Rhythm and time

The beat is the regular unit that music is measured against. It keeps going whether or not a note happens to start on it, which is what makes it useful: everything else is heard in relation to it.

Speed is the tempo, counted in beats per minute. Beats group into bars, usually in twos, threes or fours, and the time signature says which.

Beats are not all equal in weight. The first of each bar is felt as strongest, and that pattern of strong and weak is most of what makes a waltz sound different from a march.

A note in Portuguese: pulso is this steady beat. Tempo in Portuguese usually means the beat unit too, while the speed is andamento — the opposite of the English usage.

Tempo is the speed of the beat — not of the notes. A fast piece and a slow one can contain exactly the same rhythms.

It is written either as a number in bpm or as a word: largo (very slow), andante (walking), allegro (fast), presto (very fast). The words are older and vaguer, and they describe character as much as speed.

Practising below the target tempo is not a compromise, it is the method: play it slowly enough to be accurate, then raise the tempo in small steps.

In Portuguese this idea is andamento. Tempo there means the beat, not the speed.

A metronome set to 60 clicks once a second; at 120 it clicks twice a second. That is the whole definition.

Common ranges: a slow ballad around 60–70, a walking pace around 80–100, a lively dance 120–140.

What counts as one beat depends on the time signature. At 90 bpm in 4/4 the quarter note gets the beat, so 90 quarter notes go by in a minute — the note values are relative to the beat, not fixed lengths.

If the beat is the grid, the rhythm is what is drawn on it. The same handful of note values rearranged gives an unlimited number of rhythms.

Rhythm is independent of pitch — you can clap a rhythm with no notes at all, and that is often the fastest way to learn a hard passage.

A rhythm is heard against the beat, not instead of it. Notes that land between beats, or that start on a weak beat and hold through a strong one, are what make a rhythm feel syncopated, and you only feel that if the beat is still there underneath.

Note values are proportions, not fixed times. A whole note is two half notes, a half note is two quarters, a quarter is two eighths, and so on down. Their actual length in seconds depends on the tempo.

The symbol carries the value: an empty notehead with no stem is a whole note, empty with a stem a half, filled with a stem a quarter, and each added flag halves it again.

A dot after a note adds half of its own value — a dotted half note is three beats where a half note is two. A tie joins two notes into one longer sound across a barline.

Silence is measured the same way, with rests.

A rest is not a pause or a gap in the counting: it is a note-shaped hole with a precise duration. The beat carries on through it.

Every note value has a matching rest — whole, half, quarter, eighth — and the two are counted identically. A bar must add up to what the time signature promises, counting rests.

Beginners tend to rush rests, because nothing is happening and nothing feels like it takes no time. Counting out loud through them is the standard fix.

Rests are what let a melody breathe, and what makes room for another part to be heard.

Barlines chop the stream of beats into equal groups, so that the page shows the pulse rather than hiding it. A bar in 4/4 holds four beats, in 3/4 three.

The first beat of a bar is the strongest, and a barline is as much a rhythmic instruction as a piece of punctuation: it tells you where the weight falls.

Bars are numbered, which is how musicians navigate — "from bar 17" is unambiguous in a way that "from the loud bit" is not.

An accidental lasts to the end of its bar, so the barline cancels it. British English says bar, American English says measure; they are the same thing.

A tie says: add these two durations together and play them as a single sound. A half note tied to a quarter is three beats — one note, held.

It exists because a bar must add up to what the time signature promises. A sound lasting three beats in a bar of four often cannot be written as one symbol, and a sound crossing a barline never can.

The common mistake is re-striking the second note. That changes the rhythm rather than blurring it, which is why it is worth being strict about.

A curve between different pitches is not a tie — it is a slur, and both notes are played.

The top number counts the beats in a bar. The bottom number says which note value gets one beat — 4 means the quarter note, 2 the half note, 8 the eighth.

So 4/4 is four quarter-note beats per bar, and 3/4 is three. That is the difference between a march and a waltz, written down.

Unlike a key signature it is printed once, at the start, and repeated only if it changes.

6/8 is the common trap: read strictly it is six eighth notes, but at normal speeds it is felt as two beats of three, not six beats. Time signatures describe how music is counted, and the count follows how it is felt.