Music Lesson: Exploring Rock Rhythm

When you just listened to me play "Ready, Aim, Fire," hopefully, you heard me digging into the four beats of the four-four time.

Understanding the Rock Feel

In this rock feel:

• The quavers were even and connected.
• Some of them were short, and some of them were long.

I'm going to now play the first phrase, using all long, even quavers with a long production.

If you're happy with your long note version you just copied from me, then let's move on to making it sound more rocky by adding some short notes.

Analyzing the Music

Take a look at the music; you can see that some of the notes have staccato marks (little dots on the notes) while others have a line like a tenuto mark (indicating a long note).

Let's see if we can now play that phrasing exactly as marked in the part. Are you ready to follow me?

Ends of Phrases

What I'd like to add next are the ends of phrases. Ends of phrases indicate where we're travelling to.

• Look at the end of the third bar.
• We have a crotchet and two quavers with a slur mark underneath.

If I play that and slur the three notes, it sounds like this:

So the last quaver is marked short. I played it short, but I slurred into it.

What I'd like you to try and do is tong the last note, the C (the bottom C), like this:

Can you hear the difference?

I'll play it the first way. And now the second way.

It finishes the phrase off really clearly.

Practice

Now you try and do that.

I'm now going to play the first phrase. See if you can hear all the things we've learned so far in my playing.

Now that we've got those shorts and longs, along with the short note at the end of the phrase, let's really dig into those four beats.

Getting Groovy and Rocky

Let's clap the four beats. That's how we need to play it, with that kind of attitude.

Let's do it!

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Okay, things are really starting to come together now. Let's play the first two lines of the piece and really emphasize that four-beat feel.

Rock is really about beats 1 and 3:

• Dunk, dunk, clink, 4
• 1, 3, 1, 3

Unlike swing, which is 1, 2, 1, 2, 3 on beats 2 and 4.

So, really think about beats 1 and 3 in that feel on those first two phrases.

You notice that even during the bars of rest, I was still digging that four-beat feel:

1, 2, 3, 4.

Even when you're not playing during the bars of rest, you can actually listen to the rhythm section on the track.