If You Can't Read Rhythm, Start With This

Hi everyone, this is Jason Zach from Nathaniel School of Music. In this lesson, I'm here to offer you a perspective on how you can build musical rhythms literally piece by piece or beat by beat or in a you know computer or a binary arithmetic term bit by bit so to speak. So what we are going to first of all look at at the very top level is when you have music there's either sound or no sound note or rest play or don't play it's about it I've run out of opposites but anyway so the logic here is if you have a beat in a bar of four let's say 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 and what just happened I did not play at the two. So there's a rest. 2 3 4. So we notate the rest with the rest symbols. We notate the notes with the note symbols. Usually starting with the oval the the egg shade the egg or no don't shade the egg. Egg with the tail becoming a minim. And then shade it becomes a crotchet or a quarter note. Put a tail again there and becomes a quaver and so on. So note [clears throat] values have shapes. rests have symbols and all that. So this is about kind of also understanding the western notation equivalent for every single rhythm that music has to offer. We might not have time to get into topuplets and all the complex poly rhythms out there. But yeah stay tuned in another one we most likely will. So just to recap to play or not to play that is the question. So that's all we are going to work on in this lecture. And what can I play is governed by the time field of the song or what I call as the beat division system of the song which could be divide by two, divide by 3 or divide by four, divide by five, divide by anything. But for 90 plus% of music, I would imagine people just divide either by two, by three or by four or maybe don't divide at all. uh which is for maybe simpler songs like nursery rhymes or chants or things like that. Anyway, so let's assume that we are going to divide minim 2 3 and four and we are going to learn rhythm notation and also we are going to look at an app that we've built called rhythm arithmetic. We leave you a link in the description. It's a web app so you just get it practice and very soon it'll be on the iOS store and Android as well. So, if you'd like to practice it along with you on your phones, why not? But right now, it's a web app, a fully functional one, and it's great for practicing rhythm. We have huge books like the the Encyclopedia of Reading Rhythms by Gary Hess, which is one of my favorite rhythm books. In fact, it's inspired me to make this app because his book has literally everything. You have the rhythm bible. You have so many books that really push the boundary of rhythm and all written by great percussionists and drummers. But if you think about it, [clears throat] if you break it down to a beat level or a two beat level or a bar of four or a bar of three or a two bar level, two bars of four or two bars of three, it just boils down to binary arithmetic, doesn't it? Zeros and ones, play or don't play. So what we have in this app is exactly that and we've categorized it in such a way that you can find rhythms that are very simple or trivial for the want of a better word and also different ways to match rhythms together creatively. It's not just going to be random roll the dice kind of stuff which also exists by the way and it's not going to be you know preached out in a book form where you have to literally look at the book and follow the book. This goes completely beyond that. It's completely up to you and what the app thinks it should do at the time. Right? So the approach of composing rhythm or piecing together rhythm there are multiple. So stay tuned till the very end. Also get a book out. You can draw the symbols along, practice some notation along the way. We're also going to train our ears. We're also going to improve as a pianist or any instrument. So stay tuned and yeah, before we get started, it'll be nice if you can consider hitting that subscribe button, turn on the bell for regular notifications and let's get cracking. So this is how our app looks as it says, see it, hear it, become it. That is the philosophy. So most of rhythm is beat divisions. Divide the beat by two, three or four. Choose sound or silence for every slot and two race to end rhythms appear as as real notation. You can hear, read and internalize. Okay. And what you do is you tap a cell, it notates instantly. Keep tapping, it adds more. Then loop it, sing it, shape it, and do whatever you want. So off the top, this is where you view everything. This is where you loop the rhythm. For instance, now if I loop it, you'll hear what what's being played in the percussion cliff. Ta ta ta. And you have two views. Either you want to do it with rests or with holes or you visualize it with both, right? Uh you can loop the rhythm, you have the meters. Also, this app supports melody. So you'll have a melodic mode as well as the rhythmic mode. The rhythmic mode if I go here has all these samples. You have hand drums, kahon, conga, bongo, frame drum, wood blocks and of course claves. So if I check the clave out basically sticks, right? So in the bottom you'll also have rhythm dictation where we are working out how you can tap the rhythm, sing the rhythm, sing with metronome and uh it'll calibrate the room you're in and then you check how good you are at rhythm with without any teacher. You just have the app telling you if you're right or wrong. So do consider the rhythm dictation mode which I might not have time to go over but all the principles of the app can be practiced with the rhythm dictation mode. Okay. So let's start from the very beginning. You have this option. Pick a cell. It becomes the next beat. So first off, I need to choose a grid. Let me pick one bar. So in one bar, what do I have? Right now it's given me something at random. Let me customize it a bit further. So I go down here and I can pick what I want. What should be at beat one? If you think about it, the options that we have are only four either 1 1 0 1 or 0 0 which is a rest. So what more can you do if you divide by two and if you have one beat to fill right if I have two beats then you can kind of use dotted notes and you can play around a bit more but it's these same ingredients. However, when I go to triplets, you have the trivial triplets, which is just play all, swing, this one, or don't play at all. The rest, you have the groovy options. Ta ta da ta da. You you'll have all these the ones with the rests. Then you have two beats trivial and two beats groovy. Okay. To add the quarter note triplets to the equation as well. And semiquavers, you have a lot of options. You have two raised to four. That's 16 rhythmic options. So the way we've put it in is all in all out, two in, two out, three in, one out, and one in, three out. Basically, right? Uh you can also build a merged phrase using the complexity bridge. For example, like writing a poetic structure, poetic rhyming structure. A b a abba or uh a a a b maybe so or a a a c. So it gives you something and then you can pick and choose what rhythm you want or if you want a rest or whatever basically. There we go. So the so you hit build merged phrase and this is how it uh populates basically. So, right now I'm on AA C. And if you hit build merge phrase, it's hopefully going to do A B A C. And that's exactly what happened. And if we play this back, da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da. You also have a metronome to allow you to kind of uh count it better or you can just adjust the volume here or turn it all the way off. You can even do a count off. What that means is it gives you one bar to practice and now you go and so on. If you would like to customize uh the B rhythm to be maybe uh this one ta da da da da da da da. Let's see how that sounds. Let's loop it. 2 3 4 da da da da da da da da da da da da da. What if we want to rest at the third beat? This is where now that you've used the complexity bridge, you can also use it or use it in this way. You can say, hey, in the third beat, I'd like to just jumble it. Oh yeah, I like that. So let's see how this sounds. 2 3 4 D. And now I would like to change this and see this ecosystem is divide by four, right? I can even do divide by three and then roll the dice on dividing by three and maybe have a clearcut triplet there. 2 3 4 D. And if you don't read sheet music and if you're just a binary person, here you go. You can just do 0 and one and the notation adjusts itself automatically. You can even drag the notation here. We are we'll be working on more features to even add melody to the equation. So do check that out too. And it's basically the app. It has a lot of options and lot of ways to build a rhythm pattern. and a lot. Once you build it, your job then would be to count it and you can go fully random by maybe just mixing it with all the beat division permutations. See, it's just giving you all sorts of rhythms and you can pick the ones you like. Let's say you want to you [clears throat] want to practice or you start like this and keep one and jumble the rests. I I like to do that because the first one I enjoy that rhythm and then I [snorts] want to piece it together with this. That's about it really. Let's see how it goes. Triplets. Look at the visualizer if you wish. You can adjust the pulse which is the crotchet pulse. And uh yeah, we have support for 3x4. What's really cool is how the app adjusts from 4x4 to 3x4 and it's always musically accurate. See, it moved to 5x4. Uh it moved to 68, moves itself to 78 and moves itself to 58, which are more complicated time signatures. And if you don't like that, you can hit a clear all and build your own [clears throat] uh 58 composition using uh whatever grid that you wish to to use. Maybe this one can divide by four, roll the dice and so on. So, and then yeah, you can build each of the beats or each of the phrases and roll the dice uh as you wish. 54 44 34 are there and uh we are constantly building the app to make it sound a bit better. We're bringing in some famous rhythm patterns like the song clav which you can immediately hear and it'll sound good. Ta ta or the roomba clave which is tak ta or the three against four pol uh kind of poly rhythm or the charleston or the sinquilo or the habanera or the thresio or the uptown funk as it's called. So we'll add more rhythms. But yeah, I mean I don't think you need that many rhythms. You need to practice rhythm. So think of it as basically a rhythm book in the form of an app which has sound. That's basically it. But unlike the books, it's giving you every single rhythm. You can practice at your own pace. You have support for all forms of notation, all time signatures. You can do your practice length. You can adjust it however you want. It's also a melodic app. So, uh very soon we are going to perfect I I'll show you uh another video maybe where we are going to show you the playback with chords and with melodies and it'll also allow you to arpeggiate, jumble them and play around in a more creative way melodically. As you can see, we've now gone to melodic mode and you'll hear a melody in that rhythm. 3 4. So that's a nice melody over one bar that you can play around with over a chord progression. So there are a lot of future features. Also try out the rhythm dictation feature to see how good your ears are. And we'll be building a mobile app soon, but this web app is already mobile friendly. So you could consider uh using this and let us know what you think in the comments or any of our platforms. If you'd like a proper detailed study guide, do consider being a Patreon member. You'll get a study material there. Tell us what you think. Join our community groups. And that's about [clears throat] it. Don't forget to like, share, subscribe, and I will catch you in the next one. Cheers.