How to remember how much irregular groupings are worth

Question

I'm currently studying piano music theory and I have a hard time figuring out how much triplets, duplets, quadruplets, quintuplets, sextuplets, and septuplets are worth in different time signatures (simple, compounds hybrid meters) If anyone has any tricks when they want to know how many beats/notes an irregular grouping is worth, please feel free to respond!

Thank you!

Answer 1

Just looking at your examples, some thoughts that may help are as follows:

I’m assuming triplets don’t give you too much trouble. They’re pretty straightforward.

For the larger groupings, based on your example page, you could think through the following if you get lost:

1. For simple (duple) meter, find the largest number of notes in the grouping divisible by 4. Whatever the duration of that grouping is is the duration of your tuplet.

EXAMPLE: For a grouping of 9 sixteenths, the largest number of sixteenths in that grouping divisible by 4 is 8. 8 sixteenths equals 2 quarter notes, so your grouping fits into the space of two quarter notes.

2. For compound meter, do the above but use multiples of 3 instead of 4.

EXAMPLE: For an grouping of 8 sixteenths, the largest number of sixteenths in that grouping divisible by 3 is 6. 6 sixteenths equals a dotted quarter, so your grouping fits into the space of a dotted quarter.

Hopefully this helps!