This guy...
is called a staff. Just the five lines and four spaces in between them. These are the lines and spaces on which you will find the notes placed in sheet music. When you see two staffs connected together that look like this...
it's called a Grad Staff. In piano, the grand staff consists of two staffs that represent notes played by each hand (notes placed the top staff are played by the right hand, and notes on the bottom staff are for the left hand). That funny-shaped thing on the left of the top staff is called a treble clef, and the one on the bottom staff is called the bass clef.
Now that that's out of the way, let's get to the meat of this blog post: Rhythm. For the sake of this post, drill this rhythmic sequence in your head as you read along:
1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4...etc
Each of these numbers represent a "beat", or a "pulse". The staff gets broken down into these evenly-distributed rhythms in groups called "bars", or "measures". Each bar, in the case of 1, 2, 3, 4, starts with beat "1" and ends on beat "4", then the next bar begins with beat "1" and goes to beat "4", etc etc, These are what bars/measures look like:
You see the treble clef, then those 4/4 numbers (which I'll explain later), then some notes, then you come to a vertical line called a "bar line". From the 4/4 to that bar line completes one bar. Then from that bar line to the next bar line completes another bar. By the time you get from one bar line to the next, 4 beats have gone by.
Now, you see a sequence of three different types of notes in the image above. Each of those notes have a value of a certain number of beats:
The "quarter note", seen above, is one beat long, literally, one "quarter" of a 4/4 bar (don't worry about what the 4/4 means just yet). So it would take four quarter notes to complete one 4/4 bar...
A "half note" is two beats long (you would just hold the key down for two beats), literally, half of a 4/4 bar. So, it would take two half notes to complete one 4/4 bar...
The "whole note" is four beats long. Did you notice at the end of the sequence above, the whole note is by itself? Because it's four beats long, it takes up the entire bar.
So, to put the idea of rhythm and notes together, however you mix up quarter/half/whole notes in one bar, the sum of beats that the notes add up to must equal to the length of the bar. In the case of a 4/4 bar, they would have to equal to exactly four beats.
Soooo what's up with this 4/4 situation anyway? The two numbers on top of each other at the beginning of the staff (which when made up of a group of bars is now called a "system") represent what's called a "time signature". Basically, a time signature of a piece tells you how long the bars themselves are. The top number tells you how many "beats" are in the bars. For example, if you see a 4 at the top, it means that each bar is four "beats" long. If it says 3, then the bars are now only three "beats" long (you would see up to three quarter notes in that bar, or a half note and a quarter note, or something like that... but never a whole note, since a whole note won't fit in a 3-beat bar). The bottom number is a little weird, but the best way to explain it is that the bottom number represents the "value" of each beat. For example, if you see 4/4, it means that the bar is "four quarter notes long", or if you see 4/2 that means the bar is "four half notes long (2 = half). You won't see the bottom number change from 4 too often so don't worry so much about it right now. We'll worry about the bottom number once we start talking about "compound meters".
I hope this post helped shine some light on how rhythm works. Be sure to check out some of my tabs above that talk more about who I am, my youtube videos/tutorials/piano covers, and the private Skype lessons I offer! Enjoy.
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