example they want 6/4 into 2/2, 9/16 into 3/8, 12/16 into 4/8 etc...

I am finding this quite difficult/frustrating with adding a dot etc, but then also when they have grouped notes into triplets I am unsure how to change this. What is also very annoying, is that these books do not have ANY answers so you cannot check if it is correct. I have the pink support book that goes with it, but I always find the particular one I struggle with does not have an example in the support book that helps. This is very annoying...

Does anyone have any tips for this? or know any websites that can help with this part of theory? or answers?? Im also finding groupings of notes difficult to remember, so any advice on this would also be greatly appreciated. I find that these books are trying to give you an overview in their introduction to the topic, but a lot of the time, they are not explaining clear enough in simple terms.

If I had the answers, at least I could see how they managed to get to that answer!

Any advice/help will be much appreaciate.

Many thanks!

Hi justlisten84

For G4 you can get model answers for the 2006 and 2007 papers. You can get them post-free from music makers (the link doesn't seem to work very well but just search for "model answers")

If you post the question here, the chances are that somebody will be able to help you


This thread gives a list of theory books in the first post - if you can get to a bookshop to browse, you might find another one that suits you better.

Thanks for replying Skylark! Yes I have seen that I can get answers for the papers, which is a good thing...Im glad I am not the only one who has had trouble with these books, they just seem to over complicate things when I don't think they need to! That website is good, I always used musicroom but they charge for pp.

What was the book that you recommended for the keysignatures? I cant find the post now!

The book I mentioned in your other thread was First Steps in Music Theory published by the ABRSM. I didn't mean to imply though that it explained keysigs particularly well, just that (in my opinion ), it expresses similar information to what's in the AB Guide but in a simpler and more easily understood way, whether it's keysigs or anything else, and in that respect it's a better option to complement the MTIP workbook than the AB Guide. It's not perfect though - I remember there were still some things in it which I didn't understand, but then I asked on here. It breaks all the information down into grade-by-grade chapters, which makes it more digestible. And it's a small pocket book so you feel as if you're turning the pages really quickly and making spectacular progress! If you can't get to a bookshop to look at the all the options, I would recommend this little book as telling you what you need to know in a concise and (mostly!) understandable way. It doesn't deal with composition though, but have you got a teacher to help with that?

Thanks for that, I will look into the book...

I don't have a teacher at the moment, I am ok with most things I have revised but there are just a few things I need to go over again. I would like to achieve grade 8 theory, so as its been a few years since I've done theory I decided to start from the beginning and have just noticed a few things that have come up like the time signatures...thanks for your reply tho..I think I may end up asking questions here which I am unsure of!