HOW TO: count complex rhythms while playing guitar

The rulebook for decoding the dots…

Guitar Techniques, Wed 25 May 2011, 1:27 pm BST

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Every month, Guitar Techniques attempts to answer guitarists' playing posers and technical teasers with expert and practical advice. Here's one about complex - or awkward – rhythms and how to count them…

The question:

Dear GT,

Can you explain how to count awkward rhythms? I think I am okay on the basics - semibreves, minims, crotchets, quavers, semiquavers and triplets - but I struggle working out the count when a bar starts with a quaver, crotchet, quaver, crotchet, crotchet. Can you tell me if there is some sort of system that I can apply to counting rhythms?

Special K

The answer:

It doesn't matter if you're dealing with a simple rhythm or more complex ones, the answer is always the same: learn to count through them. The fundamentals don't really change that much from one to the other, it's really down to the successful application of counting regimes.

So let's examine the rulebook for decoding the dots. As with everything, it's best to start at a pretty basic level and work upwards. Ex 1 looks at how we can divide a bar up mathematically.

Example 1

We start with a whole note (or semibreve), then divide it in two and end up with two half notes (or minims), halve things again and get four quarter notes (or crotchets). Apply the same logic once more and we find the bar has now been divided into first eight equal parts (eighth notes or quavers) and finally into sixteenths (or semiquavers).

Dividing again will give us the smaller elements in music's rhythmic currency like thirty-second notes (demisemiquavers) etc; what we have in Ex 1 are arguably the most common 'domestic' rhythmic elements. Here (and we really can't stress this enough) you've got to be really sure-footed when it comes to counting. These might be the basics but, as we've seen, the idea of dividing bars up continues, theoretically speaking, in much the same way from here on.

So mastering a system of counting these beat divisions is absolutely vital to understanding what comes next. Once we're happy with how a bar may be split up like this, we can move on to look at how individual beats can also be divided. It's no surprise that the system of halving and then halving again remains in place here, too.

In Ex 2 we begin with a single beat that we then split in half (producing eighth notes) and then half again (producing sixteenths) and then once more to give us thirty-second notes.