Counting Snare Drum Rhythms Made Of Crotchets And Quavers

We have covered the counting for various rhythms in our Note Values Overview and 16th Note Groupings lessons, but we haven't yet covered how to apply counting when multiple note values are used in the same bar. In this lesson you will begin learning about that idea by applying counting to two bar rhythms built from crotchets and quavers. The exercises below will be much easier if you are familiar with the counting for quarter and eighth notes.

Before we start adding in counting there is a useful trick that will really help you with these exercises. The note values in a rhythm will actually tell you what the counting will be for the next note rather than for themselves. For example, a crotchet lasts for 1 beat, so if we have a crotchet on beat 1 that means the next count will be '2' as beat 1 is entirely filled up. If we had a quaver on beat 1 it tells us the next count will be '+' as only half of the beat is filled up. We will be using this idea throughout our explanations.

The rhythm you will start with looks like this:

The first thing I recomend doing is to write in all of the numbered counts. These are the beats what would be counted either 1, 2 3 or 4. That would look like this:

For the most part the numbered counts are the easiest to spot. '1' will always be the very first thing that happens in a bar. The remaining numbers will usually be at the start of the smaller groupings of notes, for example beat 3 of the first bar. When rests aren't involved, any crotchet count on it's own will usually be a number. If you have put '1' in, '2' will come next and so on up until 4. When you get to '4' you should be at the end, or near the end, of the bar and you will start counting from '1' again. Remember the vertical line through the stave tells us the bar has ended and our counting resets.

Something that can throw you out is the grouping of quavers in fours, shown at the start of bar two in the above exercise. Because there is only one 'crossbeam' joining the four notes, these are still counted '1 + 2 +', so the '2' goes on the third note along. This is very common rhythm shape so knowing how the counting fits with it is important.

Because we are only using crotchets and quavers for this example we now only need to fill in a couple of '+' counts. We can see beat three of the first bar is written as a quaver, if we follow our theory from above that means the next note will be counted as an '+'. The same happens on beats 1 and 2 of the second bar. Giving us the completed counting:

TASK

1. Work out the counting for the following rhythms using the process above, use the counting checker to see if you got it right.

Exercise 1

Exercise 2

Exercise 3

Exercise 4

Try our lesson on Snare Drum Rhythms Made Of Semi Breves and Minims next.