You will have already played a number of rhythms, but in order to improve your timing skills we must go back to basics, and analyse how a pattern is built up. A bar line is drawn between each bar to indicate where bars begin. The top 4 represents the number of bets in the bar, and the bottom number represents how long these notes are. This is the largest note that will fit in a 4.4 bar. So lets try playing some of those.
Whole notes get a bit dull after a while.
We can further break crotchets down into quavers, and semiquavers. We'll consider quavers and semiquavers more fully in the next lesson.