Common Rhythm Patterns You Need to Know

There are some common rhythm patterns that for some reason students almost always get wrong and you might be one of those so pay attention. Your piano teacher Tim though has you covered because today I'm going to be showing you these patterns and how to count them correctly. Let's get on to the lesson. The first thing you need to know about are simple note durations. These are quarter notes, half notes, whole notes, dotted quarter notes, maybe eighth notes, sixteenth notes, things like that. If you're not familiar with all that already and how time signatures work and the whole thing, make sure you check out the link in the description because that will help you catch you up. All right on with the meat of the lesson. The first rhythm that students commonly get wrong is the dotted quarter and usually followed by an eighth rhythm. So we're really talking about from here to here. Let me show you how to do it. Hopefully you checked out that lesson I mentioned or you know how to count already. The thing is obviously we're in 4-4 time signature meaning we have four beats in a measure so the total has to add up to four. The thing is obviously beat one is going to hit there so we need to figure out how long are we going to be holding the dotted quarter for. A dotted quarter note as you might know gets one and a half beats and if you remember from when we were subdividing let me write it over here so we can have our quarter notes right. Okay so if you remember with eighth notes we had to subdivide each beat. We still had our four beats one, two, three, four but to account for all these you know missing areas we had to come up with like kind of a placeholder. So we use the term and it looks like a plus sign. So instead of one, two, three, four we count them twice as fast one and two and three and four and the reason this is relevant is that each of these now represents half a beat so there's half a beat on the number there's another half a beat there's another half a beat half a beat so just get in your mind that each of those the one and the and two in the end are each worth half of a beat on their own. Now the thing is is that I said the dotted quarter note is worth one and a half beats so the question I want to ask you is how many halves in one and a half? Well think about it you have a half so you have a half then plus another half which is whole so you have one then plus another half so you have three halves in one and a half so therefore your dotted quarter note which will look like this if you remember going to take up one and two so here we go we're going to go back to our rhythm and this is going to take up one and two just like that I'm going to draw a line underneath to indicate how long that's going to be held for the next eighth note is going to be held on and pressed on and and then of course you have three four however I do recommend you still count out the ands this is called subdivision and the reason you do that even though you're playing quarter notes is to maintain a consistent tempo throughout let me show you how to play this now so you go to your keyboard obviously and I'm going to count it real slow I'm just going to be counting out the one and two and until I get to four or the end of four so here we go one and two obviously hitting each of those beats or each of those notes where they appear on each of the numbers that I have outlined so when you're first doing these you actually do want to go through your music and chart out like exactly how I did using the subdivisions drawing the lines to indicate how long to hold them so this one is super common students get this wrong for some reason all the time it actually took me quite a long time to get the hang of it so let's just do it together a couple times ready one and two and three and four and one and two and three and four and then beyond just counting it out what I would do is I would actually start to kind of feel the rhythm in your body and start to kind of know like like just the sound of it bum bum two and three four just like that okay now we're going to be talking about several patterns that have to do with eighth notes connected to 16th notes if you don't know already when notes are beamed across like this that tells you that together they're equal to one beat okay to explain how to count these what we're going to do is we're actually going to do kind of like what we did before the eighth notes when I was showing you how you're splitting up into one and two ands things like that so what I'm going to do is we now need to figure out well first I'm going to show you that we still have all four beats so each of these groupings of four called the 16 there's 16th notes oh three comes after two how about that and then so we have our four beats we still also have our ands like before we're just putting them in the middle there so therefore we need some placeholders for these guys so let's do that let me show you how that works so we do that using the term so and a two e and a three e and a four e and a so therefore we are subdividing even further we still have our one and two and we have just broken them up now to be even faster so back to the quarter notes it would just be counted simply as one two three four and then eighth notes you play them twice as fast one and two and three and four and then 16th notes are four times as fast or twice as fast as the eighth notes one e and a two e and a three e and a four e takes a while to get used to but keep in mind that like this helps you figure out some of these patterns just like you know how we did with the eighth notes to the dotted quarter note that we had before so let me show you how this works so obviously we're going to have beat one here right now the question is all right how long am i going to hold that eighth note for well we need to split up the beat because whenever you're dealing with 16th notes in any fashion you have to be subdividing into the one and a two e and a type of formula you only have eighth notes in the piece you can just kind of resort to the one and two and that's perfectly fine okay so you have one and the eighth note now i'm going to write up here so this is what this is going to look like so if i had my eighth notes in place they would take place on one and so really this eighth note here takes up one e and this one is the one that takes up and so obviously when we move this over here we have a single eighth note so this is going to be taken up one e this means and occurs here and then since that's only a 16th note our next syllable is going to be up so we're going to be counting this as one just like that all right let me show you a another pattern okay so we had the eighth followed by 2 16th which we just did now we have 2 16th followed by an eighth so we're obviously we have 16th notes so we're splitting this up into one e right and then this time the eighth notes on the end so this is going to get two of them right since you need two of these now two quarters really to equal half of a beat so that's the opposite now it's going to be counted the first one i'm going to count them both back to back is one e and uh and the next one is one just like that and we'll do a little practice kind of combining them all into the same measure as we go along all right let me show you one more combination of eighth 16th pattern okay we have a new pattern we got a 16th here you can always tell by the double flag 16th here so therefore we have to be using our one e and is right so whenever you have a 16th note like this first note it's just going to take up one of the syllables so one and then the next syllable has to be on that next note you know it can't take up any more space than that now this is an eighth note you can tell because the beam connecting across only has a single flag up top not two of them like the others so this is going to take up um e and and then you have uh right here so this one's going to be counted as one e and uh one e and uh and just like the dotted quarter eighth rhythm i i told you before you want to get the feeling of all these so um even without you want to count them first but then after a while you want to just get the feeling of it one one and then just like that and then same thing with these i kind of forgot to mention this one is just like that and this one is one all right now let's see how good you are we're going to kind of combine a lot of these eighth patterns together see if you really get it and then we'll move on to something else all right let me show you okay now we have a whole measure of this nonsense just kidding it's not nonsense okay so uh we got our first grouping here and by the way they're all beamed together so what does this beaming mean if they're all beamed together that means that this equals one beat you know the next one's two three four so we know that we have our four beats there because when they beam them together that's one beat so you have beat one here obviously in that first grouping so let's just write out yeah where the the three beats four beats sorry will occur uh so here we go we have a 16th note right here so this can only take up one out of the four symbols of the one and this has to take up e this next one that's an eighth note right there e and uh and then draw the lines if you need to make sure you know where they're hitting and then i'm on the second one you have two but this is an eighth note so this is going to be taken up to e and then you have and uh this one is three e because they're 16th notes this eighth note is going to be and uh and then uh the last one is the same as the first one so you got four e and uh and let me just draw the little lines here they do help me at least and then this might be confusing at first but it does get easier and easier one way you can check to see whether you are correct or not is if you have all all four syllables of each beat written out because if you're missing any or you wind up at the end and you don't have enough notes left then you know you know you goofed somewhere so then you got to kind of go back and check it is going to happen to you um especially at first it took me quite a while to get used to this but make sure you keep practicing it because you will see these patterns quite a lot all right let me uh count these out now so when you're actually playing them you want to play them nice and slow so here we go one e and a two e and a three e and a four e and a so i'm pretty good at it it might take you a to count through all right let me show you another fundamental rhythm pattern that students often get wrong okay we're doing a simple one now this is an eighth rest it's the same as the eighth note except you don't play makes sense so do we have any 16th notes in this measure no we do not i don't see any double flags or anything that would look like that so we only need to really count out the one and two hands um so what i would do is here we have an eighth rest so it's going to take up one this is the other half of one and then two three four however i would still be counting these the ends in between that will just make sure that you're playing them as consistently as possible so this i would just call the eighth rest eighth note pattern so here we go this is how you're going to count this nice and slow so you're going to go one and two and three and four and one and two and three and four and one and two and three and four and just to give you um you know some feel for how that's going to go all right on to the next one okay the next rhythm i'm going to teach you is the dotted eighth 16th rhythm so here we have a dotted eighth note and the first question i actually want to ask you is are there any 16th notes in this measure the answer is yes you can identify that one right there and that tells you you're going to be subdividing into the one and a two and a kind of format so the real question is which kind of confusing is how many beats in that dotted eighth note well if you remember the dot i mentioned this actually the other lesson i did that i told you to watch and that the dot adds half of the notes value to itself so here we have an eighth note and that's worth half of a beat and here with the dot we're adding half of a half which is a quarter which as you remember from math that you're going to have to convert this one to two over four so so two over four plus one over four so therefore the dotted eighth is going to get three quarters of a beat so when we go back to our 16th notes where are they they're way back here there we go and i'm going to get rid of this now so now when you're doing the one e and us each of those now represents a quarter of a beat so we need three quarters of a beat so therefore our dotted eighth is going to take up one e and since each of those represents a quarter of a beat so let's shift it over and apply that to what we're doing here and here we have beat one obviously and remember i said it's going to take up one e and this is going to be on a so that checks out right because that makes one complete beat and those are beamed together and then you want to count out the rest of the beats so i just like to write the numbers first and but you still want to be counting the e and as i like to call them just like that so here we go i'm going to play this one e and uh two e and uh three e and uh four e and uh once again one e and uh two e and uh three e and uh four e and uh if you're liking this lesson make sure you smash that like button really helps me out you need some more practice on your rhythm of course so you want to check out this lesson right here and uh it's been your p.m teacher tim here thanks for coming by today and i'll see you yes you in the next lesson