First Call is used to get everyone's attention to get ready to line up in formation or get ready for some activity. You'll often here this call at horse races telling the horses to get to the starting gate.
The meter of this tune makes it a very tough choice for the beginning player, but we'll use it as an example of the 3/8 meter along with triplets.
The 3/8 at the beginning means that there are THREE eighth notes in each measure. The little 3 under the sixteenth notes at the run in the first measure means that taken together the three of these notes equals ONE eighth note. You can see in the 2nd measure that there is an eighth followed by a triplet of sixteenth followed by and eighth which gives us our 3 eighth note total for the measures. (Stay with us.....).
In reality when tapping your foot it will take way to much effort to tap 3 beats to a measure, so to make life even more difficult, we'll tap just ONCE per measure. The count off in the head is (Tap-2-3, Tap-2-3) or (1-2-3, 1-2-3 and tapping on the one.) A good way to keep the rhythm of the is use the word "Pine-Ap-Ple" to count of the triplet. So it would go like:
You'll also want to see the section on double and triple tonguing to get a better idea of how to play the note rapidly.
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Reference: Music and Bugling Merit Badge Book from the Boy Scouts of America