Most musicians don't struggle with rhythm because they lack talent. They struggle with rhythms because they were taught them using a backward teaching method.
Here's an example from my own education: In Conservatory, I spent weeks stuck on a single beat in a giant piece of music. I visited my professor's office, desperate for answers, but none of his tips, tricks, or exercises made any difference. I left feeling like a failure.
After two decades of teaching children, college students, and adults, I've found out why.
Why Most People Struggle to Learn How To Read Rhythms
It seems odd that so many people struggle to learn to read and count rhythms when you consider the following:
- Beginners can play back complex rhythmic examples that their teacher performs after only a few tries.
- Even people with no musical training can echo long, complex rhythms with their voices.
In fact, you've probably had the frustrating experience of looking at a relatively simple rhythm and having little to no confidence that you can play it accurately, only to perform it flawlessly after your teacher demonstrates it for you.
Compare this to human history: For tens of thousands of years, written music didn't exist. We taught music to one another by demonstration around a campfire. But today's teachers give abstract explanations, then show you the written music and expect you to play it. They don't demonstrate (unless you're struggling) and think that students who make mistakes "just don't have what it takes" to be a musician.
Before you learn the foolproof, fastest way to learn to read rhythms, you need to understand two things:
First, most teachers are ignoring the natural skills that allow even untrained people to echo and perform rhythms with ease. Waiting to demonstrate how a rhythm sounds until students have already failed only breeds insecurity.
Second, the overwhelming majority of teachers are trying to do too much at once. When teachers try to simultaneously teach students how things sound, how they look, how the symbols relate to one another, and how to count, failure is all but assured.
By flipping the modern teaching methods on their head (and using a bit of guidance from cavemen), you can learn to confidently read and perform any rhythm.
How to Use Your Natural Abilities to Learn Rhythms
Now that we've seen how backwards modern rhythm methods are, we can start fresh with a better method. Here's another key that makes 99% of the most common rhythm problems disappear: Learn to perform it, and add one skill at a time. Not one measure, not one beat. One Skill. Here are the skills, in order:
- Use Your Natural Rhythm Skills
- Give the Rhythm a Name
- Connect your Skills to Written Music
- Apply Your Skills To Real Music
- Understand The Abstract Music Theory
To learn to read rhythms with confidence, you need to start by performing the rhythms and build your skills from there. In the steps below, I'll describe exactly how I teach my students. By the end, my students have true mastery of rhythm performance and a functional understanding of the applicable music theory. If you're a student, you can either follow these steps on your own or use them as a guide with your teacher.
Here is how to break these steps down.
1. Use Your Natural Rhythm Skills
By now, it should be clear to you that the first step to learning any rhythm is to be able to echo it back quickly and easily. Master this, and you have a solid foundation to build everything else on. This step is so easy and natural, it barely feels like learning!
For the best results, start small. When I teach my students, I stick to 1-measure exercises (and, rarely, 2-measure exercises). If my students are learning a brand-new rhythm (for example, dotted sixteenths), I create multiple examples for them that have the new rhythm on different beats and in combination with other divisions of the beat.
Most of these early steps have multiple parts that will help your progress go smoothly. In this first step, we'll use your natural rhythm skills to "echo" the rhythm 3 different ways. Master each one before moving to the next.
1a. Vocal Echos
First, I say the rhythms on a neutral syllable like "da da da da". My students then echo that back immediately, starting on the next downbeat. This immediate repetition lays the groundwork for the rapid processing of rhythmic information, which helps students develop mind-blowing skills in step 3.
When I'm performing these rhythms for students, I'm trying to convey more than just rhythm; I'm trying to make the musical example feel like it's moving and changing. The easiest way to do this is to increase or decrease the volume of specific notes. I make sure my students echo me precisely, increasing and decreasing in volume at the same spots I do.
Why do I do this? Eventually, you'll be using these rhythms in real music, and I want to teach you, from the very beginning, how to imbue your rhythms with movement. This is a fundamental part of musicality, and it can be "snuck in" to early rhythm exercises so that students learn musicality more naturally. However, this can only be done if teachers demonstrate the rhythm first!
This is a fundamental part of musicality that you can and should learn from the outset (and that you can't learn at all when taught rhythms the traditional way, leading to insecurity around musicality later on).
Here are some examples you can try. Just repeat after me!
1b. On Instrument: Single note
Now, we add one more skill: playing the rhythm on the instrument. I'll say the rhythm on a neutral syllable and/or play it on a single note on my guitar. My students echo it back on a single note on their instruments. Here, students start to see things coming together as they fuse their rhythmic abilities with the technical challenges of their instrument. Try this with the above audio files.
1c. On Instrument: 5-note scale
Now, you'll develop the ability to echo rhythms while changing pitches. This will start to feel like a "real-world, practical" exercise, unlike the previous ones.
In this step, I perform the rhythm 1 time, and my students play it back on a descending 5-note scale. My students repeat the full measure of rhythm on each note of the scale. For example, when I say:
My students play this G major scale. You can use any scale you're comfortable with.
2. Give the Rhythm a Name
Once you've mastered this step, you'll feel like you've unlocked a deep rhythmic power within yourself. And you'll start developing a foundational skill that most musicians don't develop until their intro-level music theory courses: the ability to hear music and know what is happening (called transcription). I love watching students who've previously struggled with rhythm confidently echo back counting words to me; they're feeling their own expertise, and I know they're just a few steps away from rhythmic mastery.
In this step, we give the rhythms a "name". Naming a rhythm helps you quickly recognize and perform it. Each rhythm's "name" is its counting pattern. This counting pattern can vary from teacher to teacher (some use "1 2 3 4" and others use "ta ta ta ta", for example). I have my own preferences, but whatever your teacher uses will work.
EXAMPLE of what counting/name looks like
Again, this step has multiple sub-steps. As always, don't move on until you have mastered each step.
2a. Echo Teacher’s Count
This is easy; I "introduce" my students to each rhythm's "name" by simply having them echo me when I count it. This is like step 1a above, but instead of saying a neutral syllable ('da da da da'), I count ('1 2 3 4').
Sometimes, I have my students echo back while they count and play their instruments simultaneously. This works pretty well for guitar, but wouldn't have worked at all for my flute student (since a flutist's mouth is busy). Sometimes I have my students do this on only 1 note, sometimes I'll have them do it on a 5-note descending scale. It really depends on the student and how much help they need translating their understanding onto the guitar.
2b. Translate Teacher’s Count
This is the first "tricky" step in the rhythm reading process; expect to spend a bit more time mastering this step. Once you master this, you're easily able to play things that you hear. It will also give you an excellent head start at transcribing music (writing down what they hear), since you're learning the basic skills required from the very beginning.
The effort is worth it; you're going to learn how to translate sounds into the "name" or count of the rhythm. To do this, I combine the "teacher" and "student" parts of two previously mastered exercises. I say the rhythm using neutral syllables (like in exercise 1a), and students reply with the rhythm's "name" (like in exercise 2a).
Try it here:
3. Connect your Skills to Written Music
Now we get into the heart of it, the part where it all comes together. This is what you came here for. After this, it's all just gravy (and practice!).
By now, you can easily perform rhythms. You can hear a rhythm, "name it" by counting it, and play it on your instrument while changing notes. Your confidence is growing. Most teachers would've skipped all that and gone right to seeing the music, but you're about to find out how powerful it is and how much you can grow when you master performance first.
3a. Introducing Written Music
It's time to introduce written music. This is done "live"; students see the music as they perform it. I repeat the previous exercise, except with one modification: while my students echo the counting words, I hold up a flashcard with the rhythm written on it. This allows them to compare what they are counting to what they see. No fancy and abstract explanations to distract from what is on the flashcard. This is done a few times for each rhythm exercise to allow the students to absorb what they are seeing and "put a face to the name" of the rhythms they are already performing.
You can try this out here. Press the buttons along the top to be introduced (or re-introduced) to different rhythms, then test your skills with the "Random" button.
Learning What Rhythms Look Like
3b. See and Say
Once you understand how each rhythm exercise looks, you can move on to my favorite part: Using the flashcards to increase your skills to the level where you can:
- See a flashcard
- Perform it
- Process the next flashcard while still playing
- Seamlessly change rhythms on the next downbeat.
Watching my students reach this level is incredibly rewarding for me as a teacher.
To do this, I start by holding up a flashcard and saying, "1 2 See & Say." Students need to see the rhythm and perform the Counting Name on the next downbeat. Try it yourself!
Reading Rhythms: Counting
As students become more familiar, I decrease the time I hold the card up. When you do this, you can learn to recognize an entire measure of music in only 1 beat. Eventually, you can do this non-stop; the following exercise is shown while you're playing the preceding one. This is an impressive skill to develop and an essential one for fluent sight-reading.
As you can see, these flashcards are a powerful tool for developing rapid music comprehension. But, as you might've guessed, we can take this a step further.
3c. See and Play
By now, you're getting the hang of this; we develop the skills with your voice and then transfer them to your instrument. You'll see the same flashcards as before, but now you'll play the rhythms on your instrument, as you did for 1b. You can reuse the player in the previous step to try it out.
Reading Rhythms: Playing
Once my students get comfortable, the flashcards will appear faster and faster until you can read and change rhythms on a dime.
Of course, we're not done developing your mastery yet. Next is seeing the rhythm cards from 3b again, but responding by playing an entire scale! (1a). And, as you develop your skills and fluency, you'll find yourself changing rhythms in the middle of a scale without dropping a beat!
4. Apply Your Skills To Real Music
This is where you apply all those skills you've developed to more than just flashcards. You should be able to open up any rhythm-reading method book or piece of real-world music and instantly play exercises that teach the rhythms they have learned using this method. You'll open up the book and might be shocked; these exercises are often 8-16 measures or more. All you've done is play off flashcards!
Yes, but you've done something far, far more challenging. You've played flashcards that you only had seconds to see and translate into a performance. Now, you can see all 16 measures at once, before you even start playing! Take a look and look for any rhythms that are tricky for you.
Sometimes students are challenged when pitches change very quickly; these are almost always issues of technical facility or pitch recognition rather than rhythmic understanding. You won't need to go back and ask yourself, "Do I understand this rhythm?" Instead, you can confidently isolate and drill the technical challenge like you would any other problem area in your music.
5. Understand The Abstract Music Theory
Finally, we arrive at the step that most teachers put first! The absolute last step of learning any rhythm should be this: explaining the music theory of the rhythms, time signatures, and anything else that may arise. After all, the saying goes, "Theory Follows Practice". Only after you've practiced the rhythms should you learn the theory! Rather than confusion, you'll have a solid foundation for understanding how all these parts fit together. This stage solidifies their skills beyond caveman-level performance. It brings them to the level of a well-rounded, modern musician.
Conclusion
Mastering rhythm isn't about talent. All it takes is an approach that utilizes your natural abilities and takes it one step at a time. Twenty years ago, I walked out of my college professor's office convinced I was an incompetent musician. Now I use these tips to help the college students I teach avoid those feelings.
If you're struggling to perform a rhythm on your instrument that you can clap or say, do what I should've done years ago: take the measure with the tricky rhythm and play it on a scale. And if that doesn't work, find a teacher who will help you integrate rhythms using this method.
When you learn performance first and layer on skills one at a time, you can easily move from step to step with growing confidence. This is the best way to develop deep, durable rhythmic mastery.
