Rhythm I

I know what you’re thinking. Rhythm? Really? That’s where you want to start? Yes, no doubt about it. We’re all so focused on pitches, but rhythm is actually king.

Think about it. We don’t really have that many pitches. In Western music, most songs stay within their scale of 11 notes. Even then, they don’t use all of them. When given a pitch, you have only three options going forward: stay the same, go up and go down.

This means that the number of unique melodies—just by looking at pitch—is very small and limited. Many songs have the same notes or very similar ones. We all know a million songs in which the melody just walks up or down the tone ladder: up to build tension and get a big chorus, down to close off the chorus and reduce energy.

It’s hard to differentiate from that. What are you going to do? Walk up/down after every note? Sounding like a confused broken record? You can’t go down the whole song, as there’s a lowest note you can sing.

If you were to create a list of popular songs and remove the timing from the pitches, I am certain you will find it hard to differentiate all the songs—or even recognize them.

A test

In fact, let’s do that. Below is a somewhat popular pop song from a few years ago. First without rhythm. (Tempo is “common time” of 120 BPM.)

Now, without pitch.

Notice how the pitches follow a very predictable pattern. Jump up, walk down, jump, walk down. And yet, the song I chose is one of the more varied and creative pop songs (in my eyes).

The duration of the notes when you only have rhythm ( = the width of the rectangles in the visual) is all over the place. Sometimes one or two quick notes, sometimes a lot of quick notes, sometimes a long note. In my opinion, it’s more unique and recognizable.

What was the song? “Somebody you loved” by Lewis Capaldi.

Forget pitch—for now. The unique identifier, the real juice of music, is the timing of those notes.

Rhythm is uniquely human

As far as we know, we’re the only ones who understand rhythm. Other animals can hear and produce pitch fine, but none have a “feeling” for rhythm like we do.

It’s probably because we have such a gift for pattern recognition.

Because, what is rhythm? It’s the natural feeling that music can be subdivided into bars and beats. Whenever we hear music, we immediately do that in our heads. We subdivide the tempo into smaller and smaller parts, following some pattern.

Because of this, a song immediately sounds bad if the rhythm is bad. Because it is fighting our natural instinct. Because it feels wrong to us. If we skip a beat, we feel like something is missing. If we try to cram a beat too many in there, it feels like we’re rushed and out of breath.

Both of those can be a stylistic choice, of course. The music for films usually messes with rhythm to give us this sense of “tension” and “rush”.

And that’s the point of this guide: to help you use rhythm to its full potential when composing. To give you some rules, but also when to break them.

How do we think about rhythm?

The story above explains how humans think about rhythm: as subdivisions.

We don’t calculate note lengths in seconds or milliseconds. We don’t assign absolute units. It would be annoying! It wouldn’t be practical at all! (“This note is 1.25 second, followed by a 733 millisecond note, and then …”)

Instead, we divide any music into smaller and smaller parts.

• A song
• Has different sections (verse, chorus, …)
• In which each vocal line, or instrument solo, is a phrase
• Which are subdivided using measures
• Which contain a consistent number of beats

That’s our starting point: the “beat”.

The length of that beat is determined by the tempo. You choose the tempo! This is usually done in BPM: “Beats Per Minute”. Common time is 120 BPM. Energetic pop/rock songs are usually 180 BPM, while a slow waltz approaches 60 BPM.

You can test this yourself. 120 BPM means 2 beats per second. So count on your fingers: one two, one two, one two. Or listen to this example:

Any other notes are measured compared to that one beat. We might have “half a beat” or “a quarter beat”. Or a long, held note might run for many beats.

For this guide, I keep all explanations and examples in “common time”: 4/4. There are four beats per measure.

How to use this? When writing a rhythm, only think in multiples. If a note feels too long, break it in two. If a note is too short, make it twice as long, or three times as long. This way, you’ll always have a solid structure that humans will pick up on. Don’t create rhythm using absolute time units.

And, in the end, all those beats combined need to perfectly match the length of your song. (It will likely sound very ugly if you end the song 25% through a measure.)

This will often happen naturally. Otherwise it’s a fun puzzle.

The example below only has three different note lengths, all a multiple of each other. But it already sounds usable.

Rhythm is most important (and varied) in dance music, rap and accompaniments (such as film scores). Pop songs are usually more focused on pitch than doing something special with rhythm. But it’s at least “important” in every style!

Next chapter will give specific tips and principles about rhythm.