https://youtu.be/pGvDqOgd91Y

Welcome, in this video we will be talking about basic rhythm. So up until this point, we’ve been talking about what notes to play but we never discussed how long you should play them, when you should play them and how quickly you should move on from them, this is where the rhythm comes in. 

So today we will be going over basic rhythm terms, a Whole note, a Half note, a Quarter note, and an Eighth note, but before we get into that, we have to know the tempo of our song. 

The tempo is the speed at which the song is being played, this is going to be measured in Beats Per Minute, also known as BPM. So right now on my DAW, I have my BPM set to 130. 

You can hear the metronome being played and this means every single minute this metronome is going to hit 130 times. The tempo of the song is going to be mainly decided by the genre of the song you’re making. 

So a high tempo from 120 BPM to 140 BPM is good for trap. Something slower from 80 to 100 BPM is good for lo-fi and RNB.

So anytime you hear four clicks on the metronome, that is the same length as a whole note. In Hip-Hop you also hear people refer to it as 1 bar.

Anytime you hear two hits on the metronome, that is a half note. 
Anytime the metronome hits once, that is the length of a quarter note. 
An eighth note is two times the speed of a quarter note.

Whole Note - 4 Beats
Half Note - 2 Beats
Quarter Note - 1 Beat
Eighth Note - 1/2 Beat 

Rhythm is also very important for melodies, lets say we were to play some melodies in C minor, it would be really boring if we just played whole notes the whole time. Ideally, having an interesting melody line consists of having multiple different lengths.

This is very basic stuff but once you familiarize yourself with it you can use it to have a lot of variations on your music.