How to read rhythm in music – for singers!

 A great singer needs to develop a great rhythm, but how do you get started with that if you don’t know anything about music? In this video, I’m going to teach you the very basics of rhythm For singers So you can improve your songs and communicate better with other musicians and singers.

My name is Jorgelina, I’m a vocal coach, a singer and songwriter, and my specialty is teaching adults how to sing contemporary singing from a holistic and integral approach.

Make sure you stick to the end of this video because I actually have some resources for you to improve your rhythm skills that you’re not going get otherwise. I recently also, released another video in which I teach you how to read a score.

I’m going to leave that in the description below so you can access to it and have a general overview of how to read a score, but today we’re going to focus on rhythm. The songs that you like, have a beat. What is the beat? Well, it’s a regular pulse that every song has, and of course, it’s different for different songs. You can find this information as BPM, which means ‘beats per minute’, I mentioned that in the video that I told you about so you can go there and there I explain what ‘beat’ is, what ‘tempo’ means, and how to change it, how does that affect your songs. So I’m going to assume now that you understand what’s the beat of a song and that you can figure it out and if you don’t, then go ahead, play a bunch of songs, start walking in a rhythmic way following the music and you are gonna surely find the rhythm in no time.

The next thing you have to understand Is that in Western music we group the beats into bars. The most common time signature that we have is the 4/4 bar, which means you have 4 beats per bar and those beats are measured in quarter notes.

That brings us to the next topic, which is understanding note values.

WATCH THE VIDEO TO LEARN THE BASIC NOTE VALUES!

Let’s put this into practice. We’re going to practice the rhythm tree! And we’re going to go in order from the whole note all the way to the eight notes.

WATCH THE VIDEO TO DO A BASIC RHYTHM READING PRACTICE FOR BEGINNER SINGERS!

If you found that too hard, then come back to it as many times as you want, and if you mastered it, it’s easy enough for you, then we’re gonna go to the next step. We’re going to do a short rhythm practice, this time in a different order. We are going to practice two 4/4 bars.

WATCH THE VIDEO TO DO A BASIC RHYTHM READING PRACTICE FOR BEGINNER SINGERS – the next step!

Now, as I said earlier, I actually prepared something for you, so if you go to the description below, you’re going to find three exercises that come with an audio track as well, go ahead, download it, try to do it without listening to the audio first, and then once you think you figured it out, then play the audio and check if you got it right.