Music Magic: Online Piano Lessons/Tutor - Lesson #3: Intermediate Rhythm

Lesson #3: Intermediate Rhythm

Musica

This is Musica here, your online musical companion and tutor. Welcome to Lesson #3 of this online music/piano tutor brought to you by ThinkQuest Team #15060, my creator. This is the second part of a two part series on rhythm. It cannot be stressed enough how important rhythm is to a musician. That's why I've devoted two whole lessons on it. But anyway, lets get on with the clapping and counting. Go ahead and download and play this if you haven't already:

Beat.mid

In this lesson, you'll learn about slurred notes, dotted notes, sixteenth notes and triplets. Think of slurred notes as a prolongation of a certain note, or of various notes. This creates a steady, uninterupted sound. For example, look at the following picture of a slurred note.

This is how it works. You see the half-oval in between the whole note and the eighth note? That's a slur. What you do here is do not clap the eighth note. Treat the slurred notes as one long note that's worth 4 1/2 beats. Slurs are useful because there's no symbol or note that shows 4 1/2 beats across two measures. Try clapping and counting this.

You're probably wondering what the use of all this clapping and counting is. Well, it means a lot, and it's probably helped you a lot, whether you know it or not. But from now on, you'll see a small key at the bottom of the browser. From now on, go ahead and use this. But don't substitute this for your clapping and counting. This is an extremely important thing to do each and every time until the end of at least Lesson #3.