This video will be discussing rhythm and particularly re-occurring rhythmic patterns in music. These patterns are very common in popular music and in much of the music we will be studying. You can particularly hear these patterns in the drum parts or the rhythmic parts. We are going to start by listening to “We Will Rock You” by Queen. Here we go.
<music: opening to “We Will Rock You”>
You can hear the rhythmic pattern repeating. Stomp, stomp, clap; stomp, stomp, clap—the rhythm there. Here it is again.
<music: opening to “We Will Rock You”>
So, we are going to take a look at that rhythm and talk a little bit about how we might represent it. Obviously music notation has ways of representing it, but we are going to represent this in a different way. We are hearing this stomp, stomp, clap. What I have done here, (up above), I have represented that for you with these rectangles and triangles here. You can see the stomp, stomp, clap; stomp, stomp, clap. There is a blank spot here. If we take a look at the sound track we can actually see stomp, stomp, clap. There is nothing here. Stomp, stomp, clap. This is a second line here with the voice part. Right now we are listening to this part up here.
Let me do this, I am going to put in some markers here. Options, uncheck show grid. Then I can put in some markers so that you can see this. Put my cursor here, right click and insert marker. I will call that number “1.” I will move it right here.
OK. So we have some markers here that correlate to what we call beats in music. I am trying to space these out evenly. OK, so you can see that there. Stomp, stomp, clap and then notice nothing is happening in that beat there. This is just like my representation up here. I have my beats. I put a 1, 2, 3, 4, and then a 1a again. If I show the numbers up above, you can see that I have put, 1, 2, 3, 4; 1, 2, 3, 4. So this is a recurring pattern: stomp, stomp, clap, rest; stomp, stomp, clap, rest… Let’s hear that again.
<music: opening to “We Will Rock You”>
OK. Very good. So that is a way in which I have been able to represent this notation here. What if we add the voice part now? A little bit later we get the voice part. Let me have you hear that.
<music: opening to “We Will Rock You” with the voice part>
OK. So that voice part obviously is a lot more complicated. It is hard for me to… <singing> It is hard for me to quickly figure out the note values that I would put against this other rhythmic line.
There is a way in Reaper to slow things down. So if you go to this area that says “Rate”…
I am going to put in 0.5, which means that the rate is going to be half the time of the regular rate. Now you are also going to hear that the pitch is going to go down. When you double the wave length that means that it takes twice as long for the waves to occur as they normally would.
All of the music, the sound is put down what we call an octave lower. You might remember that we have studied octaves a little bit. When we talk about “C4” we are addressing a particular C. When you go an octave lower you go down to C3. C3 has wave lengths that are twice as long as C4. So when you hear this it is going to be quite a bit slower.
<music: opening to “We Will Rock You” with the voice part—slower>
OK. But that is a lot easier for us to perceive. So you could even see during the rest that we had before. Now we have two voice little things there—two words. Now you can see my representation of the voice part it had <singing>. Let’s hear that again.
<music: opening to “We Will Rock You” with the voice part—slower>
There you go. I am going to do that again. I am following along with the cursor so you can see how the rhythm goes.
OK. So the faster notes, the quicker notes…you have more of them occurring than the others. So when the voice goes <singing da di>. Two of those notes, two of those words are occurring during the time of the first stomp. <singing> We have one stomp here, one stomp here and these notes, these words, are twice as fast. Then we coincide with the clap here. Then where there is nothing in the other parts we have the voice going <singing>. And then they coincide here.
Notice how the notes and the beats… (I am going to scroll here so that you can see that.) …they tend to line up on what we call beats in music. That is very common in music that you will have the voice part, the instrumental parts and everything …they will tend to line up at the start of each beat.
And in this cyclical pattern, this pattern repeats in the rhythmic part every four beats. It is very typical for things to line up on the first beat. So we have got the cyclical pattern going on. In “We Will Rock You” the stomp, stomp, clap –as you recall, as you have listened to the piece—you can hear how that same pattern cyclically recurs throughout the composition.
So that gives you a little bit of the idea of how rhythms work. Obviously in music we have notation that I can certainly show you. But here I have represented the rhythms with graphical figures. I have shown you in Reaper how you can look at the music, slow it down, and how you can even see in a simple texture how rhythms appear.