 this is Jason here from Nathaniel. Hope all of you are doing well. In this lesson, we are basically going to look at a bunch of things in the field of rhythm, where I'm going to try and give you a few ways to count rhythm a little bit more effectively to, to basically use different patterns or different combinations and different approaches to explore rhythm. So the idea here is not to just do it mechanically, but the idea is to try and get it to sound as musical as possible at the end of the activity of practicing it. So we learn a few concepts, we practice a few things and there is a lot of improvisation, so to speak. I will be showing you a few basic things or basic approaches and then we get by. So without any further delay, let's get cracking. And if you're watching this for the first time, if you've not really watched a video from our channel, thanks a ton. Welcome to our channel. And if you are a member, thanks again for your support, for allowing us to do what we do. And basically, it'll be great if you can subscribe. It'll be great if you can follow us on our channel on YouTube. We also, you can follow me on Instagram at Jason Zach. You have the YouTube subscribe option. You can also visit our website NathanielSchool.com. And if you'd like to go through any of our courses, any of our workshops, which happen over the weekends, it's all available there, right guys, let's get cracking. And the first thing the first order of business is to just go through all the topics for today's discussion. So I've called it rhythmic exploration. So for the entire lesson, we are basically going to divide the beat by two. We'll divide the beat into two equal units. So you go one and two and three and four and in a bar of four, or you can kind of do it in a swing fashion, which sounds like this one and two and three and four and one and two and three and four. And so for the majority of the lesson, we're going to deal with eighth notes. And these are the topics which I plan to cover. One is division versus pulse. We need to be able to count our eighth notes really well. So and in general, count our rhythms really well. So the first thing you need to do have an exercise, have a few sets of tasks to help you divide the beat and then help you also come back to the pulse. So understanding how to divide and then coming to the pulse is very crucial. We're going to look at this in a fair amount of detail. We're going to look at subtractive patterns, which is an approach. So most of what I tell you today will be approaches. Then we look at rhythmic devices, which is just a concept which I have. And finally the claves, which are very Latin Latin rhythms. If we have time, we'll do this. But for sure we I'm aiming to do the first three. Now there are a lot of supplementary lessons to help you on YouTube on our very own channel. And I will try and compile a set of lessons, which I think will work for you really great. And it will be in the description. However, you can also do a little bit of work by going to Nathanielschool.com under free lessons. And you will find all of the lessons filtered really well. For example, on rhythm, on the rhythmic topic as well, you just have to type rhythm, I guess, and that should be good. Okay, guys, so the first order of business is to figure out division versus pulse. So if you have a rhythm pattern like this over of a four four. Okay, now I'm notating it, I will explain this very shortly. So you have music like this put out here. So here in these first two, in this bar, what happens here is you're dividing the beat. Here, I guess you're not necessarily dividing the beat because you don't really have that eighth note division, you don't have any division, this is the pulse. So you have to understand that these are quarter notes, which are the pulse of the song. This is how the audience is head moves. So one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four. Now this is how we divide. So here you're going to go inside the beat and do stuff like one and two and three and four and so you go one, two, three, four. You see what my hand is doing, my hand is basically going double. It's like one, two, three, four. So I'm playing the ends, I'm playing the additional hits. But here I'm just pretty much doing music on the beat. One, two, three, four. It's pretty much what's going on. So let's try and get generate this contrast. A nice way to do it off the top would be to combine your arpeggios with your blocks. So maybe in this particular area, you can play arpeggios. And in this particular area, you can play the block chords or broken chords and just have a simple progression like maybe D major, maybe G major, E minor, A major, you know, something like so D major bar one, G major bar two, E minor and then A major. Let's see how it goes. So something like this. So you start with an arpeggio which goes one and two and three and four and change two, three, four. Then one and two and three and four and change two, three, four. So this is an important study, a very important thing to practice because in this particular case, you're dividing the beat by two, you're playing arpeggios. In this particular place, you're not dividing, you're just playing block chords. Now if you don't like playing slamming block chords, you can probably do can kind of break it up by doing the top two notes of the chord and then the bottom note. But you may want to do broken chords only when the beat gets divided by two. So let's try and go through that again. D major arpeggio, G major with a nice inversion which is D, G, B, this one. So check that out. So you have a nice pattern there, don't you? So you have D major, G, E minor, A major, repeat. Let me just move this way for the left hand. So for the left hand, you go, there we go, you just play the roots of each respective chord. So for D major, you go D, G for G major, E minor, A major. What you could do is you could even look at this as a nice inversion exercise. So once you finish the pattern, you can continue the chords but in higher inversions. So it's a nice way to kind of contrast the two. It's a nice way to contrast dividing versus not dividing. Now another interesting way you guys could consider doing this would be using a simple finger exercise. Now I have talked about this on the YouTube channel like the expansion compression of your hand. You could go, you go, one and two and three and four and that's scale increments and then up the chord in pulse. So stuff like this would work, minor it, descending, harmonic minor, whichever minor you enjoy doing. Stuff like this will really train you to understand the value of this versus that. So I've given you arpeggios, I've given you blocks, then I've given you linear music and I've given you like chordal music or vertical motion where you're stretching your hand out further. Now you could do various things. You could say I'm going, I'm doing an ascending pattern like and when I descend, I can kind of go in this slower motion. I can go in the block style. So one and two and three and four and down. I'm on the D major pentatonic. Let's try it again. So as long as you maintain that contrast, you should be really good to go. So that is division versus pulse. Now to make division versus pulse more interesting, what you can do is you can take the same rhythmic framework, but don't play on all these beats, play at a few beats. Let's say you don't want to play at the ends. So if I don't want to play at the ends, what you could do, put a wrist, something like this, maybe change it around something like that. And maybe here, instead of doing the pulse, you could go more deeper or you can multiply the beats so to speak. So you could do this one, this one, which is a minimum, and then a crotch it at the end. Let me try and make that a bit clearer. There we go. So how do we count this? Here you have a subbeat at the end. Here you have a subbeat again at the end, but end of the four. So if I have to map this stuff out, one and two and three and four and so where are the silences? The silences are at the end of the one and at the end of the four. While here, what happened it eat up B3 kind of last onward and B3 will be gone because B2 last till B3. So here you want to count it as and earlier we had almost like a machine gun, but here a lot more musical. So that gap makes it very interesting. So you go and of course we can play it and you can do that same arpeggio block drill which I gave you. So This is a proper pattern now, isn't it? Just climb. You can keep songs over for the pattern exercise over you got that I hope that is and create a contrast when you're dividing create a contrast and when you're doing the pulse level create a contrast like play arpeggios here and play the blocks. Why don't we try another interesting sequence of stuff. So let's try this one. Let's say something as simple as this. So you go Dabba. So one and two and three and four and one, two, three again, one and two and three and four and three and four and my bad one and two and three and three and end of the three silent. Why don't we also write it down. That is a very good practice one and you have an absence at the two. I put a nice dotted line there. The end of the two is played three. The end of the three is nothing. So I put a dot there for in the end of four are very much there while the minimum here or the the the half note is one, two, three, four. It kind of engulfs the beat one, two, three, four. Now how do we do this in a nice arpeggio block scenario? You go oops. Let me do what I've written. I like that. Let me practice this better. Quite tricky actually. And so on and so forth. You need to be aware. You need to be a bit on the money to do this stuff. Well, so you can kind of just knock off beats here. So what you're trying to do is knock off stuff in the arpeggio area and kind of modify between crotchets between minimums. Well, you can even do stuff like this one, right? You can do this meets this a dotted minimum meeting a crotchet or a dotted half note meeting a quarter note, if you want to call it that way, you can do that here. So at the block or the second bar, you want to just not divide the beat, you're allowed to use the pulse note, or you're allowed to kind of multiply it if you wish. And the general logic behind these symbols, if for those of you who don't know, you have the pulse level, which is here, right? Then under this, you have your quavers or you have your eighth notes, which are generally notated either like this. Or if you're using them in a bunch, you could even kind of beam them could like beam them together can beam them in twos or fours, depending on a couple of classically made rules. And then if you go beyond this, you can start multiplying the pulse. So if you go here, you get minimums. And if the minimum gets multiplied further, you have the semi brief, which is a whole note which has four counts. So if this lasts for one beat each one, two, three, four, and if this is the direction of the audience's head movement or the speed of the audience's head movement, you would thus start calling this the pulse. So this is the pulse. This is into two. This is into four, the semi brief. This is divide by two. And if you choose to go deeper, you start dividing by four. So you go divide by two, divide by four. And what happens with a divide by four scenario, we call it a semi Quaver. So four semi Quavers make up two Quavers, which makes up two crotchets, two crotchets will make up one minimum, and two minims will make up a semi brief, which is that egg like thing you see here, this is just music notation guys, so it doesn't if it's useful because it gets you to visually see what's happening. Okay, so I hope this idea of dividing the beat will be grained in you ingrained in you when you practice it like this, where you practice with arpeggios with blocks, the additional bonuses you also train your inversions, you can do a chord progression like this, you can also generalize the chord progression if you wish by doing something like a one, four, six, or sorry, two, five, which is pretty much this progression. So if you want to do it on a couple of other scales, let's say you wanted to do it on B flat major, B flat, the one, our E flat, the four, then the C minor, and then finally our this thing F. So same story on so on. So I right now let's not use 16th notes and all the other fancy stuff. Let's just stick with quavers for now. And that should be more than enough quavers means eighth notes, eight notes means divide the beat by two. Let's move forward to the next strategy I have for rhythmic exploration. The other thing I would like you to consider is what I call a subtractive pattern. So how do you create a subtractive pattern? First, you start with everything. Okay, there shall be everything, which is this particular rhythm pattern. So you start with this. And then you slowly but surely try to knock off a few things here and there. So let's say you created a phrase using these eight beats. Now mind you, this is a four by four composition. And you create a melody on a simple scale, let's say the major pentatonic scale, what is the D major pentatonic D E F sharp, A and B. Isn't it pentatonic is what one, two, three, five, six, sorry, go further. So if you build something following these beats, you could go something like that or something like this. So let's just write that melody down. What am I doing here? D F sharp A B A F sharp B F sharp. So practice that on the keys. And we count one, one and two and three and four and one and two and three. What I do faster. So once you do that, you realize that it's kind of a bit monotonous, gets more interesting if you play your chords, of course. But it can be it can be even more interesting when you just consider subtracting a couple of these beats. So let's say you now want to say goodbye to F sharp, just for some reason, you just don't like so many F sharp. So you just remove one of the F sharps. The result in rhythm is going to be with a rest, isn't it? There'll be a space there. If you'd like, you can use a notation software like a muse score to actually hear how these things sound, you know, and muse score is an open source thing. If you're interested, you can drop me a comment and I will be I'll try and do a video on muse score for sure, or in a class, which we anyways do. So if you do this now, and knock off the F sharp, it'll be something like this. This is going to train your timing. This is going to get you to really latch on to this rhythm pattern very well, because you started with everything. Remember, these are only approaches, the first the approach in the subtractive rhythmic framework, I'm just going to call this subtractive, wrong spelling, subtractive rhythm. I don't know why I come up with these strange names. But anyway, so you go, that was your normal rhythm, right? But now you're minusing this middle beat F sharp here. Now what else can we do? Let's try this sort of activity. Put a gap maybe here if you like. So if you can try and sing it. There's nothing at the ending there. How does that sounds? You get all sorts of interesting rhythms and what you could do with a subtractive approach to rhythm making is you can start subtracting from the very end and go all the way back to the beginning where you kind of have nothing, you just have the root. So you can develop an exercise for yourself, something like this. This is everything. Minus that last F sharp, how will it sound? You can either choose to sustain the E or knock it off. I kind of like to sustain it. Now what happens? What happened here? I'm stopping at F sharp. I'm minusing these two or subtracting these two. So I'm keeping F sharp as this note as my last one. So combine that stopping at E and I'm stopping at F sharp. So doesn't sound very monotonous. Use the subtractive rhythmic approach. I took a simple scale. I took the pentatonic scale and did all this stuff. So you can subtract specific beats if you like. You can subtract specific beats or you can subtract from the very end and go all the way back to the beginning to a point that as I will show you now, first everything. You actually may like that more than the whole melody. And if you like that, why not? What's not to like with just a D? Now build it. Then so I'm not rushing. I'm not rushing to the loop. My loop is lasting an exact one bar. See the fine. So you could subtract or start with nothing and then build it fully or start with everything and subtract. So that's the whole idea of subtractive rhythmic awareness or creating subtractive patterns, guys. Moving forward, I'd like to talk about the next style of rhythmic exploration, which I call as rhythmic devices. So rhythmic devices, when you divide the beat by two, when you divide the beat by two, there end up being two raised to the power of N possibilities of actually making music, where why are there two possibilities? Because you play or don't play. You play the note or you rest the note to play or not to play. That is the question. So you go to part two, which gives you four binary permutations binary because on or off zero or one. So what are the four rhythmic permutations when you divide a beat by two? Well, let's just look at it like a binary or a computer computer lesson, you go play, play, play, don't play. Don't play, play. Don't play, don't play. So this is essentially your on beat and your off beat or the end. So play, play, play, don't play, don't play, play, nothing, nothing. Now, how do we put this in terms of the notation? Here you have two quavers. Here you can either write. Well, for the most part, you could just write it as a crotchet or a quarter note that looks a lot better. Some musicians may like the whole this meets that. If you like to put another rest there, I would say just go with this for now, at least for a start, then you go rest quaver or rest eighth note, you need that very importantly. Last but not least, you have a quarter note rest, which is this rather interesting looking symbol. So now with rhythmic devices with this particular approach, what we do is we pair them together in a bar of music, which we would like, let's say I want to do three by four, bored with four by four, we've seen four by four enough for the lesson. So I pair three by four and what do we have? I can have a permutation. I can have this one, this one and nothing. So how does this sound? Fighting one and two, one and two, three, you know, one and two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three. Now if you want to build it further, you can do all of that if you are interested, you can do. But what I was hinting at doing, what I preferred to do was put a crotchet at the end. So this will be, let me try and sing it. See, I've used only these devices as I'm calling them. What about this? One and two and three. And so I've just used these pairings. Let's make this a bit more normal, maybe rest. Okay, or you could do like a, well, if you want to play a bigger one, you could always kind of do the whole deal. You could do this, you could do this. But right now we're talking about divisions. So these are your main permutations. So you could use rhythmic devices as a tool. Let's write that down, rhythmic devices as a tool to express yourself beat by beat. Each beat has a specific rhythm pattern. Each beat has a specific pattern. So when you combine those tiny patterns together, you have what we call as rhythmic devices. So far in the lesson, we've looked at this idea of combining division with pulse, division with the pulse. I've looked at different permutations using arpeggios blocks, given you like a nice inversion exercise to go with some theory notation, hopefully your knowledge of notation got a bit strengthened from this lesson. It was not from the absolute basics. If you need me to do a lesson on the absolute basics, let me know in the comments, we will figure it out. Then we looked at subtractive rhythms, which are, as I said, you subtract specific beats one beat here, one beat there, or from the very bottom or from the beginning, and then you expand it. Then you can call the expansion. And then we looked at rhythmic devices, which is beat by beat indicators of your music. You either just using binary permutations, play, play, play, don't play or play hold, don't play, play, don't play, don't play, or don't play for the entire beat. Now I did mention that I might talk about claves looks like we've kind of run out of time. So I will spend another discussion, another live or a YouTube tutorial in detail where we talk about the claves in great detail. So I'm pretty much done with the lecture. We've pretty much run out of time. But before I conclude, first of all, thanks for all those who are watching it live. Thanks for all your kind words and kind comments. And I hope I've answered your questions. Some of you have asked about odd time signatures, three by four, six, eight. I mean, I really suggest go through our YouTube channel. This has not been the lesson for that. It is just how to counter them, how to divide a beat. This is not about time signatures. I will do another lesson on time signatures. Do stay tuned to that. And obviously, all of this information will be there in our virtual courses. If you choose to do any of our virtual courses at whichever skill level, we have stuff which is really advanced. If you want to talk about odd time signatures, poly rhythms, polymeters, we definitely have a lot of that going on at our virtual classes. So you could consider two ways of learning with us in a very structured way. One is you could do our course, which is called Music Method, virtual, of course, these days with the pandemic and the fact that we have a lot of students now from different parts of the globe. The other thing could be to consider these video recordings, which you will find on our website. You just have to go to Nathanielschool.com, click on videos or the members videos, and we have a bunch of lessons and we've launched this lifetime offer where you just pay a fee, a one time fee and that portal will keep getting upgraded for life. It'll just go on and on upgrading. You can also get that on YouTube if you're watching this by hitting that join button, and then it's a subscription model. You can also support us on Patreon. All of these notes from this lesson and pretty much all of the lessons will be put as a neat PDF for you to watch on Patreon right after the lesson. We'll get that done. Right guys, that's about it. Thanks again for those of you tuning in live, and thanks for those of you who will be watching this video soon enough, hopefully. And don't forget to share the video with your friends or anyone you think who likes music, please share it with them and hopefully this lesson gets you to enjoy rhythm a bit more, improve your timing, get you to think a little bit more and move forward as an artist. More lessons coming your way. Do give us your suggestions. Your support means a lot. And don't forget to subscribe. That also helps the channel really grow and hit that bell for notifications. We release videos almost every day. The riffs are one a day. So you can stay notified whenever something goes live. Thanks a ton for watching this lesson guys. Stay tuned, lots more coming your way. Again, this is Jason Zach from the Nathaniel School of Music. I'm the piano faculty and looking forward to seeing all of you very soon.