Songwriting Rhythm Patterns

Songwriting Rhythm Patterns Matrix Infographic - Learn How to Write Songs
In this post we will explore Songwriting Rhythm Patterns. When a composer writes a melody they work with two basic elements. These elements are tone and rhythm. Tone is the pitch and rhythm is the duration of the note being played. Let’s take a look at rhythm. For this exercise I limited shortest note duration to a quarter note. What I found was there are only 16 rhythm pattern combinations. In the info-graphic is the result of those patterns.

What Composer Need

As a composer it would be beneficial to learn and use these songwriting rhythm patterns when writing music.  Of course this matrix could be expanded to eighth notes of which the matrix would grow exponentially.  All you need to do is take the above information and cut the time in half.  If you combine this 4 beat matrix with the 8 beat matrix you could get 256 rhythm patterns. That is a lot of patterns!

Online Tool

The Online Rhythm Motif tool creates patterns based on these combinations. It is a great tool to use when writing a melody.

Music is like an image put on the canvas of time. Music takes place in time by controlling the duration a note is played.  When these time variation at grouped it creates rhythm. Time in music is created by pulses, beats, tempo and meter.

Rhythm Is Important

A great melody needs rhythm. That is why it is important to know these songwriting rhythm patterns . Rhythm provides a pulse and accent to the melody. Also, rhythm provides additional color and contrast between the notes and parts of the song.

In addition, the tones and groups in a good melody are measured with reference to harmony of time-values; that is, their metric condition, and their rhythmic arrangement.  These tones act as a team with specific the natural laws relating to the time element of music.

Final note on Songwriting Rhythm Patterns

When a music composer writes a melody they use two basic elements.They are pitch and rhythm. in this post looked at 16 songwriting rhythm patterns useful for writing melodies.

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