18 Rhythms you should know

this video was made possible by HD piano learn the best songs on piano at hdpiano.com being able to refer to certain common rhythms by name is really valuable when communicating with fellow musicians So today we're going to look at 18 different rhythms starting with the son clave a clave is a concept from AFR huban music where there's effectively a master Rhythm a key Rhythm acting as a template on top of which all of the other rhythmic parts will be built and Son clave is one of the most common types of clave and it sounds like

this and here are a couple of songs putting s clav to [Music] work this is actually a three two son clave because it has three notes in the first bar and two notes in the second bar but you can flip it to get the two three son clave which sounds like this and here are some examples of songs using a two three son [Music] clave now son clave is effectively a Latin music concept but this Rhythm also features in North American and European music as well but here it's called the B diddly beat because it

was used by Bo diddly in his song Bo diddly Bly effectively popularized the Rhythm in the 1950s and then many other songs have gone on to use this in that music you [Music] know he talked and talked and I heard him say that she [Music] had well I guess it would be nice if I could [Music] woohoo [Music] woohoo so this Rhythm can either be called a 3-2 Sun clave or the bow diddly beat but if we take just the first bar of this Rhythm we actually get another common Rhythm called a trao traco is

Spanish for triplet but this isn't a triplet Rhythm that's a rhythm we'll talk about later although this is very similar to a triplet Rhythm and we can see that it still has three almost evenly spaced beats in it you can think about this Rhythm as long long short or 332 when we consider the8 e notes of the bar and how they've been divided and this Rhythm this traco Rhythm was particularly common in 2010's pop [Music] music [Music] tonight by the water she's gone as just not right for you and you you got to go get

angry at all of my honesty come on come on turn the radio on it's right night and I won why would I do without your smart mouth drawing me a song that you can effectively think of as having a trao rhythm is Clocks by Coldplay here the rhythm is effectively constant eth notes but because of the accents falling on this beat this beat and this beat due to where the arpeggio is resetting we wind up with that 332 long long short pattern of Trac let's go out [Music] be so a moment ago we were talking

about son clav but Sun clave isn't the only type of clave another very common type of clave is the Roomba clave Roomba clave is this Rhythm which is actually quite similar to The Son clav rhythm the only difference between s clave and RBA clave is that this beat happens one e note later in Roomba CL also just like with s clave we can have the 32 variation where we have three beats in the first bar and two beats in the second bar or we can have the opposite of that a 23 R clave now although

today clav is associated with Latin American and Cuban Music These rhythmic ideas ultimately originate from Africa from subsaharan Africa which takes us onto our next rhythm today the standard African Bale pattern or what's sometimes called the bembe pattern now in a similar way to how the claves traditionally were played on the clav instrument to effectively pin down the rhythm of the music the standard African Bell pattern the bmbe pattern would have been played on a bell or a similar instrument to once again keep the Rhythm tied down keep this consistent rhythm [Applause] [Music] going although

it's sometimes thought of as being in 68 or even 44 time 128 is the typical way to play and think about this Rhythm now to Western listeners 128 probably reminds them of a shuffle Groove and in fact this standard African Bell pattern is most likely where American Music got its classic Shuffle the Rhythm that's at the heart of jazz and blues and later rock music as well shuffles can come in different shapes and sizes but they're effectively a rhythm in 128 where we are emphasizing the first and third eth note of each beat as with

anything in 128 you can also conceptualize this as being in four four but with triplets on every beat of the bar although shuffles are most closely associated with blues and jazz you can also find them in many different pop and rock songs [Music] amazing no I don't even know your name it [Music] understanding how to read Rhythm how to read sheet music can be quite challenging which is why in this video I've also shown other ways to understand the Rhythm Beyond just notation and this is the same philosophy shared by HD piano today's sponsor who

are a fantastic resource for learning how to play the piano HD piano offers really easy to follow tutorials on loads of classic songs and they never use notation they never use sheet music if you've never played piano before then I highly recommend trying HD piano out by following the link down below a shuffle is effectively a type of Swing speaking broadly a swing is anytime that the eighth notes of the music are not evenly spaced but instead the first one is longer than the second one but we can actually get a few different types of

Swing Rhythm and they're best to described using what we call swing ratios where we describe the ratio between the long and the short eighth note the swing ratio we have on screen right now is what we would describe as 3: one because the long note is three times as long as the short note a shuffle is a 2:1 swing ratio because the first note is twice as long as the second note it's important to remember though that when musicians actually swing when they play swung rhythms they're not thinking this consciously about how much the rhythm

is swinging and in practice the amount that the rhythm is swinging will vary and will not be necessarily precise so swing is when the first of the two notes in the rhythm is long and the second one is short but we could have a rhythm that was the opposite of this we could have the short note first and then the long one and this is what's called a scotch snap or can also be called the Lombard Rhythm the name Scotch snap comes from its use in traditional Scottish [Music] music and the Lombard name is more

associated with barck music for example this piece here by Henry pel but we can also hear this rhythm in modern music as well and as Adam Neely points out in his great video on the topic there's loads of R&B and hip-hop music at the moment using this Lombard Scotch snap Rhythm can I you something just between you and if I'm shining everybody going to shine I was born like this don't even got to try it it for our next Rhythm let's go back to Latin America and talk about the bosan NOA bosan NOA is a

Brazilian style of music that emerged in the 50s and 60s it makes use of various syncopated rhythms but there's one particular Rhythm that you can consider the archetypal bosanova Rhythm and it's this I like to think of it as 33433 although you won't find it in every bosson NOA you can often hear this Rhythm played on the snare in boss andova [Music] songs and occasionally you can also hear boson NOA influencing other music for example we can very clearly hear a boson NOA beat on Break On Through by the [Music] this rhythm is known as

the [Music] Charleston the Charleston was originally a song written for the Charleston dance which was popularized by the Broadway musical comedy running wild the Char song prominently features this Rhythm it's effectively the first two notes of a traco rhythm or a s clave [Music] Rhythm a waltz is a very common three four rhythm a simple pattern of three beats one strong and two weak producing a sort of rhythm Wales were originally written of course for dancing to but soon enough composers started using the style and sound of the Walts for music that wasn't actually intended

to be danced to for example chopan used the Walts as the foundation of many of his pieces but they were never written to be danc [Music] to the Walts has also never quite gone out of style although less common today we can find many examples of the Walts Rhythm that 34 oapa rhythm in popular musics composed [Music] is all of G oh M rolling in next we have what we could call the 54 clave this is a common Rhythm that you can use when playing in the odd time signature 54 you'll notice that even though

we're in 54 and we have five quarter notes in this bar this clave this Rhythm only features four notes two long and two short this is a popular Rhythm to use to lock into that 54 sound perhaps the most famous example of this CL thish is the mission possible [Music] them now earlier I mentioned triplets triplets are when we squeeze three notes into the space that there would usually only be two notes sometimes people remember the sound of triplets by going triplet triplet for the three hits triplets are a form of what we call tlets

a tolet is just anytime that we have to fit a different number of notes into a space from what would usually go there in the particular meter that we're in so you could have Quinn tuplets or sep tuplets when we're using tuplets for example triplets it means we could effectively have two different meters happening on top of each other at the same time two different rhythmic schemes giving us what we could call a poly Rhythm for example A Triplet as I said a second ago is when we fit three notes in the space where where

we would usually have two but what if we had both at the same time one part was playing the three the triplet and one part was playing the two well we would wind up with a 3 over2 poly [Music] rythm this particular poly rhythm of 3 over2 can be referred to as a hemiola but it can also be referred to as nice cup of tea because nice cup of T gives us the sound of the composite Rhythm of the 3 over2 nice cup of tea nice cup of tea nice cup of tea nice cup of

tea a great example of this nice cup of tea hemiola rhythm is in Daydreaming by radio head the right hand of the piano is playing three notes triplets over the left hand of the piano which is playing two [Music] notes now with poly rythms we could technically have any poly rthm of any two numbers 5 over 4 7 over 11 but in practice there's only really two common ones that you see used we've had 3 over2 which is the first Common one nice cup of tea and the other common one is 4 over [Music] three

which we could name with the helpful phrase pass the godamn butter because that phrase naturally gives us the composite rhythm of that 4 over3 pass the godamn butter pass the godamn butter a great example of this pass the godamn butter 4 over3 three poly rhythm in action is the song Fake Empire by the national in this song we can see that the left hand is playing three beats for every four beats that the right hand [Music] plays as an English person this next rhythm is what I would refer to as the football clap or the

England chant and anybody in England knows that what you're meant to do on the last two hits of that rhythm is say England now first of all I'm really intrigued to know whether anybody from other countries thinks of this Rhythm to do with football or if they know it in a different connotation perhaps different sport different setting I don't know there are a few songs that have used it the oldest being lets go by the Roes let's go let's go and we can hear it in the self-preservation society from The Italian [Music] Job and our

final rhythm today is what we can call shave and a hair cut two bits the two bits here by the way is referring to slang for a quarter in the US so it's saying a shaven haircut costs a quarter it's not particularly clear where this Rhythm came from from how it became popular but there are recorded occurrences of it as early as 1899 what's really interesting about this Rhythm though is we can feel the rhythmic call and response even if it's just played rhythmically like this we know that it needs those two bits to resolve

the Rhythm otherwise it's unsatisfying so of course the classic musician joke is to give you shaving a haircut but not give you the two bits as we can hear for example at the end of this track by Dexter Gordon [Music] so that is 18 rhythms that you should know the names of the thing is with rhythms unlike chords or scales not every Rhythm has a recognized name in fact I would say most rhythms don't have a recognized name the ones that do have a particular prevalence or history that makes it useful to be able to

refer to them by a consistent name so if you can think of any other rhythms that have an established name do let me know in the comments down [Music] below