In today's online classical guitar lessons we'll discuss some clever ways to decipher complex rhythms in the score.
Never overlook the importance of rhythm.
Last week we talked about feeling rhythm on three levels:
- Macro - grouping the music into blocks of 4 to 8 measures
- Mid or local level - essentially the pulse of the music, what is the major beat that we feel
- micro level - the division within each beat
You can revisit that discussion here: https://craigwinston.net/blogs/guitarmageddon/posts/7635856/feeling-rhythm
Seeing Rhythmic Groupings
I’d argue that one of our least cultivated skills is our sense and knowledge of rhythm. So many of us get befuddled when a beat is subdivided in multiple ways, for example eighths with sixteenth pairs or worse yet, sixteenth triplets. It’s important to build our rhythmic vocabulary to help us learn more advanced and adventurous music more quickly. Whether you’re studying a Black Sabbath solo or Brouwer’s Decameron Negro, you’re definitely going to need some rhythm deciphering skills to be successful in your study.
The Rhythm Menu
A few years ago there was a meme that went around, mostly circulated among music teachers, that showed a restaurant menu with pictures of food and rhythms underneath to match the syllables of the name of the food. Good for a laugh, but also good for a numonic device, this was actually an effective way to learn complex rhythms. Similarly, I like to emphasize that we learn rhythmic groupings as musical words or quips, such that when we see an eighth note beamed to a pair of sixteenths we instinctively know how it sounds, vs. having to calculate where the beats land. This is exactly the same way we have learned to read the word “strawberry,” we of course first learned “straw” and separately “berry” but we can quickly say the word when all those syllables are strung together as “Strawberry.”
Let’s talk about this rhythm menu. Notice that it starts simple with two quarter notes given to the word “Hot dog.” But it quickly gets very elaborate with foods like “Milk and Cereal” or “Pepperoni Pizza” given to combinations of eighths and sixteenths. The first way to use our rhythm menu is to just learn these familiar sounds set to a beat. So when you read the word “Hot dog” you will clap a basic quarter note beat and say the words to the beat, thus the words will land with each clap. It’s important to say the words as metronomically as possible. Certain words we might tend to naturally jumble together like “cinnamon,” to make this work with its assigned rhythm, put the stress on the first syllable, and don’t say the word oatmeal until the next clap. In fact, for all of these, emphasizing the first syllable that lines up with your clap will help it all work perfectly.
If this all makes sense, then go through the chart and see if you can say all the food names while clapping a steady beat.
Customizing your rhythm menu
A good next step is to say the food name to a steady beat, and then see if you can do the same rhythm but use generic syllables. For example, perform “Avocado Toast,” then vocalize the rhythm as “TA-ta-ta-ta TA”
Some further use for this menu:
- Note that each food item covers two beats subdivided. Go through each rhythm and learn the word for the rhythm figure on each separate beat. Thusly, you can begin to understand a pair of eight notes as “Soda” and an eighth beamed to a pair of sixteenths as “Strawberry” and four sixteenths as “Ravioli,” and a single quarter as “Hot.” From here you can invent wild menu items like “Hot Strawberry Ravioli Soda”
- Use this menu as a reference for a piece you are working on. while it is not exhaustive, it is an excellent start. For example, most of these rhythms can be applied to the guitar solo for Iron Man or to a variety of studies by Fernando Sor.
- Finally, if you encounter a rhythm that is not on the menu, become the chef and design a new item, for example “Crispy Tostada” could be set to a dotted eighth beamed to a sixteenth followed by triplet eighths on the next beat.
Craig Winston is a classical guitarist and instructor in Denver CO. He offers guitar lessons online and in person at his studio in the Santa Fe Arts District.