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Alfred's Adult Piano Lesson 6
Level 1 - Quarter Notes and Half Notes
Alfred's Adult Piano Lesson 6 is a written tutorial to help guide your progress through Level 1 of the Alfred's Adult All-in-One Course. It's free for your personal use!
Have a question? Email me - I'm happy to help!
You can find all the Alfred's Adult lessons that I've created listed here.
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Alfred's Adult Piano Lesson 6
Quarter Notes and Half Notes
Page 13 (first half)
Onward - your first real song is waiting!
Written music is actually very efficient in everything it communicates in a small space! You've already learned in Lesson 5 that where a note is placed on the staff tells you not only how high or low the sound is, but exactly what key to play on your piano. Now, we're going to learn that the note shape itself tells you about how short or long the note is.
Alfred's Adult Piano Lesson 6
Notes and Beats
A quarter note is one beat. Think about when you clap along with kid's songs or nod your head along with your favorite song on the radio. You're nodding or clapping on the beat. If you wrote your clapping or nodding in music, it would be quarter notes!
(Note: those of you who've had music instruction before know that as we get more advanced, that last sentence isn't always the case. We'll get to that later!)
Your heart beat, the ticking of your watch, or the sound of your feet on the pavement as you walk or jog are all steady beats. In music, what we're trying to do is keep that steady kind of beat while we play.
You already have rhythm in you - you breathe, walk, and speak in rhythms. You listen to music, whether it's on the radio or on your favorite TV show. You already get it -- you just need to learn to translate it to the keyboard.
If we put two of those steady beats together, we get a half note -- two beats. Exactly double the length of a quarter note. These are your first two musical building blocks!
Alfred's Adult Piano Lesson 6
Rhythm Practice
In the middle of the page you have a small exercise of notes separated by lines. The lines are called bar lines, and they divide the notes into measures, or equal parts (think of cutting a pizza into precisely equal pieces). I don't mean equal pieces by the number of notes. I mean equal pieces in numbers of beats. If you add up the beats in every measure, what do you find? They all have 4 beats.
All music is this way: measures divide beats equally. As complex or "black" as the music gets, there's always the same amount of beats in a measure!
Now let's work on this rhythm exercise. Start tapping an even beat on the table, a piano key, or your dog! :D Now say the count, speaking at the same time as you tap:
1(tap) - 2(tap) - 3(tap) - 4(tap)
That's the first measure! In measure 2, we have our first half note, so it looks like this:
1(tap) - 2(tap) - 3(tap) - 4
Notice we didn't tap on beat 4? We're holding out that half note for two beats. You still counted to four out loud, but your tap 'held over' from count 3. If you had been pressing a piano key, you'd still hear the sound, your finger would still be down on the key.
You know how to do measure 3 (same as the first measure) so let's do measure 4:
1(tap) - 2 - 3(tap) - 4
Two half notes in a row! Keep practicing this until you can tap and count those rhythms smoothly.
Alfred's Adult Piano Lesson 6
Counting and Tapping
OK, truth time. Most people don't do the counting and tapping, unless they're in a lesson and the teacher instructs them to. Why? Well, of course - the actual playing is more fun, and feels more satisfying. But I'll tell you the truth: the time you spend counting out loud and tapping rhythms will have a huge impact on the speed of your progress and your ability to read rhythm and notes. Huge.
I can't emphasize this enough! If I could tell you one thing that will help you learn easier and faster, it's this! Count and tap! And, as we'll learn in the next lesson, say note names and tap! It's not enough to count inside your head. There's a very real part of our brain that learns best and easiest by combining senses -- so tapping (touch) and speaking (hearing) combine into a powerful tool. Just trust me on this, OK? :-)
OK - happy practicing. And don't forget you can email me if you get stuck, have a question, or have a suggestion!
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