Hello and welcome back. I'm Joseph Hoffman.
Today is all about rhythm and beat.
It's important to understand the difference and relationship between beat and rhythm.
We've talked about this before, but we're due for a quick review.
First, let's talk about beat.
The beat in music is steady like this:
Rhythms on the other hand can have different patterns of faster or slower sounds in various combinations.
Let's review some of the rhythms we've learned and how many beats they are worth.
For example, the whole note is worth 4 beats. FO-UU-UU-UR
But, what if we took the whole note and cut it in half?
Then we'd get two half notes.
If a whole note is worth 4 beats, how many beats is each half note worth?
If you said 2, you're correct.
TWO-OO TWO-OO
Now what if you took a half note and cut it in half?
That would give you quarter notes.
Now quarter notes are each worth 1 beat,
which means that if you had four quarter notes, it's the same value as a whole note,
which is also the same value as two half notes.
TA TA TA TA
To say that another way, the time it takes to do four quarter notes
is the same amount of time it would take to do one whole note.
So if you say FO-UU-UR while I say TA TA TA TA, we should finish at the same time.
Now, what if we took a quarter note and cut it in half?
That gives us eighth notes.
They're called eighth notes because you can fit eight of them in the time it takes to do one whole note.
TI-TI TI-TI TI-TI TI-TI
You can see that every time we go down a row and cut a rhythmic value in half,
it makes us go twice as fast.
So eighth notes are twice as fast as quarter notes, which are twice as fast as half notes, which are twice as fast as whole notes.
Now, we can keep going from here. What if we cut eighth notes in half?
That would give us sixteenth notes.
Now we're going twice as fast again.
Now we have TI-KI-TI-KI TI-KI-TI-KI TI-KI-TI-KI TI-KI-TI-KI
Here's a question for you: How many sixteenth notes can fit into one quarter note?
If you said four, you're correct.
You can fit four sixteenth notes in the same duration or the same beat. The same amount of time it takes to do one quarter note.
Now can you figure out how many sixteenth notes there would be in one half note?
If you said eight, you're correct.
Now last of all, how many sixteenth notes can you fit in a whole note?
If you said sixteen, you're correct. That's why they're called sixteenth notes, because one of them is 1/16 of a whole note.
Now you're probably wondering, can we go even faster than this?
And yes, in fact you can.
You'll notice that to go from eighth notes to sixteenth notes, we just added this extra beam.
It's this second beam that makes these notes go twice as fast.
So if we want to cut sixteenth notes in half we could get thirty-second notes
because then you'd be able to fit thirty-two of them in the same amount of time it would take to do a whole note,
but that's so many notes I couldn't even fit it on one of my cards.
So let's look at it in this real musical example.
You'll notice that thirty-second notes have three beams instead of just two.
So if sixteenth notes go this fast, TI-KI-TI-KI TI-KI-TI-KI
thirty second notes are almost too fast to even say. They'd be more like:
And then yes, you can go even faster than that. If you add a fourth beam, now you're up to sixty-fourth notes,
and I've even seen a piece of music that has one hundred and eighth notes with five beams.
Here's what that looks like.
That's pretty insanely fast,
but don't worry. You'll be playing that someday.
Now let's review all the names of the notes one last time. Say them with me.
Whole note.
Half note.
Quarter note.
Eighth notes,
and sixteenth notes.
Now I'm going to scoot all of these notes over so we can also take a look at their corresponding rests.
Each rhythm has kind of like a twin brother that gets the same value as the note.
For example, the whole note, which is 4 beats long,
has a whole rest as like its lazy twin brother. Lazy because it's always resting.
The whole rest can mean 4 beats, but it can also just mean rest the whole measure,
and sometimes if a measure only has 3 beats or 2 beats, you would still use a whole rest.
It just means rest the whole measure or for 4 beats.
The half note also has a twin brother, the half rest.
Here's a little trick to tell the difference between a whole rest and a half rest.
A whole rest kind of looks like a hole in the ground.
A half rest looks like a hat, and hat sounds like half.
So the half rest gets 2 beats just like a half note,
and a quarter rest gets 1 beat just like a quarter note.
An eighth rest gets half of a beat,
and then if we wanted to rest for just 1/16 value,