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Tutorial: Reading Rhythms
This tutorial teaches you how to read rhythm in music notation. You'll learn basic concepts and their appliance. After finishing this tutorial you will be able to read almost any rhythm! This tutorial is for anyone that wants to know more about reading rhythms.
Beats and Bars
Every piece of music has some kind of pulse, or beat. These beats are grouped. Most common is a grouping in three or four. In popular music beats are most often grouped in four.
You can count the beats simply as “one two three four”. After the four, you repeat and start counting at “one” again. There is often a light accent on the “one” and “three”.
A grouping of beats is called a “bar”. In music notation a bar is written as two vertical lines. For example one bar:
Or three bars:
In front of the first bar you often find an indication of how many beats there are in a bar (as stated, most of the time four). When there are four beats in a bar, one of the two following "time signatures" is used:
or 
The following both mean the same: four beats in a bar.
or
One beat: the quarter note
When you want to write down a rhythm, you use notes. You can also use notes to indicate the pitch of the tone. That however is not what this tutorial is about. We’ll Look at rhythm only.
To write down four beats in a bar, you use four “quarter notes”. In rhythm notation this looks as followed:
Let’s analyze two bars:
You can count these two bars as followed:
The anatomy of a quarter note
