Rhythm Lesson 1

Since we learned a few chords in our last lesson, now it's time to talk about rhythm. Music is all about counting. You have to know how long to stay on one note before going to the next note. And then how long to stay on that note. And so on. And the same could be said for chords. Musicians depend on counting to know when to come in or when to lay out in a song.

This is the standard notation for music in the civilized world. It is called the treble clef staff. The little symbol to the left is the treble clef, also sometimes called a G clef. There are some other clefs that get used in music, depending on the instrument. But here we will only be concerned with the treble clef & tablature, or tab for short. We'll go over tab notation later.

The staff is made up of the horizontal lines you see going left to right. This is where the notes will be represented. And it is through this representation that musicians can communicate with each other. It is the language of music. Think of the staff as a graph. The tone or pitch of a note is represented on the vertical and the length of time you spend on each note, or the rhythm of the piece, is represented on the horizontal. So higher pitched notes will appear near the top of the staff & lower pitched notes near the bottom.

The numbers next to the treble clef tell us the time signature for this piece of music. In  this example, it is called 4/4 time, pronounced "four four". It is written as a fraction. The top number means there will be 4 beats in each measure. The bottom number means a whole note gets 4 beats. Sounds like a foreign language doesn't it? Well don't worry. Keep reading & I'll explain.

Here we have a breakdown of what the different notes on the staff mean, as far as rhythm goes. Start at the top. A whole note gets 4 beats in the first example. So, every time you see this note, no matter where it falls on the staff, you will pick that note & hold it for 4 beats.

Two half notes make up a whole note, since each half note is literally half of a whole note. A half note gets 2 beats. And a half note is made up of 2 quarter notes. Each quarter note gets 1 beat. So there are 4 quarter notes for every whole note. This means that you will play each quarter note for 1 beat before moving on to the next note.

Here is another example of what the notes represent, as far as rhythm or timing as concerned. When you see a whole note, you will pick that note - an F in this case - and count 1, 2, 3, 4 before going on to the next note. The other notes are counted as you see in this example. Let's try an exercise:

You can click on the picture above & print it out on a full page if you like. This is the A major chord you just learned. Notice the notation. Don't worry about the notes on the staff yet. We'll get to that. Just play the A major chord like you learned in the last lesson. In the 1st measure of this example, strum the chord once & count 1, 2, 3, 4 before moving to the next measure. Then, in the 2nd measure, you'll strum once & count 1, 2 & then strum again, counting 1, 2. In the 3rd measure, you'll strum the chord once for each beat. So you'll strum it 4 times. Practice strumming downward the first time, then upward the second time, alternating each time. In the 4th measure, you'll strum 8 times - up, down, up, down, up, down, up, down. And so on.

See? It's not that difficult. Incidentally, the TAB that you see underneath the staff is a different way of notating music, called tablature, as mentioned earlier. We'll get into that in the next lesson & learn a few more chords. Until then, keep strumming the above example until it is smooth as silk. See you next time & rock on!