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Reading Music: Rhythm Training
837 students
Reading Music: Rhythm Training
Learn to read, play, and write rhythms
Created byJonathan Peters
Last updated 10/2023
English
What you'll learn
- How to read and play rhythms
- Distinguish beat from rhythm
- Discover if you are playing rhythms correctly with instant feedback from "Smart Music" software
- Learn both "Unit" counting and "Metric" counting
- Practice hearing rhythms and writing them down
- Get tips for playing various rhythm patterns
- Be able to read, play, and write multiples and subdivisions of the beat
- Be able to read, play, and write dotted notes, rests, triplets, ties, and more
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Course content
10 sections • 80 lectures • 3h 11m total length
Requirements
- No previous musical knowledge is needed.
- Smart Music software (a free download) to complete the rhythm assessments and get instant feedback on your rhythm performance
- A piano (or other instrument) is helpful but NOT necessary - you can clap the rhythms if you don't own one.
- Some type of basic music notation software will be needed to complete the rhythm writing assignments. I recommend MuseScore which is a free open source music notation software. Or you can just use paper and pencil.
Description
Why a course about rhythm?
In my 30 years of experience as a music teacher I have found that more people struggle with reading rhythm than reading pitch.
Many courses only teach the letter names of the notes. Knowing the letter names of the notes is useless information if you don't know how long each note should be played for.
Isolating rhythm from pitch lets you focus your attention on mastering rhythm which is the most fundamental element of music. Once you have a solid foundation in rhythm, learning the other elements of music will be much easier and quicker.
Music is a type of language and so in this course we will learn the same way a child learns a language.
First, they learn to speak by hearing others and imitating
Then they learn to read the language
And finally, they learn to write the language
Each section includes:
Learning a new concept.
Practicing the new concept through, imitating, reading, and writing.
An assessment in Smart Music where you will get instant feed back on your performance of various rhythms.
Who this course is for:
- Anyone wanting to learn how to read, play, and notate rhythms
- Beginning musicians
- Musicians who never "really" learned how to read rhythm
- Musicians who want to brush up on their rhythm reading