Music Theory for Songwriters: Rhythm

Improve your songwriting process by factoring for rhythm and building rhythm. Explore note values, time signatures, feel, timing, dynamics, syncopation, and more.

Music theory is fundamental to making and playing music. This course is designed to teach the fundamentals of rhythm in both a user-friendly and songwriting-focused way, demonstrating rhythm on drums, guitar, bass, keyboards, and vocals, allowing songwriters to learn music theory while they learn song craft on their instruments.

Music producer and record label owner David Franz starts the course with the building blocks of rhythm: counting, notes, measures, rests, rhythm notation, subdivisions, and tempo. He then explains time signatures, discussing common, compound, and asymmetrical time signatures, as well as double time and half time, and how to choose the time signature for a song. Next, he discusses the concepts of feel and timing, including dynamics, accents, articulations, tempo changes, swing, syncopation, polyrhythms, and playing ahead of, on, and behind the beat. Along the way, David demonstrates all of these concepts by playing musical examples on drums, guitar, bass, keyboard, and vocals.

Introduction

• Welcome

1. Rhythm and Note Values

• What is rhythm and what are beats?
• Notes, measures, and counting
• Rhythm and drum set notation
• Simple rhythm examples
• Tempo and note lengths
• Using subdivisions to build rhythm
• Rests
• Rhythm examples with rests
• Triplets and duplets
• Dots and ties
• Rhythm examples

2. Time Signatures

• Common time and 3/4 time
• Simple and compound time signatures
• Odd time signatures
• Choosing a time signature for your song
• Double time and half time

3. Feel and Timing

• Dynamics
• Accents and articulations
• Tempo and tempo changes
• Ahead of, on, or behind the beat
• Swing
• Syncopation and off beats
• Polyrhythms (two rhythms at once)

Conclusion

• Next steps