Before we can begin to understand Rhythm, what it is, and how we work with it, we must understand a few basic definitions first. We must understand the definitions of the basic elements of music.

There are two words we hear often in our study of music, the word Note and the word Beat. We hear somebody say "this note gets one beat, this note gets two beats". We might even hear "this note gets one half of a beat".

What is a note? A note is a sound, that’s all. Sing La, any way you want, and you are singing a note. In fact, drummers call the sound they make when they hit the drum a note. You could slam the table and call that a note! So, a note is just a sound. As simple as this seems, it is important to be clear on it, because, like the word beat, the word note is used to mean more than one thing. When you look at a piece of music, and see all the black and white ovals on the music paper, we say they are notes, but they are really symbols for notes, symbols for the sounds the musician makes, which are actually the notes.

What is a beat? This one is a little trickier. In fact, this one is so tricky, it is here that many people go wrong in understanding rhythm. When we hear music and tap our feet, we usually say "I’m tapping the beat". That may be true in one sense of the word, but it is not true for musicians reading music. That is not what the beat is when it comes to learning to read music. If the tap of your foot were a beat, how could you divide the "tap" into two halves so that you could give a note a half beat?

No, a better word for that would be "pulse". When we tap our foot to the music, we are tapping the "pulse" of the music. Your heartbeat, for instance, thought of this way, would not be called a beat, but a pulse. This confusion in words that define "beat" is a big part of the problem.

So, what IS a beat? A beat is a unit of time, measured by the foot going up and down.

Start tapping your foot slowly. Start counting 1 2 3 4 as you tap, over and over. The TIME in between your taps is one beat.

Time is always measured by something moving. The second hand on a clock moves in a circle, and when it does one round, we call it a minute. We divide that circle into sixty parts and when the second hand travels from one part to the next, we say ONE SECOND has gone by.

Minutes and seconds are always the same. On every clock, minutes and seconds are the same. But beats are not always the same. If you tap your foot slow, the beat is long. If you tap your foot fast, the beat is short. So, how fast your foot goes determines how long or short the beat is. When we say "a fast beat" we really mean a fast pulse, a fast tap of the foot. Technically speaking, the beat is not fast; IT IS SHORT, a short amount of time. If our foot is tapping slowly, there is a longer time between taps, and we say "the beat is slow", really, the beat is now longer.

 So we will understand that the common way of speaking is to use phrases like "the beat is slow" or "the beat is fast", but really, the true meaning is "the beat is long", or "the beat is short". Later on, with more advanced things, understanding beats and rhythm in this way is important, that is why I mention it here. But we will agree that saying "the beat is slow" is the same thing as saying, "the beat is long", likewise, saying "the beat is fast" is the same as saying "the beat is short".

Having understood that, we will introduce another important word for understanding Rhythm, the word Tempo. Tempo means the speed of the beat, how fast the beat (the tap of your foot) is. Fast tempos give us short beats; slow tempos give us long beats.

When a carpenter builds something, he works with two things: the material of wood, and the dimension of space. He has to take his wood and cut it into pieces of just the right length, and then fit them all together. If he is the tiniest bit off in measuring and cutting one of his pieces, his finished product will be all lopsided (like every piece of woodwork I ever tried to make!). So, measuring his material, wood, precisely in terms of the dimension of space, is crucial to the finished product.

For musicians, our material is sound, and our dimension is time. We must measure out the exact right amount of time for each sound we make. And just as the carpenter has his units of measurement, namely inches and feet; we have the beat as our measuring unit. We must give the right number of beats, or sometimes a part of a beat (maybe a half-beat or even a quarter of a beat) to every sound we make. If we are off in our measuring of time to the sounds we make, our music will as lopsided as my carpentry projects were!

So, we have already learned how to measure out beats by tapping our foot and counting. Let’s try measuring out some sounds with different lengths of beats.

You are now singing notes that are each receiving one beat. If you take your guitar and strum a chord to this beat instead of singing, you will be playing what are normally called quarter notes. (You will learn later that it is not really "correct" to call them quarter notes.)

Now we will sing notes that get two beats. As in written music, we will divide the beats by placing  a horizontal line in between every group of 4 beats.

1. Tap your foot to a steady beat, and count 1 2 3 4 every time your foot hits the floor.
   
2. As your foot taps, sing LA for beat one and two. You will sing one long LA for both beats, then say 3,4.

Sing: LA-A-3-4 | LA-A- 3  4
Tap: 1   2  3-4 | 1   2   3  4

You are now singing a longer note, one that gets TWO BEATS.

The ability to tap the foot and sing (and play) sounds of different lengths is essential to becoming a musician. It should begin at the beginning of music instruction, but often isn’t.  

1. Tap your foot to a steady beat, and count 1 2 3 4 every time your foot hits the floor.
   
2. Sing LA for the number of beats indicated:
   
   

Length of Note: ____|____   _______|__ _________ ___|_______
Sing:                LA-A-LA-A | LA-A-A-LA |LA-A-A-A | LA-LA-A-A |
Tap:                 1    2  3  4    1   2  3 4     1   2  3 4    1    2   3  4