What Is Rhythm?

Start the groove above and tap your foot with the kick drum. You are tapping the beat: a steady pulse, 92 taps a minute, with exactly the same gap between every tap.

Now listen to the other two drums against your foot. The snare lands on every second tap. The hi-hat plays twice for every tap, once on it and once exactly halfway to the next one.

Musicians keep those two ideas apart. The beat is the steady grid underneath. Rhythm is the pattern of sounds placed on it, and the three drums here are three different patterns on one beat.

A melody has a rhythm as well. Hum Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star while your foot keeps the beat: the first six notes each last one tap, and the seventh lasts two.

Every note length is measured against the beat. In most pop, rock and folk, one beat is a quarter note, and the other lengths double or halve from there:

Split a beat into four and you get sixteenth notes. The names are fractions of the whole note, which is why a quarter note is exactly a quarter of one.

Silence has lengths too. A quarter rest lasts one beat, the same as the quarter note it replaces, and it counts every bit as much. Note Values and Rests has the full set, including dotted notes and triplets, and What Is Sheet Music? shows what each length looks like on paper.

Count along with the groove: 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4. The kick falls on all four numbers. The snare falls only on 2 and 4, and that accent on the second and fourth beat is the backbeat most rock and pop is built on.

Counting in a repeating group like that is called meter. One group is a bar, also called a measure. Four beats to a bar is written 4/4, and three beats to a bar is 3/4, the count of a waltz.

Beat 1 is where the group starts again, and in most music it carries the most weight: chords tend to change there, and a new section usually begins there. Time Signatures covers the other groupings, and Pulse, Tempo and Meter shows how to find beat 1 in a song you are listening to.

No. Tempo is how fast the beat goes, measured in beats per minute. The groove above runs at 92.

Drag the tempo slider in the groove and every hit gets closer together or further apart. The pattern stays exactly the same: the snare is still on 2 and 4, and the hi-hat still plays twice per beat. Change the pattern at a fixed tempo and you have a new rhythm.

Count the hi-hat with the word "and" between the numbers: 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and. Every hi-hat hit lands on a number or on an "and". In this groove, the kick and snare land only on numbers.

Move the snare hit on 4 back to the "and" just before it, and it arrives half a beat early, where the ear is not expecting an accent. An accent placed between the beats like that is called syncopation, and it is much of what makes funk, reggae and Latin music move. Syncopation and the Offbeat takes it further.

Swing changes the "and" itself. It stretches the first half of each beat and shortens the second, so the hi-hat goes long-short, long-short. Push the swing slider up and listen to the hi-hat change. Swing, Shuffle and Groove explains how far to push it for each style.