Counting Snare Drum Rhythms Including Semi Quavers

This lesson continues to discuss how to add counting in the same way our lessons on Counting Quarter And Eighth Notes and Counting Whole And Hald Notes did. This time you'll be including Semi Quavers, which will mean adding in 'e' and 'a' counts on top of the numbers and '+'s already discussed. This is where things get a bit more complex but our idea of a notes current value telling us what count is next will really help. As before, I will talk through an example rhythm before giving exercises for you to work on. We are going to use this two bar rhythm as our example:

An example snare drum rhythm.

As before, start by writing in all of the numbered counts. Remember, they will pretty much always be at the start of each of the little blocks of rhythm. That would give us this:

An example snare drum rhythm with numbered counts.

Now that we have semi quavers involved our next step will be to add in any 'e' counts. By doing this we can work our way through each beat from left to right. You will only need to add an 'e' count if the first note of the beat is a semi quaver, as you can see below there are three of these. With 'e' counts added we have:

An example snare drum rhythm with added 'e' counts.

Next we'll add in the '+' counts, as that is what comes after an 'e' in semi quaver counting. You will add an '+' if the first note of a beat was a quaver or if the previous note was counted as 'e'. That will give us:

A snare drum rhythm with '+' counts added.

Beat 3 of the second bar is the exception to the last rule I mentioned. There you have a quaver on the second note of the grouping, which means the '+' count isn't needed. Finally we can fill in the 'a' counts on all remaining semi quavers. Giving us the complete counting:

An example snare drum rhythm with counting.


TASK

  1. Work out the counting for the following rhythms:

Exercise 1

A snare drum rhythm. Check Your Counting:

Click here for the answer.

The counting for this is: 1e+a2e+a3 + 4 1e+ 2e+ 3 +a4 +


Exercise 2

A snare drum rhythm. Check Your Counting:

Click here for the answer.

The counting for this is: 1 +a2e+ 3e+ 4 +a1e+a2 + 3e+a 4


Exercise 3

A snare drum rhythm. Check Your Counting:

Click here for the answer.

The counting for this is: 1 2 3e+a4e+ 1e+ 2e+a3 + 4


Exercise 4

A snare drum rhythm. Check Your Counting:

Click here for the answer.

The counting for this is: 1e+a2 +a3 +a4e+ 1 + 2 +a3 + 4

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