Here’s a quick crash course in reading music notation, specifically as it applies to rhythm. If you have never seen standard music notation, this might not be the best place to start. I’m just offering a refresher to be sure we’re on the same page as you go through the rest of this guide.

To clarify some terminology below - I’m using the American nomenclature for most of my terminology. I’ll try to indicate British terminology here in this section when I know it’s different, but in the main guide I’m going to stick to the American system. The one place where I may differ from certain American conventions is in my use of Staves as the plural of Staff. If I’m only talking about one, I’ll call it a Staff, for more than one I will say Staves. Some people might say Staffs for that, but I Iike the word Staves better personally.

For rhythm notation, we can use any kind of music staff - many of my examples will be using standard 5-line notation, or piano grand staff notation, and a few might even use score notation (with several staves, up to full orchestra) depending on the context and what I want you to notice. But if we’re really just talking about rhythm divorced from any particular pitch context, I might also use single line “percussion” staves which get rid of the pitch dimension entirely and just show rhythms. I might also occasionally make use of beat or slash notation (not to be confused with beat slashes as discussed in the “Notation Tips” section). For this version of beat or slash notation, the noteheads become slashes or some other shape and just indicate rhythm, again divorced from pitch, even if they are used on a 5-line staff.