What rhythm is: beat and tempo
Every note right but the timing off, and a listener knows instantly. One wrong note with steady timing usually goes unnoticed. Rhythm matters more than people expect.
Where the next twelve days go
The last six days were about your hands and the instrument: which key is which, and how to sit and hold them so you can play for an hour without hurting. The next twelve are about something else entirely — about time, and about paper. Those two are what stop you needing someone to teach you one song at a time, because once you can hold a beat and read a page you can pick up whatever you actually want to play and start.
| What turns up | What it is | What it buys you |
|---|---|---|
| Day 7 — beat and tempo | The steady pulse running under the music | Playing along with a recording, or with other people, without drifting off |
| Days 8-9 — note lengths and silence | The shape of a note tells you how long to hold it | Playing a tune people recognise, instead of the right notes in a shape nobody can name |
| Days 10-11 — bars and the numbers at the start | How time gets cut into equal chunks | Counting yourself in, and hearing whether a piece sways like a waltz or walks in four |
| Days 12-14 — the staff and its two clefs | The map from a dot on the page to a key under your hand | Opening any sheet music you find or buy and working it out yourself |
| Days 15-16 — dots, ties, syncopation | How to write lengths that do not divide evenly | Pop songs that sound like the record, not like a stiff version with every note the same length |
| Days 17-18 — reading faster | The habits that put your eyes ahead of your hands | Meeting a new piece and getting through it on the first pass |
The beat is the pulse of the music
When you listen to a song and your foot starts tapping without being asked, the thing your foot is tapping is the beat. It is a pulse running steadily underneath, no matter how busy the melody on top gets.
Most people think their timing is fine, right up until they play with a metronome. Then they discover they speed up whenever the music gets easy and slow down whenever it gets hard. This is normal, it happens to everyone, and the metronome is the only thing that will fix it.
Tempo and BPM
Tempo is how fast the beat goes, measured in BPM — beats per minute. A song at 60 BPM has one beat per second, exactly matching the second hand of a clock.
| BPM | Musical term | Feel |
|---|---|---|
| 50 | Largo | very slow, like an evening piece |
| 70 | Adagio | slow, typical of ballads |
| 92 | Andante | walking pace, roughly how you stroll |
| 112 | Moderato | moderate — a great many pop songs live here |
| 138 | Allegro | fast, with drive |
| 176 | Presto | very fast |
Playing in time
Time to try it properly. You get one bar of counting in, then you tap along with the marks you can see. Any key will do — the system only cares when you press, not what.
Tap four even beats
Listen to the count-in bar, then tap every beat in time.
You get a count-in bar, then tap any key in time with the marks · 72 BPM
Look at the average error the system reports. Under 60 milliseconds is very good for a beginner. Over 120 means there is work to do — but do not worry, everybody starts there.
Put in the reps
Today's drill contains one note: C, four times in a row. Four beats counted one to four and then back round to one is what gets called a bar — day 10 goes into how that is written down; for now, a group of beats you count over and over is all it needs to mean. There is nothing in the drill for the fingers to solve, which leaves exactly one thing to judge — whether your note and the click land on top of each other or beside each other.
One C, four times, on the click
As long as you can still hear the click as a sound separate from the C, you are not on it yet; when you are, the click vanishes inside your note. That is easy at 54, but it comes back out at 78, and that is the rung to stay on.
Loop it in time with the clicks. 5 clean reps in a row moves you up a rung; one slip starts the count again · from 54 up to 78 BPM
Today's minigame
A rhythm scrolls past and you tap along. Scored in milliseconds.
Trains: steady time, which listeners feel long before they notice a wrong note
Homework
Go to homeworkAll homework lives on the homework page. Repeat it as often as you like — anything you're still shaky on gets pushed back to the top by itself.
No rush. The list below says what's left. The one about coming back only counts sittings more than an hour apart — playing again right now stays the same sitting.
- Read every part · 0 of 5
- Take the drill up to target tempo · 0 of 1
- Clear 60% of today's minigame · 0 of 1
- Leave it an hour, then come back and practise · 0 of 2 sittings