Well...Ok...That week of inactivity was a downer, right? Had to spend a whole week playing chords and a scale without any structure, and we all know that can get pretty boring. So let's get a little rhythm under our belt.
Did you know I have been involved in music since jr. high but it wasn't until I had to write a college paper that I knew how to correctly spell rhythm? I say that to say...if I spell it incorrectly later on, forgive me.
Alright, so we've got our system that tells us what note to play and now we need system that tells us -how- to play those notes. What I mean by that is "how long do we hold out the note" or "what feel does this passage of music have". In music we distinguish how a song is played by multiple factors and it all starts with the time signature.
The time signature indicates two things: how many beats are in each measure and what note length constitutes a single beat in a measure.
"Ok, ok...what's all this measure and beats and junk?" For the sake of simplicity, let's just get their generalizations so we can have our working vocabulary up. A measure is like the name entails it to be, a "distance" so to speak, that allows a musical piece to be broken down into small sections to ensure the musician can keep in the correct place. Let's pretend that a musical piece is the "distance" of a mile. We know that a mile consists of 5,280 feet, so for the purpose of this illustration, our musical piece contains 5,280 measures. This means that they are all of equal length and together make up the whole mile (song).
Let's take it a step further. Within a foot we have inches, all of the same length (distance). These are what we would designate notes as. Measures and notes are just a way of taking a large sampling (the musical piece) and putting it down to details.
Make sense? I hope so. Analogies aren't my strong suit.
Moving back to the time signature, let's build our first one. The most common of time signatures is 4/4. (In some 4/4 musical pieces, the time signature is indicated by a "C", which stands for common time) By our definition of time signatures, there should be 4 equally spaced beats in a measure in the 4/4 time signature.
Ready to clap?
Let's start off by clapping in equally spaced beats. This should come fairly naturally, just remember to clap equally spaced and not like you're giving Skynyrd a reason to come back out and play Free Bird again. Now that we've got to clapping and got a little beat going, start counting in fours. Example: Using 'c' as an indication to clap.
[c - c - c - c ]-[ c - c - c - c ]-[ c - c - c - c]
[1 - 2 - 3 - 4 ]-[ 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 ]-[ 1 - 2 - 3 - 4] etc.
You will notice that there are 4 claps in each set of brackets; the brackets indicate a measure and since our time signature indicates that there are 4 beats per measure, there will be 4 equally spaced claps (beats) per measure. Go grab a cd or go to youtube and type in a popular song. In fact let's try some AC/DC - Back in Black. Try clapping in our system in time with the song. You should be able to pick up on this very quickly and one quick way to help is to notice the drum beats. When you hear the bass drum those will be counts 1 and 3, and these are also called the downbeats. When you hear the snare drum, those will be counts 2 and 4, and these are called the upbeats. Try clapping through the whole song.
Tired of Back in Black? Well then let's move on to something else. Go find Sweet Child O' Mine by Guns N Roses and clap along to it. You will still be in 4/4 time, but you will notice that you're clapping a bit faster. This is where tempo comes into play. (You can finish clapping along to SCOM if you want the practice before moving on, or not...it won't hurt my feelings).
Tempo simply determines how quickly (or slowly, depending on your view of things) a beat or note is played within a piece of music. The tempo of a song is measured in beats per minute. If the song had a tempo of 60, that would mean that there are 60 equally spaced beats within one minute (or 1 per second). If the tempo was 120, there would be 120 equally spaced beats within one minnute (or 2 per second).
Ok, we can let this settle in for a bit before moving on. Next time we will try to implement timing into our playing. Thanks for reading and for your patience between lessons. Please leave me a comment or shoot me an email at Doghouse Guitar if you have any questions. Thanks
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