🧩 7 easy pieces

rhythm, explained simply

The 🟢 Start Here Series

• In Part One, we gave names to the sections of songs—verse, chorus, etc

• In Part Two, we talked about our musical ruler of time: beats & bars.

• In Part Three, we looked at our musical ruler for pitch: the major scale

• In Part Four, we looked at chords with spicy extensions.

• In part five, we talked about chord progressions.

• (Oh and there’s a brand new course on practicing and IT’S FREE.)

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Let’s not kid ourselves.

Like the rest of music, rhythm is a bottomless rabbit hole.

You can spend an entire life exploring, and you’ll never reach the end. But the most-used elements of rhythm? You can learn those right now.

Let’s get to it.

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#1 - Quarter Notes

this is what quarter notes look like

Here’s a super-basic drum beat with:

• kick drum on 1 & 3

• snare drum on 2 & 4

A quarter note takes up one beat.

90+% of western music has four beats per measure, so an easy way to think of it is that a quarter note takes up a quarter of a measure.

aka one beat each

How convenient!

You’ll hear four quarter notes in the kick drum of disco songs like December, 1963:

You’ll also hear four quarters in the snare of Motown songs like Uptight:

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#2 - Eighth Notes

Cut a quarter note in half and you get 8ths.

8th notes are “beamed” together. Quarters only have the head & stem (no beam).

Here’s that same basic drum beat with:

• kick on 1 & 3,

• snare on 2 & 4…

• …only now we’ve added hi hats on the 8th notes:

If a quarter note takes up a quarter of a bar, does an 8th note take up an 8th of a bar?

Well yes, but… it’s much more straightforward to say an 8th note takes up half a beat.

When we count these half beats, we use ANDs: “one and two and three and four and”.

8th notes are the “normal” thing to play on hi-hats. There are lots of drum beats that don’t use them… but there are waaaaayy more that do.

Steady 8th notes are also the basis of A LOT of guitar parts.

• in the chorus of Message In A Bottle:

• one of the two guitars in the intro of The Power Of Love:

• throughout most of I Wanna Be Sedated:

• the riff of Oh Pretty Woman:

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#3 - 16th Notes

each of these boxes is the same length of time: one beat

• 1 note per beat = quarter note

  • quarter notes have a head and a stem, but no beams ♩

• 2 evenly-spaced notes per beat = 8th notes

  • 8th notes are joined with single beams ♫

• 4 evenly-spaced notes per beat = 16th notes

  • 16th notes are joined with double beams ♬

Words & pictures are nice, but sound is better.

Here’s a hi-hat pattern with 16ths:

The standard western way of counting 16ths is “1e+a 2e+a 3e+a 4e+a”:

Sixteenth notes are everywhere, especially in funk music.

• the solo from Prince’s Kiss:

• the main riff from 3rd Eye Blind’s Semi-Charmed Life:

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#4 - Triplets

It feels natural to divide music into quarters, eighths, & 16ths.

It’s like we’re going with the grain. But that’s not always what we want! For a little more tension & stank, we can divide that same beat into 3 equal pieces.

They’re called triplets:

each beat is divided into three equal pieces. the 3 written above each set helps us to not confuse them with regular 8th notes.

Again, words are an inadequate tool. Let’s hear them:

Here in the West, there are a bunch of common ways to count triplets…

…and every single one of them sucks.

I like to borrow from the South Indian Konnakol counting system, where triplets are counted Takida—“taa - key - duh”

(We explore this “rhythmic solfège” in more detail in RhythmOS.)

Here are a couple songs with triplets:

• Rich - Marren Morris

• I’ve Got A Feeling - The Beatles

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#5 - Rests

Every one of these notes has a corresponding “rest.”

“Rest” makes it sound like it’s your chance to turn off your brain and relax. That would be a mistake—rest ≠ going on break! The beat continues during rests, so you should probably keep counting.

We PLAY rests—they are deliberate, measured silences.

• a quarter rest is one beat of silence

• an 8th rest is a half-beat of silence

• a 16th rest is a quarter-beat of silence

• an 8th note triplet rest is a third of a beat of silence

These make more sense once you look at…

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#6 - Longer Notes

I gave you a lot of drum examples.

You know what drums don’t have? Sustain.

Guitars do, and oftentimes you’ll be asked to play longer, sustained notes & chords.

• A whole note is 4 beats long. It takes up a whole bar of 4.

• A half note is 2 beats long. It takes up half a bar of 4.

Here are two examples that use both half notes & whole notes:

Hot Chocolate’s You Sexy Thing:

The electric guitar in the riff of Jack & Diane:

That Jack & Diane riff uses the quarter rest, half rest, & whole rest:

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#7 - dotted notes

We’ve seen notes that are 4 beats, 2 beats, and 1 beat long.

We’ve seen notes that are 2 to the beat, 3 to the beat, and 4 to the beat.

What about a note that’s 3 beats long?

Or a beat-and-a-half?

Or three-quarters of a beat?

For those, we use dotted notes.

A dot after a note increases its length by half.

Not half a beat. Not half a second. Half of whatever its length was to begin with.

Put another way:

[normal note length] x [1.5] = [dotted note length]

• A half note gets 2 beats. So a dotted half note gets 3 beats.

• A quarter note gets 1 beat. So a dotted quarter note gets 1.5 beats.

• An 8th note gets 0.5 beats. So a dotted 8th note gets 0.75 beats.

Again: words fail us. It’s much easier to hear.

Baba O’Riley is classic example of a dotted half note:

(This is slash head notation. It’s for when the rhythm is important, but the specific notes aren’t. It gets used A TON and we’ll look at it more next week.)

The first note in the guitar riff off My Girl is a dotted quarter note:

And we hear a dotted 8th note in Stevie’s Sir Duke:

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Of course there’s more.

I’ve glossed over so many things.

Here’s a few things we didn’t cover:

• ties,

• pushes,

• shuffles,

• staccato,

• Takadimi,

• odd meter,

• time signatures,

• 16th note triplets,

• combinations of 8ths & 16ths, and

• hundreds more examples drawn from real songs.

It’s all stuff that’s incredibly useful in the day-to-day act of making music.

And it’s all stuff that we cover in depth in RhythmOS.

Obviously I’m biased. But Remi—a reader just like you—had this to say about it:

thanks again Remi, you rock!

Check out RhythmOS here:

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That’s all I got this week.

See you next Wednesday, when we’ll wrap up the Start Here series by looking at how all of these elements work together on the page—on a real chart.

Josh