 Hi guys, this is Jason here from Nathaniel. In this lesson, we are going to demonstrate and discuss and have various illustrations of all things rhythm, okay? So, rhythm basically is a very deep subject, it's very difficult to even explain rhythm. In fact, one might explain rhythm to a child by perhaps saying, rhythm is just the thing which makes you move or dance, you know? Because there's too many things going on, there's a lot of maths. And it's very much dependent on the maths, there's a beat, a beat has a certain duration, you then divide the beat, you then multiply the beat, then you use fractions, then you use LCM, HCF, algebra, I don't know if people use calculus as well, but there we have it. There's a lot of maths and rhythm. So, a lot of you have been asking questions about rhythm, you know, some of you want me to explain what a meter is, what a time signature is, which is pretty much the same, then accents, polyrhythms, triplets, phrasing and so on and so forth. So, I just thought in this lesson, instead of explaining it like a textbook explanation which goes, you know, topic by topic, chapter by chapter, I thought I'll probably play you some music, keep changing the music, keep it as spontaneous and improvised as possible and then hopefully you digest the information and you can then probably come up with your own explanations of all these factors governing rhythm, the rhythm component of music. Now, rhythm, if you ask me, is the most inspiring part of music for me personally because once you have a phrase or once you have a structure in your head, you can definitely sort of convert it into anything like a rhythm could grow into a melody, it could grow into harmonic arrangements, it could grow into chordal structures and it could also become a baseline. So, whether you're a pianist or a guitar player or even a singer, rhythm needs to be known by everyone and some of us try to sort of avoid the fact that we are not so good at rhythm by, you know, trying to replicate what others do. So, sometimes a person would give you all the information probably in a video or in a class, show you, this is how you hold the chord, this is the inversion, it gets very visual but at the end of the day, there's a sonic element and that sonic element is governed by the maths, it's governed by how well you count and how well a clock you have internally, right? So, there are a lot of ways to practice rhythm, a lot of people would suggest metronome, some would suggest reading, some would suggest just jamming with musicians and getting better, working with more experienced musicians, some might say do practice a lot of genres and so on but in this lesson, I'm just going to give you some foundational stuff and also explain all these terms and all the definitions basically in a musical way and see how we can put it on the piano. However, if you're watching this and if you don't play the piano, I think you can also benefit a lot from this lesson, right? So, let's get started. Before we do, it'll be awesome if you could subscribe to our channel, hit the bell icon for notifications, leave us a comment, leave us a like, share the video across with your friends. Let's get cracking. So, the most important thing about rhythm when you play it on any musical instrument is what I call as the pulse. The pulse is something as a musician and as an audience which are both felt and the audience may not know that you're playing poly rhythms or dotted quavers or an odd time signature or an even time signature, all they want to do is just move smoothly to the music. If there is regular movement of their body and obviously your body, I would imagine that they're going to enjoy it or someone on the earth is definitely going to enjoy it because your music is tight as we call it. It's rhythmically rock solid. So, whenever you play music, you need to feel a pulse. You need to move in some way which is periodic, slow enough so that you can understand it and also see that you don't get a glitch somewhere in your muscles and also for your audience, you're trying to promote their movement. You're trying to get them to move a certain way or promote a certain style of dance and that's how it works. Music and dance work hand in hand. You're not going to have one without the other, isn't it? So, if you're trying to look at musical rhythm, that is the first thing you would need to do. You would need to feel the pulse from within yourself and then send it to the listener. I do not think the metronome helps with this. A lot of people say, oh, if I do it with the metronome, I'll get better. But the pulse has to be felt from within. To give my personal example as a musician growing up, I don't think I used a metronome for the first 10 years. Went into a recording studio, they had a metronome, I played with it or it didn't really matter because I was following my mind and my drummer of the band. That seemed to be more efficient for me and we were fairly on time. No one really complained in that recording. So, let's get cracking. Now, if I play music like this, I'll just play you some music. Now, there are a lot of notes which are being played, right? But if you see how my head is moving, it's very consistent. Three, four, run, two, three, four. So, it's actually very difficult to count while you're playing it, even for me, for that matter. But you should feel that pulse ideally with your body. So, as you play music like this, you can move your head in some way or you can move your foot. Now, I tend to not move my foot because on the piano, we also have a sustain pedal. So, your foot is pretty much tagged to that. You'll have to use that. And I have a technique where I use another foot for balance, which I have shown in an exclusive sustain pedal video, which you should check out on our YouTube channel. So, I generally use my head to feel the pulse and you start with your head and then you can start controlling your entire body. You know, what I mean by that is if you want to get louder, just the volume, just simple volume, if you want to get louder in volume, what you could do is take a breath in. That's what they tell you, I guess, even during physical exercises, you know, and yoga perhaps. So, you go... So, I didn't do much. I didn't think of getting loud. I just thought of breathing in and when you breathe in, you must have heard the volume just went up, right? So, this is a very important way to play music. If you have to play loud, you tend to, you know, go faster. It's a common issue. You play loud and you go fast. You play soft, you go slow. So, to avoid that issue, breathe. Breathing really helps. So, it just makes the muscles, you know, more tense and more louder and then you breathe out and it makes the muscles softer. Let's try that again. Breathing with pulse, right? So, that's the first thing you need to do, guys, when you're playing the piano or any musical instrument, feel the pulse and get some dynamics going into your performance, right? So, this musical performance had a specific pulse. Now, this brings us to a few rhythmic factors. The first factor is the meter or the time signature. So, what you need to do is, there is a cycle which will keep happening in a performance by a musician. That cycle will last for let's say, well, how many ever beats, you know, how many ever pulse movements with your head and we call it a cycle because then that phrase or that pattern which the musician plays will kind of repeat itself, right? Or it may repeat in a slightly different way. A pattern may be born out of the phrase or out of the notes you play. So, why do we need that? Because otherwise the music will start getting very confusing. It's almost like why human beings use a watch or a clock in the first place, night or day. You know, we are people of, you know, habit or we prefer cycles as we live. So, with music, it is no different. You want a repetition. So, if I played a tune like this, now that entire tune ended, it kind of ended there. So, it then probably I would want it to repeat as a composer because you the listener would then digest it better because I am giving it to you more and more. So, you count the number of beats which elapsed from the start of the melody to the end and that will probably give you your meter or your time signature. Otherwise, it's just an endless pulse. One, two, three, four, five. You could be counting or you just move, bob your head, you know. So, to convert it into a cyclic event, you go cycle over. Also, when a cycle ends, you will find that a chord might change. So, that's another thing your ear could adapt to. When is the chord changing, you know? One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. One, two. So, that will end up being a four or a four by four. Don't worry too much about that by four thing. You can just say it's four beats per cycle or four beats per bar. I think that's easy to just say and understand. Now, if you do something like this, this perhaps is still a four by four because my cycle was some people may mistake this for three. They may say, oh, the guy played three notes. So, it has to be three, you know, but it's not. If you count two, three, look at your head, follow your head always playing the pulse. If you can't do that, record it on a phone, hear it back and then see how your head moves. Sometimes tough to do the head movement while you play the keyboard. So, one, two, three, that's the speed. So, that's pretty much again a cycle of four. Let's look at a cycle of three and see how that works. Something like that. So, one, two, three, one, two, three. Three also kind of feels a little different for the body. So, you should see how your body reacts to it. Does your body feel like moving this way? I get that feeling personally with every four by four thing I play. Or does your body kind of want to move sideways? Three could be a, maybe it's on three. Again, maybe. There's a big maybe there. Does your body feel a bit excited or energetic or slightly weird? Then it may be an odd type signature like five or seven. So, if I take this piece of music, it just sounds very, I guess, relaxing. One, two, three, one, two, three. So, feel that. So, step one, get the pulse. Step two, you need to see the meter where it goes. And now, coming to the actual information or rather before that, let's just look at a couple of odd meters and see how that can digest for you. So, now the challenge here is how do you count this? One, two, three. So, one, two, three. I have a lot of students who count it like that in the initial stages. But maybe you don't want to do that because it's not. And if you're saying three, it has to be an even three. It cannot be one, two, three, one, two. That is not even three. So, it's essentially one, two, three, four, five. One, two, three, four, five. One, two, three. That's how you would ideally count it. One, two, three, four, five. One, two, three, four, four, one, two, three, four, five. If you're confused with odd time signatures, what musicians do is we segment it. We'll have one, two, one, two, three. One, two, one, two, three. To make it like easy numbers, right? Two and three put together. One, two, one, two, three. One, two, one, two, three. One, two, one, two, three. One, two, three, four, five. Something like that. Five. Let's try a demonstration with maybe seven. So again, seven. I'm simplifying for my mind to do it something like one, two, three, four. One, two, three, one, two, three, four. That's how I'm phrasing. Seven. And so on. So this is pretty much about a time signature or a meter. So we've come from the pulse. We've come from the time signature or the meter. And then we have this idea about beat division. Okay. So when you divide the beat, what's going to happen is you set, you set across a grid in which you start placing your notes. And remember, it's not just counting one, two, three, four. And then you have those four slots to place the notes or the chord or the pattern or the hit inside those. No, not at all. Music and rhythm is just like a measuring tape. So if you're measuring, you know, let's say X amount of feet, you then start dividing those feet into inches and then sub inches and so on. Right. So it's ultimately a measurement unit, which is time. So you have an entire beat, which let's say lasts for one second. You can go how much ever into that second you would desire. Right. So common music, you could say is around 100 to 120 beats per minute. That's what you call your tempo. So in a nutshell, that's the speed of the beat. The tempo is like the amount of time you have for every beat. But then the tempo doesn't tell you how much you divide the beat. You can divide it by two, by three, by five, by whatever you want. Right. So in the next part of this series, we are going to look at how you can get inside the beat, develop some incredible phrasing, some accents along the way. So do not miss the next part. This is a series. So come over there to the next one. And again, don't forget to subscribe, turn on the bell when the next video hits you. Cheers.