Understanding Rhythm (Beginner Piano Theory)

if you are new to learning the piano and you want to be able to sight read then you need a very clear understanding of note values so notes have many different faces and each note appearance each different sort of looking note has a different value attached to it and the value of the note simply means how long you're going to hold it down when you play it so you want to memorize note values very early on i'm going to make this super simple for you i'm going to explain it all draw it all out and i want to give you some like ways you can practice this at home so you can get really comfortable with rhythm concepts so here we go the first note that i'm going to teach you is the quarter note i have terrible writing but i'll try to be neat for you so the quarter note it's just a colored in circle with a stem so that equals one beat so if i were to draw four quarter notes i'm trying to make them all the same guys but it's harder than it looks it would be counted or clapped like this one two three four so pretty easy the next note is called the half note now the half note looks almost like the quarter note but it's not colored in so it's just a circle with a line like that and a half note equals two beats so i'm going to draw two half notes here just like this and if you were to clap this or count it you would go one two three four now the word half note is a two syllable word so i find it really easy to go half note half note so you hold each of those half notes for two counts now here's a cool little piece of information each half note could fit two quarter notes right because two quarters put together makes a half so you can see how this kind of funnels into each other the next note i'm going to show you is the whole note so this one's pretty straightforward it looks like a circle you can maybe think of it as like a doughnut hole or a hole and it equals four beats so that's an entire measure of music if you have a whole note here you're gonna count it like this you're gonna go one two three four i like to say great big whole note because it's got four syllables and it helps me to remember the value so you could count it like this great big whole note one clap and four beats and we could fit two half notes into one whole note or four quarter notes into one whole note so that's like the most basic simple look at rhythm we have more note values that we can add on to this so let's take a look at one of my favorites this guy is called the eighth note now it's really really fun to draw it's a really common one you know when you're sort of doodling notes colored in like a quarter but it's got a little stem like that and this little guy equals one half of a beat so that can get complicated um so we often see eighth notes in groups of two so when you put eighth notes beside each other instead of having their little stems point down like this i'm going to show you this right here instead of those downward pointing stems we actually connect them like this we can erase those stems and that's what you get so you get two notes that put side by side equal one so they're grouped together in groups which makes it much easier to count and to read so eighth notes are often counted like this one and because that breaks those ones into half so you can count single eighth notes or eighth notes together so i'm gonna do a group of one two three four beats notice i have eight notes so we count it like this one and two and three and four and so this is one beat this is two this is three and this is four so all of these guys together equal a whole note or four beats four quarters so i hope you're tracking with me so far eighth notes are really fun to count um you'll often hear them counted t t so you could go if that makes it any easier for you um now we get to the real fun stuff we're going to do a couple more complicated notes before we finish here so what we have here we're going to use a dot a dotted half note so i'm going to take a half note and we are going to put a dot beside it so we've got a dotted half note now any time you add a dot beside a note it adds half the value of the note it's beside to the note so a half note equals two half of two is one so we're going to add that giving us a note that equals three a half note dot equals three beats so you could count it half note dot c i just called it a half note dot there its grown up name is a dotted half note but if you say half note dot you get those three syllables which helps you to remember the value of the note so that's how i count my dotted half notes now half note dot or one two three so a dotted half note is a lot of fun finally this is the last one it's maybe one of the more complicated ones but when you break it down this way i find that it makes the most sense so what it's called is a dotted quarter note and it sounds simple all we need is this lovely little quarter note guy here we'll put a dot beside him but we need to figure out the value so a quarter note equals one we're going to add half the value of that one to the note so we're going to add half of 1 which is half so now we have a note that equals 1 and a half beats and that's kind of something you can't leave alone you have to complete it so we're going to find something else that we've learned in here that equals a half a beat our friend the eighth note and we're going to use that little some eighth note to complete the value so when you see a dotted quarter note you'll almost always have an eighth note in the same measure so we've got a full beat here for the quarter a half beat here and then this little guy here is also a half a beat so together this would equal two so it sounds like this one and two and another way you could count that which again it's silly i use this in my kid classes but i find it really helpful i called the the quarter note at taw and then i call the dot a dot and then i call that eight the t so i go t so whatever way you want to look at it go for it this is an overview on note values what the notes equal write these down on a piece of paper and see how many of them that you can memorize make little combinations of the different note values and practice clapping them it's really really going to help you as you learn to sight read and play so enjoy this lesson and we'll see you around [Music] you

Channel: Pianote

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Keywords: music theory, rhythm lesson, time signatures, piano lessons, sheet music, how to, music lesson, piano chords, piano scales, five minute mozart, 5 minute mozart, time signature, dotted half, rhythm patterns, music theory lessons, music theory tutorial, rhythm lessons for beginners, rhythm lessons for elementary, rhythm lesson for grade 1, rhythm lessons for kindergarten, rhythm lessons for middle school, rhythm lesson 1, rhythm lesson 2, how to play piano

Id: yFAcDynQdeQ

Length: 8min 1sec (481 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 05 2019