Following The Beat
When listening to music, you might find yourself tapping your foot along with the beat. The beat keeps track of the songs time, by creating a regular pulsation against which the length can be measured.
The beat may be fast or slow, but it must be regular. Each beat has to have the same duration.
You’ve all heard the lead in to a song when the lead singer counts to four and then the music begins. Or perhaps you’ve heard a drummer click the drum sticks together to begin a song. In both cases they we’re setting the tempo for the song. The tempo is simply the speed at which the song is played.
We’ll begin with some strumming exercises in this lesson that are in 4/4 time (sometimes called common or standard time). This means each measure will get four beats. So, the next step would be to learn what a measure is:
Measures
When writing music down on paper for other musicians to play the music is divided into what is called measures. The measures are divided with vertical lines. The lines that musical notes are placed on are called staffs.
Can you see the vertical lines in the music staff below?
Note: The funny looking symbol at the far left is a treble clef. This is just signifying that the music staff is for a treble clef instrument (which the guitar is), but it is of no concern to us at this point. We’ll talk about the two 4s stacked on top of each other right next to the treble clef next.
Same thing here in this tablature staff:
The image below is what our strumming exercises will look like. You can clearly see the vertical lines indicating the measures. Remember, each measure will get four beats- which is a count to four, then on to the next measure:
A quarter note is a note that represents the duration of one beat. In other words it gets one beat.
It looks like this:
You remember that I told you that a song in standard (4/4) time gets 4 beats per measure, right? That would mean that the song it would get 4 quarter notes per measure, because a quarter note gets one beat. That’s why it’s called a quarter note. There are 4 quarters in a whole. For example, a dollar bill can be divided up into 4 quarters.
In our exercises we will be working exclusively with quarter notes.
Strumming Exercises
Exercise 1
Exercise 2
Exercise 3
Exercise 4
Exercise 5
