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Lesson 10: Rhythm

There are two aspects of musical beats: pulse (the steady beat) and rhythm (the length of individual notes). In playing by ear, we need to feel the beat (and stay with it), but there are many different choices we have with regard to rhythm. And, once again, while we generally think of "playing by ear" as playing without musical notation - it's helpful to have at least a sense of what's going on in the written music - and it will help me explain some of the concepts and exercises we meet in this lesson.

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If you decide you would like to view the "Circle of Fifths" tool for this lesson, you can come here, to the top of the page, at any time and click this button to open it - again, it will open in a new tab or window.

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Listen to this clip to start learning about concepts of rhythm in music.

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In this section we will be filling out the "Rhythm Chart."

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Click on the "Worksheets" button to view and print a copy of the Rhythm Chart that you can fill in as we go along.

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Don't worry about the "rests" for now, we'll get to those eventually.

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Here is the Rhythm Pyramid - another way of showing the relationship of different notes to each other. Just listen as I play the different rhythms in the Rhythm Pyramid.

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So let's start learning how to play different rhythms:

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And here's a rhythm chart in 3/4. I'll play an example of the 3/4 rhythm, and I'll play through our example rhythms.

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Play the audio clip to learn about the way musicians count quarter and eighth notes. We'll start out with our 4/4 rhythm:

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And now let's practice counting a 3/4 rhythm:

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(Note that this rule about the meaning of Stem UP and Stem DOWN applies to the rhythm charts we will be playing in this lesson. However, when you are looking at regular notated music, the directions of the stems on the music has an entirely different meaning)

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Now we'll make it a little trickier by changing chords each measure, using these rhythms with one of our Chord Progressions from the last lesson.

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(Note that, when you are playing along with printed music or chord charts, the chord (or number) will normally appear right above the note or lyric word where the chord changes. So in the first bar of the example above, the "I" would normally appear over that FIRST quarter note, not over the third one. If it appears over that third beat, then you wouldn't change the chord you're playing until the third beat of the measure.)

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And let's repeat that example using our 3/4 rhythms, C chord throughout:

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And now, repeat the exercise where we change chords each measure:

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Click on the "Worksheets" button to view and print a worksheet that contains more 3/4 and 4/4 rhythms. You don't need to worry about playing the notes in this exercise, just use it to practice counting and clapping out the rhythms. If it helps you to do so, you can write in the counts for each line of music.

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Of course, if you feel like you're ready to try playing the notes on the piano, that's great - but for this lesson, we're really just looking at the rhythms.

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Each line of music is in a different rhythm and key signature. At the end of each line of music, the rhythm and key signature for the next line is written in - this is something musicians do so that the player won't be surprised when they look down to the next line and find things have changed! Musicians can usually look ahead on the line they're playing, but if they look ahead to the next line of music and then try to find their place again, it can be confusing. So this is just a convention used in sheet music to make it a little easier on the musicians who are playing.

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For our final exercise, we'll put it all together: print this page this page so that you can create your own rhythms and practice playing them.

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Hooray, You Made It Through Lesson 10 !!!

Rhythms are tricky - and as you will discover when you start playing songs, there are many, many different rhythms. Part of "playing by ear" is being able to hear the rhythm of a song and adjust your playing so that it sounds right for the song.

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I hope everything in this lesson made sense - as always, if you have some questions at the end of the lesson, click the "Ask Rhonda" button to send me an email and I'll try to answer your questions as quickly as I can!

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