Guitar Lesson Five - Theory Part II

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Guitar Lesson Five - Theory

Part II

A wise person once said that notes are nothing more than a clever way to get from one silence to the next. What they were pointing out was that what you don't play, often times, is more important than what you do play.

In fact, it's the spaces that you leave between the notes that help to define RHYTHM.

The spaces in music are called RESTS, and just like notes, they come in different shapes and sizes:

Whole Rest

Half Rest

Quarter Rest

Eighth Rest

Sixteenth Rest

You'll notice that, just like notes, rests smaller than a sixteenth are determined by adding more flags. In fact, everything about rests is just like notes, except rests indicate silence instead of sound.

Now, before we take a look at rests on the staff, I want to show you a little bit about how the drums help to keep the beat.

4/4 is the most common time signature used, especially in rock and country music. 4/4 is so common, in fact, that it's usually just called COMMON TIME and notated on the staff like so:

So, let's look at how the drummer will usually handle 4/4 time [Note: Drum notation is a little different than standard notation in that the lines and spaces of the staff represent the different parts of the drum set, and different noteheads are used for cymbals and tom-toms. Also, a drummer doesn't have to worry about playing different pitches, so a percussion clef is usually used.]:

In 4/4 time, the bass drum will usually play the 1st and 3rd beats of the measure, and the snare will play the 2nd and 4th beats:

Listen

The high hat will usually play eighth notes:

Listen

This is the basic framework within which the drummer has a lot of freedom for variation. For example, it's very common to throw in an extra bass drum beat before or after the 3rd beat of the measure and on the & of the 4th beat of the measure:

Listen

Listen

Listen

Here's an interesting example that really mixes it up:

Listen

The possibilities are endless, but this is enough to give you the basic idea.

Now, the reason for this diversion into drum playing is that rests are easiest to understand within the context of what the rhythm section (bass guitar and drums) is playing.

Most people, when first learning to play an instrument, have a hard time thinking globally. They're too focused on their own instrument, and tend to think that they have to fill up all of the available time with their own playing. Besides, practicing silence is not as fun as filling up that silence with guitar notes!

Below is an example of a part that a horn section might play:

Listen

That funny blue sign at the end of the second staff is called a REPEAT. We'll cover repeats in more detail in a later lesson, so, for now, just think of this repeat sign as telling you to go back to the beginning and play the whole thing again.

Now, by itself, this horn part is not very exciting. But, see what happens when we add a drum part:

Listen

If we add a bass line, we can make the horns sound even more interesting:

Listen

You can see from the above examples that the spaces that the horns are leaving make the whole thing work. If the horns were filling up all the space, the music wouldn't be half as interesting:

Boring (and ugly!)

Again, instead of giving you countless (no pun intended) drills to work through, I've included two tunes in the music section of this lesson that feature rests in conjunction with the main riff of the song.

Understand, learning to read is a very valuable skill that will heighten your awareness of rhythm to a fine degree. And, although the ability to read warrants serious consideration, I don't think that beating it to death with endless drills and exercises is the way to foster much enjoyment out of the process of learning. Instead, the best approach is to delve into things when they seem interesting and pertinent to what you're trying to accomplish, and let things rest (no pun intended) for a while when they seem frustrating or overwhelming. Asking a lot of questions can also help to get past roadblocks.