The Signposts
Repeat Marks
One of the most commonly seen signposts. This symbol is placed instead of a barline and
means go back to the start of the music.
The one catch is if there is a set of repeat marks facing the other way in a previous bar
then should go back to these rather than to the beginning of the piece.
Loops
This symbol means that you should repeat the material played in the previous bar (it is ba-
sically a shorthand to make things quicker to write and read). If there are multiple ones
then you need to repeat multiple bars of material. So, 2 bars of repeat signs will mean you
should loop the previous 2 bars of material.
1st and 2nd time bars
These tend to be the signposts that people find the most confusing. It is really important to
get your head round these as they appear fairly frequently in sheet music. They occur
when a composer is wanting you to repeat a section of music, but change the last bar(s) of
the section when you repeat it.
Have a look at this example on the next page....