Lesson 2: Quarter Notes and Quarter Note Rests
Overview: This video covers Quarter Notes, Quarter Note Rests, the 4/4 Time Signature and the Repeat Sign.
Assignment: Joel Rothman's Teaching Rhythm, pages 1 thru 4: Get The Book (paid link)
You can also get a metronome here: Get the Metronome (paid link)
In this lesson, I'll be discussing quarter notes, quarter note rests, the 4/4 time signature and repeat signs. Rhythm and time signature are very intertwined, so we'll start with the time signature. If you remember from my last video, we learned about the 4/4 time signature from a high-level (Fig.1). I said that bar lines are used to split the staff into into defined chunks of time called measures, and that the time signature tells us how long each measure lasts.
Fig. 1 The 4/4 Time Signature Source: Teaching Rhythm, Joel Rothman (c) 1967 Joel Rothman
If you were talking to someone about the 4/4 time signature, you would say that 4/4 time means we have four beats in each measure and that the quarter note gets the beat. Beat is more of a feeling than a definite thing. You can recognize beat when you are listening music. It’s the pulse to the song that you can dance to or feel. There's something almost indescribable and human about it. That pulse that is what we're talking about when we say beat. The time signature is the composer's way of telling you how to count and feel that beat.
In a piece of music that is 4/4 time, the time signature says that there are four beats in a measure. That's what the top number means. We started with the idea of a pulse and now we're saying each measure has four beats or pulses in it. The bottom number helps us explain what's happening a little further. The bottom number tells us that the pulse is quarter notes. It's a bit like a fraction, but not exactly. The bottom 4 means quarter note, in kind of the same way 1/4 is called a quarter.
So, the 4/4 time signature tells us that there are four quarter notes in each measure. In other words, there are four pulses in each measure and the type of note that is creating the pulse is a quarter note. This pattern is used in all time signatures, and it might start to make a little bit more sense once we learn about the other types of notes and time signatures.
Quarter notes are made up of a solid note head and a stem, that's the circle with the line on it. You can see in Fig. 1 that the measure has four quarter notes in it before the bar line. Click here jump to the video at 3:33 to listen to how quarter notes sound.
Remember that when I use my metronome, I am saying that the click is quarter notes or in other words, the click is how fast the quarter notes go by in the music. I play one quarter note with each click. Four of those slicks go by and I'm into the next measure.
That is basic music reading. You follow the click from your metronome and play along. Maybe if you're in a marching band you have a conductor. The conductor's arm waving tells you where the quarter note is. If you're playing in an orchestra it's the same thing.
Music is made up of sound and the absence of sound. It's a way to create texture and make music interesting. You can have noise happening and then no noise happening. You also have everything in between with different volumes of noises happening. These are things you can do to make music unique, otherwise it's just in your face all the time.
Rests are symbols to represent silence (Fig. 2). The symbol you see on beat four of line two in the example means to be silent for the same amount time that you would play a quarter note. It's one quarter note length of silence. Jump to the video at 6:14 to watch me demonstrate quarter note rests.
Fig. 2 - Quarter Note Rest Source: Teaching Rhythm, Joel Rothman (c) 1967 Joel Rothman
Finally, I have one more element of music to point out in this lesson's practice material and that is called a repeat sign (Fig. 3). It will appear at the beginning and the end of a section. It looks like a double bar line but has two dots with it. When you see those symbols, it means to play everything in between them again. It's important to stay in time when you repeat the section; there is no pause. Once you've repeated the section, you continue on to the next section. You can see how this works at 7:15 in the video above as I take you through the lesson and show you a road map of how to play through the page.
Fig. 3 Repeat Signs at the beginning and end of the section. Source: Teaching Rhythm, Joel Rothman (c) 1967 Joel Rothman
To sum it up, using Joel Rothman's Teaching Rhythm pages 1 - 4, you can practice counting in 4/4 time while playing quarter notes and quarter note rests. You also get practice reading different parts of the page because you'll have to jump your vision to follow all of the repeats.
You'll start to notice a pattern within the book, and it's the reason why I like it. Rothman likes to include all different variations of the rhythms, so you will get lots of practice reading measures with 1, 2, 3, and 4 quarter notes or rests. You'll start to see measures with different combinations of sound and no sound. You can practice these pages at a tempo between 70 BPM and 100 BPM depending on how comfortable you are with it.
That's it for this lesson, thanks for joining me. Remember you can get all of the videos right to your inbox weekly by subscribing to my newsletter here or be notified when I post new videos by subscribing to my YouTube channel.
Also remember that if you want to practice along, you can get Joel Rothman's Teaching Rhythm and a metronome from my Amazon Associates account, which gives me a commission if you use my links above. That would be AWESOME!
Thanks again and see you next time for Half Notes and Half Note Rests.