Reading Rhythm
Preface (skip if this isn’t your first time here):
THERE ARE TOO MANY PEOPLE WHO DON’T KNOW ANYTHING USEFUL ABOUT THE GUITAR!
It’s because no one either showed them anything useful or they never found out the basics of playing guitar.
DON’T BE LIKE THEM!
Here we are going to talk about those guitar basics in bite-sized chunks.
Hopefully, this will give you everything necessary to understand how to play the instrument, fix any flaws in your playing, and form ideas on how to change things up in your technique.
Musical notation, tabs, and chord charts are all ways to play music on the guitar. But what about that fancy things everyone is talking about: rhythm.
Rhythm is one of the foundations of music. Reading rhythm can be a pain though. For right now, we’ll only be discussing the rhythmic notation of all the guitar music that we’ve gone over.
For musical notation there are four types of notes to become familiar with:
A Whole Note is worth 4 beats (think of a beat as a consistently moving second-hand on a analog clock):
A Half Note is worth 2 beats:
A Quarter Note is worth 1 beat:
A 8th Note is worth a ½ beat:
All of these can be seen in musical notation, tabs, and chord charts.
For musical notation all the notes will look just like up above. In tab they will look slightly different:
For Chord Charts, the rhythm is either almost identical to tabs, or doesn’t look like this at all. Sometimes a “strumming pattern” is just written instead. Mostly you’ll see some sort of count written down such as 1-2-3-4. Then you’ll see indications to strum over the beats.
Here’s the equivalent of our notes for this sort of rhythmic indications:
Whole Note:
Half Note:
Quarter Note:
8th Note:
Look up any sort of music and you’ll these exact patterns being used. If you need more help with rhythm and getting down the concept of a “beat” check out these help tools below.
Finally, there’s something called a “tie.” These ties “tie” two notes together. Check out the pictures below (they all mean the same):
You combine the length of the notes when you see the tie. These two half notes (each worth 2 beats) combine to be worth 4 beats.
“Why didn’t they just write a whole note?”
Hey, don’t worry about it, just know what it is and how it works.
You have the basics, now it’s time to play.