Basic Rhythm for Punks or Rock Weirdos

Added: 2026-05-12

[00:00:00]Okay, so a little while back I made a video where I talked about music theory, specifically just like basic ideas that might help people who are writing punk or post-hardcore music better communicate with their bandmates or better just write riffs and parts. One thing that I didn't really go over as much is just rhythm. I knew that was also just going to be kind of like a drier conversation, but I've been having a lot of talks with people about music recently that have just led me to think that it's probably important to revisit and talk about for the sake of helping people who are trying to learn from the channel. I'm going to try and make it as interesting as possible, but at the end of the day like this is a essentially just a math lesson, which is maybe not the coolest thing to talk about. So, I apologize that it's not as like creatively focused. I promise that this is like pretty important, I think, to writing better parts and just understanding music in general. In my experience, especially with guitarists, there's a lot of people out there who kind of understand the mechanics of playing guitar well and maybe even play the guitar reasonably well and understand rhythm on a more implicit basis, but when it comes to making things explicit for the purposes of communication or for the purposes of writing, they're not as familiar. Having a formal understanding of rhythm, I think, is is very helpful. There's really no other way to do that than to talk about like music theory specifically and talk about fractions, which is again maybe not the coolest subject. So, to start with, music in the Western tradition is written in what we typically refer to as time signatures.

[00:01:18]And these are designations that songs receive mostly out of convenience.

[00:01:24]There's something of a subjective quality to the way that rhythm works, which is to say that it's kind of based on feel, right? Like when I say that a waltz is in 3/4 time, for instance, it's because it has this persistent rhythm within it that is made up of three beats. It goes bump bump bump bump bump bump bump bump bump. And that that lower bump before it jumps up to the higher two beats feels like the start and it's repetitive in that way. That makes it easy for it to be divided into sections of three. A time signature consists of two numbers.

[00:02:00]The top number tells you how many beats are in what we call a measure, and the bottom number tells you what type of note is designated as a single beat. So, one of the most common time signatures, and the one that most punk music is written in, is 4/4 time. In 4/4 time, you have four beats per measure, and you have a quarter note getting the quality of one beat. There are other types of notes, right? Not just quarter notes. We have whole notes, half notes, quarter notes, eighth notes, 16th notes, and even 32nd notes. And then there's also triplets and dotted notes, and we'll get to those in a second. A whole note is the most amount of time that a note can take up before you have to start tying notes together, which is designated by a line that connects two notes. A whole note is uh usually considered four beats. So, if I'm counting off 1 2 3 4, and I was to play a note that is that long, that would be a whole note. So, like in the classic Ramones song "Blitzkrieg Bop," for instance, right?

[00:02:53]Dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun If I was to play a note that lasts that first chord, uh and just let it ring, that would be a whole note. Dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun All other notes that I just mentioned are essentially subdivisions of a whole note, right? So, if a whole note takes up four beats, four beats is kind of the most common time signature in Western music. More or less, three is also very common. A half note is half of a whole note, which makes sense. A half note is two beats. A quarter note is one beat.

[00:03:29]An eighth note is half a beat. A 16th note is a quarter of a beat. And a 32nd note is a eighth of a beat. So, all of this is kind of framed around the idea that 4/4 is kind of the most common time signature, but it's not always like that, right? And in 4/4, the standard unit of the beat is given to the quarter note, right? So, if a whole note is made up of four quarter notes, a measure is made up of four quarter notes as well.

[00:03:54]And like I said, this is subjective, but if you listen to a song, you can typically figure it out by following the rhythm, trying to clap on the beat. Like if I'm singing Three Blind Mice, for instance, right? Three Blind Mice, Three Blind Mice, See How They Run, See How They Run. It's in 4/4, right? That basic melodic unit of the Three Blind Mice, doom. That's four beats. One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. And it means that those melodic notes are typically designated as quarter notes as well. And then depending upon how you're singing it, you might consider that last note a half note or a rest, right? Which is the same thing as a note, but it designates that there's no music being played instead of music being played. So if I'm playing in 4/4 and I have twice the number of notes as I do beats, then I must be playing what's called eighth notes, which means that there's notes not only being played on the beat like in Three Blind Mice, but also off the beat as well. Bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, right? And we call that off beat the and. So if I'm counting it, it goes one and two and three and four and one and two and three and four and.

[00:05:02]Similarly, if I'm counting with 16th notes in mind, then I'm going to count one e and a two e and a three e and a four e and a. E and a are the subsequent subdivisions. So all of this is based on whatever the initial count of my song is. And like I said, that's essentially subjective, but it's usually something that you can suss out just by listening to the way that the pattern repeats. And it's mostly done for the convenience of communication of an idea to somebody else. So it's possible that you'll hear one time signature and somebody else hears a different time signature, right?

[00:05:30]And time signature doesn't have to hold through the whole song. You can have a time signature that changes over time as well, between three, between four. You can have measures made up of five, like in the legendary jazz song Take Five.

[00:05:43]Doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, or in the Mission Impossible song bump bump bump bump bump bump bump bump bump bump bump bump. It's all just related to how the patterns in what you're playing repeat. You're dividing patterns in your song into the simplest subdivisions. Whatever measure length you're designating is essentially based on the rhythmic feel of the song itself. So, if I'm telling you what a time signature is again, the bottom note's telling you what value gets one beat and the top note's telling you how many beats there are per measure.

[00:06:16]Generally speaking, we don't in popular music spend too much time worrying about what beat gets the value of one. It matters a lot more if you're writing music out than if you're just speaking colloquially about it, but it can be valuable information depending upon the context. More often than not, there's two notes that get the value of one, the eighth note or the quarter note. And it's almost always the quarter note, but sometimes it's the eighth note. And again, it really just depends upon how you're trying to notate something. So, unless you're transcribing it, it's probably not super relevant information.

[00:06:50]But the number of beats in the measure is definitely more relevant information.

[00:06:54]This is literally why when someone counts off at the beginning of the song, they say 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 or sometimes even 1 2 3 4 5. Once you get beyond five beats, you can really start subdividing measures into smaller quantities. So, yes, there are songs that are in like 11 or seven for instance, but if you're me, you're just counting those measures as like a measure of three and then a measure of four or a measure of five and then a measure of six. It gets weird to count all the way to 11 in your head, especially because some of those higher numbers are multisyllabic and it's a little bit hard to stay in time and say seven or 11, right? Like that's a lot of syllables to get out in one beat. So, in addition to the value of individual notes, there's a few other concepts we should probably cover. One is the tie.

[00:07:40]Uh if you have a note that you want to play for longer than the value of one beat or that's like kind of an odd number of beats and it ends on an offbeat, then you might want to tie two notes together. And you do this by literally drawing a line between them in notation. Uh it might happen, for instance, if you're just playing a series of whole notes, like if you're holding a note for even longer than a measure. Like, for instance, one Like, I held that note for eight beats.

[00:08:06]So, if I was to notate it, I would draw two whole notes and then draw a line underneath them connecting the two whole notes. Another thing I can do for ease of notation is add a dot to a note next to the note. If the dot is below or above the note, that's called staccato, and that's more related to feel. Feel is a whole other conversation that we could get into. Uh there's like concepts of staccato and legato, which are even more relative and probably just like not worth discussing at this particular juncture, but maybe someday. But, a dot to the side designates that a note gets plus 50% of the amount of time that it would normally get. So, if I see a quarter note and there's a dot next to it, that means that that note actually gets a beat and a half of time. So, I don't play it for just one and then stop. I play it for one and then stop when my hands would be open on the next beat, right? It gets one and a half beats. Uh and that's true of any valued note, right? see a half note and it's dotted, then it gets three beats. Uh and you see that one a lot because when time signatures are in three, then if you're holding a note for the whole measure, it would be designated by a dotted half note, not a whole note, because again, a whole note is four beats. So, yeah, you can dot any note. You can dot an eighth note. You can dot a 16th note. Once you get to 32nd notes, you're getting into pretty crazy territory from like a writing perspective, from like a performing perspective. There are songs, obviously, that have 32nd notes, but 16th notes is typically how deep rhythm goes. So, I'm going to provide an example in a minute, but the last thing that I'll probably talk about is just rests. Um you can play notes, but then you can also not play notes, and there's obviously sometimes space between notes.

[00:09:41]And if we're trying to designate that space, then we're usually going to include what we call rests. And rests can have all of the same values as notes themselves. There's whole rests, half rests, quarter rests, eighth rests, 16th rests, and so on. If you see a rest, that just means that you don't play.

[00:09:57]Um when you're learning music in a more traditional, more formal setting, typically what they do is make you clap on the beat >> [snorts] >> and then sing along, right? And so if you see a rest, then you're just not supposed to sing on that beat. Rests can happen anywhere. They can happen on the beat, they can happen off the beat. If you see a note followed by a rest, it just means that you're not playing then.

[00:10:19]So to provide like a little bit more context, like I know I've been putting images up on the screen that might help you understand this a little bit better, I thought I could just show you one piece of music and then be done with it.

[00:10:28]So the song I selected as an example is a jazz standard, and I have it here in my copy of the real book, which is a collection of jazz standards. Uh and this one's a bass clef real book because I played bass in high school jazz. Bass clef and treble clef are also probably beyond the scope of this particular video, but safe to say when you see music notated, there's usually two separate ledger lines of music, and the bottom one is the bass clef, and usually the lower notes are located on the bass clef. So the song that we're going with right now is So What by Miles Davis. You might have heard it if you've listened to Kind of Blue. It's one of my favorite jazz albums. It's also maybe just one of the most popular jazz albums of all time. It's quite good. Bill Evans, who's one of my favorite jazz players, who I think I've talked about before on the channel, wrote a lot of the piano parts, helped write a lot of the arrangements in general for the record, plays on the record. Miles Davis is also very good, obviously. It's his album, really. It's a fantastic record, and I think So What is one of the best songs on it. So if you don't know it, you should probably go listen to it right now. So if you look right next to the clef, first off, you'll notice that it says it's in 4/4.

[00:11:33]You see that notation that we were just talking about. There's a four on the top and a four on the bottom, so there's four beats per measure, and each note that gets the value of one is a quarter note. So, if you're familiar with the song, it starts with this like bass intro, right? And that bass intro begins on the offbeat. As you can see, the first note here is a rest. And then all the subsequent notes are eighth notes, so it goes ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba boom.

[00:11:59]And then this note holds, right? You can see that there is a whole note there. Ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba boom. And there's like a call and response element that happens in the upper voicings after that line gets played. So, it goes ba boo ba boo ba boo ba boo ba boo. Ba ba. And you'll notice that the whole note in this measure here extends for all four beats, cuz that's the bass note, right?

[00:12:20]The bass player keeps playing boo.

[00:12:23]And then these notes are all played by the horns, right? And the piano. So, that first chord there is a dotted quarter note, so it gets one and a half beats. Ba ba. And the second note there is an eighth note that comes in on the end after this beat and a half has been played. And you can tell that prior to that, to account for the four beats in the measure, we have half rests above that whole note. So, what we have here is essentially a form of math, right?

[00:12:48]Where you need to fill the space between these two lines with four beats. And in order to do that, we have to account for it all with either notes or rests, which we've done here, right? There's two beats here between this dotted quarter note and this eighth note, and then another two beats with this half rest, and then the bassline here is accounted for with this whole note, which lasts for four beats. So, that motif continues through the rest of the song, right? You have ba ba ba boo ba boo ba boo ba boo.

[00:13:13]Ba boo. Ba boo ba boo ba boo ba boo ba boo. Boo boo. Ba boo ba boo ba boo ba boo ba boo. Boo boo. I could continue talking about this for a while, and there's a lot of other more formal videos on this subject that you might want to check out on YouTube. You can also just get books on the subject as well. That's probably the easiest way to come to understand it. One book that might also really help with this is Paul Hindemith's Elementary Training for Musicians.

[00:13:38]Uh this one begins with a discussion of rhythm and it has a series of exercises in it that you can go through that will help you get rhythm a little bit better.

[00:13:47]I have a lot of people ask me about how to improve as guitarists and at the end of the day, I think, you know, playing to a metronome is really important if you want to improve your timing, but if you don't really understand specifically what to do with rhythm, then playing along to a metronome isn't necessarily going to help very much either. And that's why I think it's really critical to internalize at least some details about rhythm. A lot of bands that are on the technical side, a lot of my favorite bands, definitely make usage of notation when they're writing out ideas. It helps you be as specific as possible about what it is you're trying to do. And if you're trying to share an idea with a bandmate, there's really not an easier way to do that than using rhythm in context. On top of that, I think like, you know, in Western music, we only have 12 notes essentially. Like the whole range of possible notes that you can play is only divided into 12 notes.

[00:14:39]That's actually a pretty limited number of notes, but there's a lot more subdivisions within rhythm. And some of them get pretty weird, too. Like I mentioned triplets earlier. Like you can even have a song where the count is four and you have a sort of polyrhythmic subdivision of three over those four-beat feels or over a two-beat feel.

[00:14:58]But if you're not really familiar with like formal rhythm, triplets can be really hard to understand. I've certainly played in some bands before where I had a triplet feel part and I was trying to show it to somebody and they were just kind of struggling to understand it cuz they had just never really been exposed to formal rhythm before. But it's a really common kind of polyrhythm and you can write more stuff like that if you are more familiar with formal rhythm. So, yeah, I would recommend spending a little bit more time looking at some actual resources, textbooks, online materials if you're curious to know more about this. I hope it was like an okay primer on the subject. I know this is like a pretty dry video by comparison to others, but I tried to get through as much information as quickly as possible while still being pretty detailed. So yeah, thanks for watching.