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Rhythms

When it comes to making up rhythms, take heart. Every person on the planet already knows every possible rhythm. They just have to learn to pick them out of the air.   Let me try to help you develop this skill that you already have. -

In music you’ve heard of counting beats 1-2-3-4. (let’s just go to 4, but of course some rhythms could be more than 4 beats long). Let’s look into this.

1        2       3        4   --count this 1234 out loud, kind of slowly

Now count this next thing out loud so that the 1,2,3,4 have the same speed, but you’re fitting the number ‘2’ in between each.

12 22  32 42

Now count this next thing out loud again so that the 1,2,3,4 have the same speed, but you’re fitting the numbers ‘2’ and the ‘3’ and the ‘4’ in between each.

1234 2234 3234 4234

So you can see that what we’ve done here is divided the first 4 beat measure or phrase into 8 parts, and then into 16 parts.

The more short intervals you have available, the more rhythms you can devise. That should be clear to you pretty soon.

So let’s write a 4 beat phrase, and divide it into 16 parts again.

1234 2234 3234 4234 -  This time, tap your hand to all of these 16 units and hit your hand harder on the main beats (bolded).

Now on this next one, tap out all the numbers again, but now let’s hit our hand harder on these bolded numbers. And do the whole thing a little faster this time.

1234 2234 3234 4234

Now this one:

1234 2234 3234 4234

On this last one, you just did a pretty fancy rhythm. If it didn’t sound like much, try it faster (tapping your hand faster on every number) You can do this stuff at any speed that you’re able to. Now try tapping only the bolded ones (try it, it’s cool- you’ll have to whisper the numbers that you don’t hit, so you don’t get lost).

Actually it’s just the bolded hits that constitute the rhythm, so you can leave out the unbolded ones, if you can, when you make up rhythms. After you’ve become able to make up a rhythm and then do it, you can play chords with any of these rhythms, or you can play some of your scale notes in the pattern of one of the rhythms, whatever.

But you do want to be able to come up with rhythms on your own.

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