Rhythm

No matter what instrument you play, rhythm should be studied as a separate subject unto itself. It is the thing most often neglected by those of us who are not drummers but it absolutely needs to be understood for two reasons:

1. The greater your understanding of rhythm is, the better will be your feel for the groove of whatever you are attempting to play and the better you will be able to communicate with your audience. Playing “in the pocket” is what separates the pro from the novice more so than how many notes you can play. In fact, the true top musicians can communicate more with an audience using 5 notes and one hand than someone else using two hands and a half a chord dictionary.
2. It is usually an underdeveloped understanding of rhythm that causes so many musicians to stumble when they attempt to learn how to read music. Figuring out what notes the lines and spaces of the staff translate into on your instrument requires a lot less study and a lot less practice than what all the various combinations of dots and dashes can add up to from a rhythmic perspective.

The main thing to understand however is that rhythm and rhythm notation is really just the constant recombination of the same handful of 20 or so rhythmic combinations. The actual number of recognized combinations is arguable depending on who you talk to and what style of music you are playing but the wisdom behind the method is universal. In the same way that the english language is made up of the same recombination of 44 sounds which are themselves derived from the 26 letters of the alphabet, rhythm and rhythm notation, from style to style, is also made up of a virtually finite number of combinations that can be learned and then read on sight or recognised when heard or conceived of in the mind. That is what this section of this site will be dedicated to.