Rhythms: The Fundamentals

Rhythm refers to the length and pattern of sounds and silence over time we often think of Rhythm in music or dancing but Rhythm has always been fundamental to The Human Experience not only when we do certain types of repetitive work but even the regularity of our steps as we walk and run listen to our breath and even our own Heartbeats this deep connection may explain why rhythm is far more important in a performance than notes if you mix up the notes it'll sound you know not great but at least you know what song it is but even if you get all the right notes if you mix up the Rhythm bad enough the song can be unrecognizable now rhythmic notation of vocabulary can get pretty complicated and really feel overwhelming but don't feel like you have to learn it all at once you can almost think of it like a board game the basic rules are pretty easy and you can do a lot with a base game but after a while you're ready for more complexity and you can even start adding expansions each one has a bit of a learning curve but it's manageable if you do it bit by bit and each installment really expands the possibilities of the game we'll be covering these three in this video which will be plenty to get you started and will save these other more advanced expansions for upcoming installments so let's get started with the rules of the base game the most fundamental concept of understandable rhythms is the beat which is the basic underlying sense of pulse in a piece of music most of the time the beat just ticks along at a steady and consistent Pace there can be sounds that are longer than a Beat or shorter than a Beat [Music] they can match right up with the beat or be off the beat but basically everything to do with rhythms is defined by its relationship to the beat Tempo refers to the speed of a piece of music and is measured in beats per minute this piece is at 120 beats per minute which just happens to be double A Tempo that you're already probably very familiar with the second hand of a clock you can also use a device called a metronome to accurately determine basically any Temple you like Fine Music tends to group itself into cycles of strong and weak beats which are known as bars or measures and the length of those bars is known as meter you'll hear four beats per bar pretty often it's an incredibly common meter across nearly every genre of music it has a strong beat on one followed by three weaker Beats [Music] you'll also hear a lot of music with three beats in a bar which has a strong beat on one followed by two weaker Beats foreign to a type of notation called a time signature it consists of two numbers the top one tells you how many beats are in a bar and the bottom one dictates what kind of note is counted as the beat for now we're only dealing with time signatures with four on the bottom which means we're counting the quarter note and that covers a ton of music but we'll explore other options later on so in 4 4 there are four beats in a bar and the quarter note gets the beat and a couple of bars of quarter notes look like this each one gets a beat and they're counted for the beat that they fall on foreign which are two beats long and whole notes which are four beats long so that gives us options for one two and four beat notes and if we want a three beat node we use a dotted half note and if there's a different number of beats in the bar everything still works out exactly the same way foreign number of beats in a bar is possible but some are more common than others in fact 4-4 is so common that it's sometimes called common time and it's notated with a c on the staff and speaking of different names for the same thing the British have a different set of names for note values just like they have for a lot of different words use whichever one you like but I'll be using quarter half and so on not only because that's what I'm used to but because I think it makes the rhythmic relationships between note values much clearer each one of these notes has a corresponding rest which just means silence instead of sound for some number of beats [Music] one thing to note is that the whole and the half rest look fairly similar to remember the difference you might think of the half rest as looking like a hat the Hat rest and the whole rest looks like a hole that you don't want to fall into the whole rest also a whole rest is four beats long and it hangs down from the fourth line of the staff and the half rest is the other one there's also something called a tie which is a curved line that connects notes of the same pitch to make them longer they can occur inside the bar or over the bar line foreign that's basically all there is to the base game this stuff can take a bit of practice to get used to but the patterns and rules are all relatively simple and not only can you play a lot of music with just these rhythmic Concepts it sets you up for understanding everything that's coming next if you're ready to move on it's time for our first expansion a small and simple but useful tool multi-rests the great silence multi-rests are a shorthand notation for rests that last more than one bar this passage has a bunch of bars of rest in a row but it's hard to tell how many there are at a glance but with multi-rest it's really clear multi-rest mostly show up in longer pieces when you're playing with other instruments music might get boring if everybody played all the time so composers often have different instruments or different sections featured or resting at any given time we usually count them as one two three four two two three four three two three four and so on that way you can keep track of how many bars are passed and stay in time with the beat and don't be afraid to discreetly count on your fingers so you don't get lost it can be pretty easy to zone out and forget what bar you're on and that's multi-rests just a quick mini expansion to build on what we already know about rhythms the next expansion of this game is called Anna Cruces and the modification of time now that may sound like the title of a fantasy novel but Anna Cruces is a fancy name for a really simple thing it's probably more commonly known as a pickup note or pickup beat it occurs when one or more notes precede the downbeat of a bar or phrase and it's something you've probably been doing since you were little you might remember the song Bingo the accented strong beat doesn't happen on the first word it happens on the second and it works the same with the wheels on the bus and the Itsy Bitsy Spider the notes before the strong beat are the pickup or the anacrucis looking at these songs in notation you'll see a little preview of The rhythms that are coming up in the next video but all you really need to know right now is that this is beat one it's right after the bar line and this is beat four and that's really important to know because if you're playing music with other people you want to make sure that you're all starting in the same place or it can get really messy here you start on beat three so you might hear a count off of a bar and two beats something like one two three four one two the song Happy Birthday has a two note pickup to every phrase of the song but it also has another interesting feature because while the beat usually continues at a steady tempo that's not always the case this symbol is a fermata you can put it over a note or a rest and it just means to hold longer than its usual value usually a conductor or soloist will indicate when the group should continue if not you'll just have to try to follow the people around you there's also this marking called a sejura also known as train tracks which is a full break where the music pauses for a moment and then continues it's a bit like a fermata over a rest the difference is that all instruments stop versus Azura during a fermata even though time is stopped some instruments might be playing While others are resting navigating the end of a sejura works the same way as with a fermata and there are a number of other ways you can modify the rate of tempo using various terms commonly taken from Italian it looks like there's a lot of them but most of them are just variations on speed up and slow down don't worry too much about memorizing them all right away you'll learn most of them through wrote and exposure and at the end of the day they really all just mean watch the conductor and that's anacrucis and the modification of time sometimes notes come before the downbeam and sometimes the tempo could speed up slow down or even pause entirely the stuff we've covered today really lays the foundation for understanding everything related to rhythm in the next video we'll be looking at subdivision which is an incredibly powerful expansion and then we'll get into some interesting time signatures and other useful rhythmic Concepts be sure to subscribe and enable notifications to make sure you don't miss it and if you have any questions about Rhythm or things you'd like to see covered let me know in a comment below thanks for watching

Channel: Brad Harrison Music

Views: 32,387

Keywords: music, music lesson, for dummies, always be counting, reading fundamentals, beginner tips, quarter note, half note, dotted half note, whole note, counting rhythms, anacrusis, pickup note, pickup beat, multi rests, quaver, semiquaver, demisemiquaver, eight notes, sixteen notes

Id: ZJIbf4nMG3Y

Length: 9min 0sec (540 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 07 2023