Chapter 2

Getting to Know the Music Staff and Traveling through Time

In This Chapter

Finding the beat

Playing quarter notes, half notes, and whole notes

Getting to know time signatures

Access the audio tracks and video clips at www.dummies.com/go/guitarrhythmtechnique

In this chapter, you take your first baby steps toward reading and playing rhythms. You get to know the music staff and some of its basic components. You begin playing quarter notes, half notes, whole notes, dots, and ties, and work with time signatures and metronomes. All this information is elementary-level stuff and, honestly, not very exciting, but you need to know it in order to play the much cooler strum patterns and rhythmic ideas in Chapters 3, 4, and 5.

Keeping Your Finger on the Pulse

Before you even take a look at rhythms on a staff, you get to know how time works in music. Every song is guided by a steady pulse. The pulse itself is not always present in the music - that is, it's not normally assigned to an instrument to play - but everything in the music follows it and it holds everything together. Musicians are seen internalizing this pulse by tapping their feet, nodding their heads, or rocking and swaying their bodies.

Players are introduced to the pulse during a count-in or count-off, when a band leader calls out numbers prior to the start of a song. This counting serves three purposes:

• It establishes the tempo of a song (how fast or slow the music moves along).
• It indicates the time signature (how the music is segmented and counted).
• It cues the players to all start together (preventing train wrecks).

When a pulse is established, the band members keep it silently in their heads and use it as a guide while playing their parts.

Although pulses are usually internalized, musicians often use mechanical and electronic devices to keep a steady pulse for their reference. A metronome is any device that produces a regular, metrical sound. The sound is a tick, click, beep, or any other, usually percussive, sound that is clearly audible during performance and distinguishable from the instrumentation. Whatever sound is used, musicians commonly refer to it as the click.

When a click track is in use during a live performance or recording session, it's piped to musicians via headphones so that it isn't heard by the listeners and doesn't interfere with the actual music. In this day and age, aside from keeping the time steady, click tracks are often necessary to sync live performances to additional audio, video, lights, lasers, heck, even explosions! Because drummers are the timekeepers of the bands, and other instrumentalists follow their lead, click tracks are often added only to the drummers' headphone mixes.

In the old days, a metronome consisted of an adjustable weight on the end of an inverted pendulum rod. You may have seen one of these pyramid-shaped mechanical devices sitting on top of a piano. The pendulum swings back and forth at a specified rate, while a mechanism inside the metronome produces a clicking sound with each oscillation. Nowadays, metronomes keep time and produce sounds electronically. Stand-alone, electronic metronomes are similar in size and appearance to electronic guitar tuners. Metronomes also come built into keyboards, drum machines, and music-recording software programs. Even some guitar amps, particularly the digital variety, offer a metronome feature. You can download metronome apps and use them on your smartphone or tablet. Prerecorded metronome clicks, called click tracks, are available on CD or as MP3 and WAV downloads at various tempos.

You can hear a sample metronome sound in Audio Track 2.

You work with metronome click tracks throughout all of Guitar Rhythm & Technique For Dummies - some provided for you in the audio and video examples, and others that you need to generate with your own device. If you don't have a metronome, buy or borrow one now!

When figures in this book don't include tempo markings, that means the tempos aren't important and you can play at any rate that's comfortable for you.

Drawn and Quartered

The pulse I mention in the previous section is commonly thought of and counted in groups of four. This is why a count-in is called out as "One, two, three, four." In music, each pulse is called a beat and each group of four is called a measure or a bar. Each of the four beats in a measure takes up one-quarter of it, just as four quarters make a dollar. In written music, these quarter notes (formally referred to as crotchets) are symbolized with a filled-in oval note head and a straight, flagless stem. Figure 2-1 shows an example of four bars of quarter notes.

© John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Figure 2-1: Quarter notes.

Click tracks often feature a unique sound on the first of every four clicks. This reminds players that the music is in a 4/4 time signature and helps them keep track of beat one, the first beat of each new measure.

In the following sections, you get to know the components of a music staff, begin to read basic rhythms, and deal with ways in which written music is simplified for guitarists.

If you would like to make your own guitar tablature and notation, get the program GuitarPro (www.guitar-pro.com) or Sibelius (www.sibelius.com).

Rhythmic notation

Sometimes using full-blown standard musical notation isn't necessary, and an alternate style of notation called rhythmic notation is used to simplify a score, especially when the score is relied upon mainly for its rhythmic markings. In rhythmic notation, the oval note heads are converted to slashes that are centered on the middle staff line; in some cases, only one staff line is used, as shown in Figure 2-2. You work with mainly rhythmic notation throughout the sections of this book that focus on rhythm.

© John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Figure 2-2: Rhythmic notation.

Beats per minute

The first thing you see in the upper-left corner of Figure 2-2 is a small quarter note followed by an equal sign and the number 80. This indicates the tempo with the number 80 indicating that the quarter notes are played at 80 beats per minute (BPM). The higher the BPM, the quicker the pulse and tempo. The lower the BPM, the slower the pulse and tempo. 60 BPM is a quarter note every second. 30 BPM is a quarter note every two seconds. 120 BPM is a quarter note every half second. Don't bother getting your stopwatch out to determine the proper tempo for 80 BPM - that's what your metronome is for! All metronomes operate by adjusting and setting the BPM.

Time signature

The next thing you see in Figure 2-2 is a fraction, with a 4 over a 4. That's the time signature. The number on the top tells you how many beats are in each measure, and the number on the bottom tells you what kind of note value gets counted as one beat. In this case, there are four beats to a measure and quarter notes are counted as the beats. No surprise here - you know that there are four quarter notes per measure, but in some cases, which you explore a little later in this section and again in Chapter 5, measures are divided by less or more than four beats, and another note value, such as the eighth note, is counted as the beat. For now, though, you stick with a 4/4 time signature, also known as common time and sometimes indicated with a c symbol rather that the 4-over-4 fraction.

Bar lines

The next thing to notice in Figure 2-2 are the bar lines, which are the vertical lines separating each measure. The double bar line followed by a thicker bar line at the end signifies - you guessed it - the end!

Chords

The last thing to notice about Figure 2-2 is the letter A above the first beat of the first measure. This indicates what pitch or chord to play. I chose A just to give you something to play. At this time, it's not important what type of A chord you play, so you can play any type including an open A chord, an A barre chord, or an A power chord. You can even play just the root, A, using the fifth fret of the sixth string, or the open fifth string.

Each quarter note in Figure 2-2 corresponds to a click from a metronome or click track. You can set your device to 80 BPM and practice playing along by strumming the A at precisely the same time as each click, or go back to and follow Audio Track 2.

All the examples in this chapter are played using an A chord, but you can try practicing them on your own with a metronome using any type of note or chord you like.

Give it a rest

Of equal importance to knowing when to play is knowing when not to play. A period of silence is called a rest. A quarter note rest looks like a vertical squiggly line and is equal in duration to a quarter note: one beat. Figure 2-3 features four bars of quarter-note rests. Each rest corresponds to a click and signifies that you keep quiet. Just to be sure that you're on the right track (so to speak), resting...