4.3 Grouping rests in compound time

In compound time, you should follow the ‘show each beat’ principle as in simple time. As you learned in Section 3.8, when dealing with such compound time signatures as 6/8, 9/8 and 12/8, the beat is a dotted crotchet, so each beat’s rest can be written either as a dotted crotchet rest or as a crotchet rest followed by a quaver rest, as in Example 37.

Example 37

However, in 12/8, which has four beats per bar like 4/4, two dotted crotchet-beat rests at either the beginning or the end of the bar can be written as dotted minim rests, as in Example 38.

Example 38

You can see the parallel with 4/4 – Example 39 shows the 4/4 example (Example 35) compared with the 12/8 example.

Example 39