Learn Rhythm
Rhythm is when sounds happen. This room teaches one skill: hear where each hit falls against a steady beat, then say it, clap it and play it. It starts with the beat itself and adds one idea per lesson.
From theory: Western theory: note values · Eastern theory: laya
What you will be able to do
- Keep a steady beat and say whether you are early or late
- Count a rhythm out loud, including the places between the beats
- Clap a rhythm you hear, and read one written as a grid
- Recognise the named rhythms musicians trade by name: tresillo, clave, bossa nova, shuffle, tāl
No instrument is needed. The dots in each grid are notes you clap along to: press play, tap the count (1 2 3 4) with your foot or one hand, and clap each dot as you hear it. Your hands learn the rhythm before your head can explain it. An instrument is only a louder way of doing the same thing. The instrument rooms (guitar, drums, tabla and the rest) teach how to play each rhythm on their instrument, and every lesson here links to them.
How to read a grid
Every rhythm here is drawn as a grid, and you can press ▶ to hear it. The same few rules apply to every grid in the room.
- Each column is one moment, left to right, like words in a sentence. The numbers along the top count the beats: 1 & 2 & means beat 1, the half-way point, beat 2, the half-way point. Bold numbers are beats; faint ones are between beats.
- Each row is one sound. A grid with two rows has two things playing together.
- ● A dot means play on that count. · A small dot means stay silent.
- > A > above a dot is an accent, as on sheet music: play that one harder. It also sounds louder and a little higher.
- While it plays, the column being heard lights up and the whole pattern loops. The wheel beside a grid is the same pattern bent into a circle, so the end meets the start.
Press play on the grid above and count 1 2 3 4 aloud, saying the 1 louder. If that makes sense, you can read every grid in the room.
How to read the notation
Under every grid is the same rhythm written the way a musician writes it. You do not need it to clap along, and nothing here assumes you can read music. It is there because it is the shared way of writing rhythm down, and because it says something the grid cannot: how long each note is. The grid and the notation are drawn from the same data, so they always agree. Press ▶ and the note being played lights up.
- A note is a hit. A filled dot with a stick is a quarter note, which is one beat. The little flag on a stick, or a bar joining several sticks, means it is shorter: one flag or bar is an eighth note (half a beat), two are a sixteenth (a quarter of a beat).
- A rest is a silence with a length, drawn as a squiggle (one beat) or a small block on the line (two beats). A dot is a hit in the grid and a note here; a small dot in the grid is a rest here.
- The one line stands in for the drum or the clap. Its height never changes, only when each note falls. A grid with several rows gets one line per row, stacked, so notes that fall together sit directly above one another. A × in place of a dot is how a hi-hat or cymbal is written. The two thick bars at the start of a line are the percussion clef, which only says this line is for unpitched sounds.
- The vertical lines cut the music into bars. The two numbers at the start, such as 4/4, are the time signature: the top is how many beats are in a bar, the bottom says each beat is a quarter note. Tals and other cycles have no time signature; their sections are the bars.
- The > above a note is the accent, the same mark as in the grid.
A drum cannot hold a note, so a hit is written as long as the gap up to the next hit, up to a beat and a half. A longer gap becomes a rest. That is how the lessons say a rhythm out loud (“long, long, short”). The chart below shows the note lengths you will meet and how you count each one.
Quarter, eighth and sixteenth are the three you will use most. Each is half of the one before it, and the counts are the ones from the grids: 1 2 3 4, 1 & 2 &, 1 e & a. A dot after a note makes it half as long again, so a dotted quarter is one and a half beats. A triplet squeezes three notes into the time of two, and is marked with a small 3.
The ladder, step by step
Do the lessons in order. Each one adds a single idea and builds on earlier ones, and each says what you will learn, why it comes at that point, and what it needs from earlier.
- The beat and the bar
You learn: To keep a steady beat, and to hear which beats in a bar are strong (the first) and which are weak.
Why now: Every other rhythm is a set of hits placed against a steady beat. If the beat is not steady in you, nothing later can be placed, so it comes first.
- Dividing the beat
You learn: To cut one beat into 2 equal parts (eighth notes) or 4 (sixteenth notes) and say them aloud: 1 &, 1 e & a.
Why now: Lesson 1 gave you one tap per beat. Almost every rhythm also puts hits between the beats, so you need names for those in-between places before anything else. Halves and quarters come first because you will use them most; threes come later.
- Off the beat
You learn: To play hits between the beats while the beat itself stays steady. This is called syncopation.
Why now: The in-between places now have names, so you can use them. A hit placed there, away from your tap, is what makes a rhythm feel like music rather than counting.
- Two parts together
You learn: To do two different things in one bar, a low stomp and a clap, and to hear how moving them changes the feel.
Why now: Until now you have played one part. Real rhythm is several parts at once, and every grid after this has more than one row. It uses what you have just learned: eighth notes for the ticking row, and sixteenths with an off-beat stomp for half-time.
- Groups of 3 and 2
You learn: To count a pattern in short groups of 3 and 2 (1 2 3, 1 2 3, 1 2) instead of one long count to eight, and to play a hit on the start of each group.
Why now: The off-beat hits in lesson 3 are hard to remember as “beat 1, the & of 2, beat 4”. Counting in groups gives the same hits a simple chant. Lesson 6 and lesson 8 are both built from that chant.
- Timelines
You learn: A timeline is a short pattern that repeats unchanged while everyone else plays around it. You learn the clave family.
Why now: Son clave is the 3 + 3 + 2 group from lesson 5 followed by a second bar of two hits. If you can say 3-3-2 you already have half of it.
- Grooves of the world
You learn: To play a pattern that is shared between a low sound and a high sound, so it feels like a real groove.
Why now: A timeline is one voice. A groove splits a pattern between a low and a high voice, as lesson 4 did with the stomp and the clap, but with the longer patterns from lesson 5 and lesson 6.
- Cycles
You learn: To hold a long cycle of 6 to 16 beats in your head by its sections, and to know where the first beat (sam) falls.
Why now: A timeline repeats every bar or two. Indian tāl uses the grouping idea from lesson 5 on cycles of up to sixteen beats, with a name for each section. It comes once you can hold a repeating pattern.
- Threes
You learn: To cut one beat into 3 equal parts (a triplet), and to feel a bar of 6/8 as two big beats of three.
Why now: So far every beat was cut into 2 or 4. Threes feel different, and swing and polyrhythm are both made from them, so they come before both.
- Swing and feel
You learn: To divide a beat unevenly: long then short, instead of two equal halves.
Why now: Lesson 2 cut the beat into equal parts. Jazz and blues often cut it unevenly instead. You can only hear the difference once you know the even version and the triplet from lesson 9.
- Two at once
You learn: To hold two different beats at the same time, three against two and four against three, and to say the single rhythm they make together.
Why now: Until now every row shared one beat. Here the rows run at different speeds. It needs an even three (lesson 9) and the habit of reading rows (lesson 4), which is why it is near the end.
- Phrases
You learn: To hear a rhythm as a question and an answer, and to count the silence as part of it.
Why now: It comes last because it is what the rest is for: once you can read and hold rhythms, you use them to talk to someone. It also shows that a rest has a length.
Look it up, or test yourself
Then play it on your instrument
This room teaches the rhythm. The rooms teach how to play it, and Take it to your instrument lists, lesson by lesson, what each one becomes on yours. Madal and tabla carry the strokes and bols, drums the kit, guitar and ukulele the strum, bass the line, piano the meter. Every rhythm in the catalogue lists where it is taught.