Music Rhythm - A Free Piano Lesson

Reading piano notes is the key to broaden your horizons and getting to know worlds you never thought existed. In order to read piano notes you must get familiar with the meaning of musical beats.
Let's start from the basics!

To begin with, if you haven't read the introduction to piano playing yet, I suggest that you check it out for a moment before you'll learn to deal with music rhythm. Just click here.

Ariel and me are just about to start our music rhythm lesson

The Musical Beats

When playing piano we play the piano keys and by doing so we create different tone lengths.
Piano notes are basically musical signs that tell us which key we have to play and how long we have to play it.
In order to measure the different tones we count beats. It's the same as using a meter for measuring your height.

Just like your heart, music is beating. Your heart never stops. You don't pay attention to it but you always know it's there, beating. Same goes for music with one exception.
The distance between the beats is longer in slow pieces then in fast pieces but unlike the heart that beats faster when we're excited the beats in music are always equal to each other

Tone Lenghts

The Music Rhythm in MERRILY WE ROLL ALONG

Try to play the song on the piano as we played it before and this time count the beats according to the tone lengths of the notes.

O.k., so now that we learned how basic music rhythm works, and we saw an example of it, let's experience some other music rhythm examples.

Read Piano notes- Play and Count

Read the piano notes and play according to the next rhythm pattern.

When learning to play piano it's easiest to start to read piano notes with an online metronome.

The online metronome is a wonderful practicing tool that produces a steady beat to help us play rhythms accurately.

Do as follow...
1. Click on the link above

2. Point the metronome to 72 Bpm (Beats per Minute). It's a good pace to start with. Place your thumb on the C note, read the piano notes and play the exercise according to the beat.

3. Play again and this time count aloud.

Here is how it should be done.
Click on the audio file. (The first four beats are left empty to indicate the speed of the rhythm).

Did you make it?
Well done my friend, we're definitely on our way to make you a music rhythmic beast.

The Time Signature

In the beginning of musical pieces you will see numbers. These numbers are called the time signature. The time signature tells us how many beats we have to count per measure and how long a beat lasts. Remember to always first take a look at the time signature. It will save you a lot of time with figuring what you have to play and how to play it.

Ariel and me are now ready to continue with our next piano lesson. Join us in our next piano lesson where we're going to learn to tell the different piano note names.