How To Read Guitar Rhythms

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In this lesson, I’m going to teach you how to read some basic rhythms on a guitar. To start out, we need to know what a whole note, half note and quarter note and so on is. The way I like to learn this sort of what I like to teach it is to think about a dollar bill. If you have a dollar and you’re in 4-4 common time that means you’re going to have 4 quarter notes per measure. So, if the entire measure is your dollar and if you break that dollar into 4 quarters, you’re going to have a 4 quarter notes in that measure.

So, if we’re thinking—

[Demonstration]

A pulse like this for our beat, those are going to our quarter notes and for 4 of those beats if we have a whole note we’re going to hold that whole note out for 4 beats—

[Demonstration]

That’s going to be our dollar.

Now, if you have 50-50’s instead of a dollar we’re going to chop that whole note in half and play two notes per measure. So, if we have to pulse it again like this—

[Demonstration]

We’re going to have two notes per measure or two attached strums per measure.

Then, if we talk about quarter notes, our pulse—

[Demonstration]

Each beat is going to get a count or a note—

[Demonstration]

So, if we have one, two, three, four—

[Demonstration]

That’s our quarter notes.

Now, when we get to eighth notes that’s for my little dollar analogy it kinds of falls apart because you can’t split a quarter up into two even parts. So, you just have to think about it as splitting a quarter note up into two even parts. So, instead of having just 4 beats per measure we’re going to have 8 so if our pulse is like this again—

[Demonstration]

Our eighth notes are going to sound like this—

[Demonstration]

So those are some basic rhythms that you’re going to be using when you start learning how to read music.


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