From the course: Music Theory for Songwriters: Rhythm

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Notes, measures, and counting

Notes, measures, and counting

From the course: Music Theory for Songwriters: Rhythm

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Notes, measures, and counting

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- [Instructor] One of the first things we learn as kids in school is how to count; one, two, three, four, five. When writing music, we often don't have to count passed four. Pretty low-level stuff, we take it for granted. However, that simple task of counting to four is probably the most fundamental skill that we use every day when working on music. Counting helps us to subdivide time. If you have this much time, what happens between the beginning and end of this time? Does one thing happen? Do multiple things happen? How do we communicate what goes on during this time period? Well, clever people more clever than me came up with a system of symbols called Notes to represent the relative durations of musical events. You've seen notes before, they look like this. In addition to representing duration, notes can also represent the pitch or frequency of a musical event. Well, we're not going to get into that here. We're going to stay focused on all things that strictly relate to rhythm. So…

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