Q: okay, I can recognise beats. what's the next step?
A: most music uses beats in groups of 4. (1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4, etc). listen to some songs and find the beat like you did before, but instead of counting them all the same, see if you can count them in groups of 4, and see if you can easily find where the "1" is. these groups of 4 are called Measures (or more commonly called "Bars"). every 4 beats (1, 2, 3, 4) makes up a bar. a bar is a unit of time which is 4 beats long. Most songs use 4 beats per bar. some songs use 3 (or even other numbers in rare cases) but usually 4. See if you can find the beats and bars in some of your favorite songs. then the next step is to get some staff paper and i will tell you how rhythms work. actually you can do rhythms without staff paper but if you want to learn to read you are going to eventually have to get staff paper. ok let me know when you are ready for the next step