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How To Read Rhythms and Count Notes

Do you sing in a choir? Can you read music? Do you think that you would have a higher quality musical experience if you could read music? Well, on this site I am going to teach you how to read music.

One element of music is rhythm. Rhythm is the timing of sounds over time. When you tap your feet to music you are tapping a rhythm. When you learn to read music you must learn to read rhythms. Learning to read rhythms will help you become a better choir member because you will be able to learn your music faster.

In this lesson you will learn about notes, time signatures, and bars (or measures).

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Fig. 1

This is the second lesson in a series about how to read music.

In our first lesson we learned about notes and how to count them. In this lesson you will learn more about notes, rests, and how to count.

What Are Rests?

Rests are periods of silence in music. Just as notes represent a sound of given duration, rests represent silence of a given duration. In the first lesson we learned about different types of notes. Well, for each type of note there is a corresponding type of rest. See Figure 1.

In the first lesson we talked about the time signature of 4/4. The top 4 means 4 beats in a measure, and the bottom 4 means that a quarter note gets one beat. So, in 4/4 time a quarter note gets 1 beat, a half note gets 2 beats, and a whole note gets 4 beats. An eighth note gets 1/2 beat, and a sixteenth note gets 1/4 beat. The equivalent rests are counted simularly.
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In this lesson you will learn about tied notes.

We have been discussing note values in 4/4 time. In 4/4 time a whole note gets 4 beats, a half note gets 2 beats, a quarter note gets 1 beat, an eighth note gets 1/2 beat, and a sixteenth note gets 1/4 beat. The people who write the music are composers or arrangers, and being creative types, they don’t want to be limited to the note values that I have listed. They sometimes want to use notes that are 3 beats or 8 beats or 7 beats. They even want to use notes that have durations of 1 and 1/2 beats. How do they do it? Read the rest of this entry »

How many times have you become lost in the music because there was a repeat and you didn’t know where to go? It has happened to everyone who sings. Even when you know what Dal Segno means, sometimes it’s hard to find where to go. We won’t address Dal Segno in this lesson, but you will learn about simple repeats and 1st and 2nd endings.

I Don’t Want To Write The Same Music Again!

Fig. 1

Music often contains sections that are repeated. Instead of writing the repeated section again, the composer will supply instructions that tell the performer to play or sing a section again. Read the rest of this entry »

In the previous lesson we discussed tied notes. Tied notes are a way for us to add notes together, allowing us to extend the sound of notes. In this lesson we will learn about another method of extending notes by using dot notation.

We use dot notation to extend the length of notes.

When we want to extend the length of a note, we can place a “dot” after the note to extend it. The dot increases the length of the note by one-half. This means that if you place a dot after a half note which gets two beats, then the dot adds 1 beat to the note so that a dotted half note gets 3 beats.

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