Written Piano Music And Rhythm

Do you play piano? If so, do you know about rhythm? If you do, you know that you can improvise with rhythm as long as you are somewhat expert at playing the piano. It’s the same with singing. Singing, too, can be improvised simply by holding some notes out longer and making others shorter — and no one has to tell you how to do it. You just know how.

To learn a song you don’t know yet, it’s useful to use written music and play it as written first so that you understand the rhythm. If you’re playing in an ensemble or group and the group is playing from sheet music, you’ll do better if you play from sheet music as well because you will stay in time with them.

The first thing you learn about rhythm is the time signature. The time signature is directly to the right of the treble and bass clefs on a music staff. If the time signature changes while the piece is in progress, the composer puts a different time signature at that point where the rhythm is about to change.

What is a time signature? It’s written as two numbers, one over the other. The top number tells you how many beats per measure there are. What’s a measure? That’s the unit of the musical piece marked off by drawing vertical lines through the staff. Each measure contains the same number of beats as the next one, as denoted by the time signature.

The bottom number in the time signature tells you the type of note that comprises a beat in that piece of music. For example, if a piece of music is written in 4/4 time, that means that there are four beats to a measure, and that the quarter note makes the beat. As you become more familiar with piano and its rhythms, you’ll begin to be comfortable with playing with the rhythms so that the time signatures become a guideline rather than an exact order to play a quarter note’s worth of music each beat. When you’re starting, though, do try to stay in rhythm and play as the time signature tells you to.

The notes themselves also have different values depending on how they’re written. A whole note, for example, is the basis of 4/4 rhythm. An entire measure can have just one whole note and nothing else. With 4/4 time, a whole note is worth four beats. That should make sense if you consider that a quarter note is worth one beat and that there are four quarter notes in a whole note. In other words, four fourths equals one whole.

If you understand math, you can understand music rhythm quite easily, because the two are very similar. It’s been shown that babies who are introduced to hearing music with rhythms that are rather complex can often do better at complicated math problems later once they are in school. When you’re first beginning, though, let’s just take a look at a couple of simple equations to help you understand things better.

We’ve already said that a whole note is worth four quarter notes, but a whole note can also be worth two half notes. A 4/4 measure can be divided into eighth notes, specifically eight eighth notes per measure. You can also “mix up” the different rhythms in this type of measure, as long as they add up to four beats total. For example, one whole note, two half notes, four quarter notes, or eight eighth notes are all worth the same number of beats. Adding a dot to a note adds half again the value of that note; so, for example, if you dot a half note, you change it from being worth two beats to being worth three beats.

A whole note is just a simple drawn circle with an open center. The half note is a drawn circle with an open center, and then it has a stem coming up the side of it, thus denoting it as a half note. The quarter note is a fully filled in circle (black), with a stem on its side. In eighth note looks just like the quarter note, with the exception that it has a small flag at the top of the stem. Two eighth notes together are drawn side-by-side, but instead of having individual flags for each of them, a single bar joins them at the top of their stems.

Take a look at your sheet music and see if you can identify the note values. When you practice for them, tap your foot to determine what the baseline rhythm is going to be; it should be a steady beat. Once your foot is tapping steadily with the “baseline beat,” clap your hands to the individual rhythms of the note values themselves. For example, whole notes will get four beats in 4/4 time.

In that case, you would clap once, hold your hands together for three more beats after the one you clapped on (tapping your foot four times), and then would not clap again until the next note. Two eighth notes get two equally spaced claps per beat — once when your foot has tapped the floor, and once when your foot is up in the air before the next beat occurs.

It’s useful to practice rhythm by clapping the rhythms of any sheet music you find. Oftentimes, sheet music has more than one line of music; in that case, choose one line (often a vocal line, for example), and then clap out the rhythms, one note at a time.

Once you can clap rhythms accurately, play the notes in rhythm on the piano. There’s a lot of simple sheet music out there that you can start with, but if you can’t find any, you can also make up some of your own. You can make or purchase staff paper, and you can also do this type of work on your computer.

Every measure should have notes in it that adds up to four beats if you’re doing 4/4 time; in the corner of your sheet music, make sure you do a 4/4 time signature as well. Rests, as well, can be used when you’re writing your sheet music. A rest is a “pause” in the music, with different types of rests denoting different lengths of pauses.

When you’ve written something down, play your composition from your sheet. It might not sound like a song just yet, but the rhythm itself should be very interesting if you’ve used different note values. It’s a lot of fun to make up your own music.

This type of method is good when you want to practice the different facets of music you’re currently learning. When you do this, you don’t have to search for music and instead can make your own. At the same time, you’re also practicing and coming up with examples of things you are actually learning.

This makes the learning process even stronger, such that it trains your mind. And as you go, you can test what you’ve learned by playing different parts of written music you’ve already got on hand. All of this can be part of your learning process.

Time after time, I have come across pianists who cannot read music well and rely on memorization to save them. Do you admire pianists who can just pick up any piece of sheet music and play without stumbling? If you want to take your sight reading to the next level then check out the piano course "Mastering The Art Of Piano Sight Reading!"