[MUSIC]
It's really important to have a basic idea of what rhythm is all about.
Now, notes and
a melody occur in a piece of music in a certain space and time.
If you change that time, it no longer sounds like the same piece of music.
A lot of western music is written in what's called 4/4 time signature.
Now, a simplification of that might be to say a lot
of the music that we play has a four beat feel to it.
One, two, three, four, one, two, three, four.
Often subdivided into what we call measures are bars.
I'm going to set my metronome now to what feels
like a 4/4 time field.
As you can see, there's an accent every four beats.
[SOUND] One, two, three,
four, one, two, three four.
One, two, three, four.
Now I'm going to consider the first accented the beat on this metronome at
the beginning of the measure.
So we can actually count measures here.
That's one measure.
Two.
Three.
Four.
So we're dividing this rhythm into measures.
Now we're going to divide these measures into notes.
Now if I were to play a note that lasted for
the entire length of the measure we call that a whole note.
So now I'm going to play a C note on the guitar and
I'm going to play it for the entire length of a measure or 4 beats.
One, two, three, four, one two, three,
four, one, two, three, four.
Those are what we call whole notes, appropriately called,
because they last for the whole measure.
Now, we're going to subdivide that measure exactly in half.
And we're going to play what we call half notes.
Now, half notes last for half as long as a whole note and
they last for two beats in the measure.
So, in the same measure of four beats you can fit two
half notes and it's going to sound like this.
[MUSIC]
Moving right along, if we considered each one of these beats the same length of
a note, we'd have what we call a quarter note.
Quarter notes last for one beat.
So I would have to play four quarter notes in each measure.
Each lasting as long as one beat.
[MUSIC]
We can subdivide further and we can actually play two
notes that last the same length as one quarter note.
And those are called eighth notes and they sound like this.
[MUSIC]
We can subdivide still one more time.
And actually we can keep subdividing, but we just need to do one more subdivision.
And we're going to go to sixteenth note.
Now sixteenth note, I can get four sixteenth notes for
the same length as a quarter note.
Which is one beat of the metronome corresponds to a quarter note We can play
four notes in that time.
And this is what it sounds like.
These are sixteenth notes.
[MUSIC]
So those are the basics that you need as far as note value and measures.
A lot of Western music, including pop and rock, is written in 4/4.
And those are the fundamentals that we need for this course.
So some PDFs will be available for
you to download to reinforce that you should memorize it.
And you'll have it moving forward as we get more into written music.