- Hey students! It's your piano teacher, Tim here! And today, I'm gonna show you a way you should be counting your rhythms that will both eliminate confusion and help your counting
to be more accurate. Music is broken up into
these wonderful boxes, which are called measures. So there's measure one. Measure two is here. Measure three, and so forth. They are all divided by
these lines in the middle. These are called bar lines. How about that? So, what you need to understand first is what's called the time signature. And the time signature is this lovely fraction-looking number kinda over here and this one is called four, four. You just say the top number
and the bottom number. So the most important
thing you need to know is the top number here, because this top number tells you how many beats can fit
in each of these boxes that I was just talking about. This is a quarter note. So I mentioned that a
quarter note gets one beat. If a quarter note gets one beat, you gotta ask yourself, how many quarter notes can
you fit in each measure? Or remember I said that top number being a four means that
you can literally fit four of them. Since each one's worth one, one plus one plus one plus one is of course four. And that's just the very basics of rhythm. So half notes worth two. And depending on like how the note looks tells you how long you're
gonna be playing it. These, you probably seen this before, these are eighth notes. They're twice as fast as a quarter note. They're only worth half of a beat. And I'm gonna show you the rest later. You can have a whole note. Whole notes worth four beats into the part I wanna talk about. So I'm gonna draw a four
quarter notes again. And what I want you to start doing is counting these. I mean obviously, the first
quarter note's beat one, beat two, beat three and beat four but here's where things
are gonna get interesting. What I want you to start practicing is when you play quarter note, instead of just saying one, I want you to break it down in these four syllables. And you're gonna call this 1e and a, the plus is and. That's just how we do it in music. 1e and a. 2e and a. 3e and a. 4e and a. Now you're gonna find out why in a minute. But essentially, what you're doing is when you're playing each of these, you're now breaking... You're still playing one note per beat but you're breaking it
down into four syllables. One e and a. Two e and a. Three e and a. Four e and a. And by doing this, it's going to allow you to count much more evenly and it will eliminate confusion like they mentioned in the intro, which we'll get to in a second. If you have half notes going on. You're gonna count one
e and a, two e and a. You're gonna hold it through the entirety of the 1e and a and 2e and a. So start doing that on a regular basis. That's the main tip. Now, the reason we do this is that you can break a quarter
down, a quarter note down into smaller parts. We call this subdivision. So when we're breaking
it down into 1e and a-s that's a subdivision of four. We're breaking it down
into four equal parts. One, two, three, four. And then beat two: one, two three, four. And because we're gonna start having notes that breakdown the beats
into those smaller parts, when we're used to counting quarter notes in that subdivision, it's actually gonna make things
a whole lot easier for us. Now let's talk about this. So, now, I mentioned a minute ago that when you split a quarter note, you can split a quarter
note into two parts. And that makes them eighth notes. So, what we're gonna do now is beat one is still here, right? And we're still gonna be
counting out the 1e and a. So now we've split it up into two parts. The 1e is gonna hit with the eighth note, first eighth note, the and a is gonna hit with
that second eighth note. And let's just fill out a
whole measure of eighth notes just to make sure or just
for consistency's sake just to kinda show you
a real world example of how you're gonna find these. So here, I'm gonna play this
for them and count it out. 1e and a, 2e and a, 3e and a, 4e and a. With your point of attack, point of attack just meaning when you're playing the note, you're gonna be hitting it on one, the number then and, the number, and and. You're holding it for
the e and the and a-s and all that other stuff. So I think you get the idea. It's common, even fairly
in the beginner stages. Now you'll be a few months along before you really start seeing these ones. Let me get these in here and let's draw out a
whole measure of these. These are known as sixteenth notes and there are four of them in a beat. Hey, where have we seen the beats break down into four before? Well remember in the very
beginning of the lesson it was with the quarter
notes, with the 1e and a-s 2e and a-s. And we just kept that subdivision through the eighth
notes, just holding them for two of those syllables. And now it's perfect
because we can hit the note. We're now hitting a note on
each individual subdivision. 1e and a 2e and a. And then in a minute,
as I'm drawing these, I'm going to explain
how it's going to make your counting more accurate. Cuz a lot of students
struggle moving between all these different notes at once. Cuz in music you're not just going to find just sixteenth notes for the whole song. You're gonna see quarter notes, eighth notes, sixteenth notes, half notes, dotted half notes, everything pretty much. So here we go. So this is how you count it, very simple. Now you're literally playing a note on every subdivision. 1e and a, 2e and a, 3e and a, 4e and a. Now take note that the
notes are now four times as fast as they were. I'm playing four times as many as I was when it was the quarter
notes because before I was going 1e and a 2e and a. But now it's 1e and a. So keep that in mind that
when you are splitting the notes from quarter
notes to eighth notes to sixteenth notes, you're getting twice as fast each time. But so long as you're counting
out these subdivisions it's going to make it really
really easy to manage. And you wanna count them
out as evenly as possible. You don't want to go 1e and a, 2e and...a, 3e and a, 4e and...a five. Well there isn't beat
five, but you get the idea. There's even more we have to cover, but if you found this
lesson helpful so far, make sure you smash that like button cuz it lets other students know that this is a quality lesson that
they can learn from as well. Okay, back to the lesson. Now let's write a
measure of mixed rhythms, meaning that I'm just
gonna draw a quarter note. So what I'm gonna do is I'm just gonna draw out the numbers of the beats so far. And one little pro tip for you that I didn't realize
until I was like in college and it blew me away that I didn't know, and felt stupid. But it's that the beams in general-- 95% of the time--when you see notes beamed together like that, that signifies that together they equal one beat. Now things aren't always so easy. You're not gonna always find it like that, but whenever you see something like that you're like, "Oh, well together "they equal one beat." So a little tip for you. Okay, so here we go. Let me chart out-- now we're not done yet, why? Why do you think we're not done yet? Because like I said, even though you're counting out quarter note here, you still wanna be
subdividing the 1e and a. Here we got 2e--gonna draw
the lines underneath again-- and a. Draw a line underneath here. And then here, this one's easy: 3e and a. Just one on each of these. For each note. And then here, on beat four... Are we done yet? No. Good. I hope you said no, anyway. 4e and a, with just one note there. Okay, so now I'm going to play this rhythm and by subdividing it's
going to make it way way more easy to understand,
and way way more accurate. So here we go. 1e and a 2e and a 3e and a 4e and a. And again, if you're having a little bit of trouble with it,
you always want to plan your attack points. So when you're actually
hitting the note, right? So you're hitting the note on one there. That's pretty easy to understand. And then the eighth note,
you're hitting it on two when you're counting, and and. So always the first one
of your groupings there. And then the total line underneath is how long you're holding them for. And then here, obviously,
you're points of attack are 3e and a, and then four. By planning out your point of attack you're really honing in on when you're going to be playing that next note. Just make sure that you're holding them for long enough. So it may seem like a lot of work to count out the subdivisions at first, but the goal is--same with
reading music or anything-- you wanna get faster and better and you wanna know this
like the back of your hand so that you're actually... You'll start to actually think about this stuff as you're playing the music. Okay and of course when you're done watching this lesson you really really want to check out this lesson right here on the mistakes that you, yes you, are making while playing rhythms. It's a great lesson to
follow up from this one. Remember to smash that like button, smash subscribe, turn on the notifications so you get updated on all the great things that come out.
