Last Updated on 29 April 2026 by Victoria Williams
Rhythm
Rhythm and melody are two distinct elements in music. The vast majority of music uses both melody and rhythm at the same time, but you can also have these two things separately.
Lots of percussion instruments, like the drums, hi-hat, the tambourine or the maracas, aren’t tuned to any particular notes – instead of making a musical note, they make a musical sound. {bom bomba bomb om, bom bom}. They can’t play melodies, but they can play rhythms.
On the other hand, some music is based purely on pitch or sound, with no recognisable rhythm. like Medieval Gregorian chants… or the modern day composer Ligeti – check out his Requiem to see what I mean: you can find it on Youtube.
But, as I said, most music combines rhythm and melody together. As you look along the stave from left to right, you can think of it as a time line. At the beginning of the music there will normally some kind information telling you what speed, or tempo, the music needs to go at. This is sometimes just a word like “fast” or “slow”, or sometimes it’s a precise speed given as a number.
In classical music the tempo words are most often in Italian, which is just the traditional way of doing it. The most common words are “allegro” for fast, “moderato” for medium speed” and “adagio” for slow. If you find any other words, and there are lots!, just google them, but always include the words “in music” or something similar, so that you get the right translation. Sometimes the words might be in other languages – German and French are quite common.
If there is a number written above the start of your music, this will tell you the speed to set your metronome to. If you don’t own a metronome you can download one as an app on your phone. Let’s set the metronome to 60. Each of those clicks is one second apart. The number 60 means “60 clicks per minute”, and that’s why they each last for a second.
At 120, each click is ½ a second apart, so it’s twice as fast. Each setting on the metronome works out as that many clicks per minute, so the higher the number, the faster the clicks.
Metronome clicks are regular – once you’ve set the metronome, it carries on at the same speed. In music, each of the clicks is what we call a beat. In most music, the beat is more or less steady, continuing at the same speed all the time.
The rhythm of the music, on the other hand, can be slow or fast, steady or changing, while at the same time the beat remains steady.
When you listen to pop or rock music, usually there’s a drummer involved. The drummer’s job is partly to keep that steady beat going, and the steady beat is what makes pop music easy to dance to.
In classical music the tempo and beat are often a lot more fluid. The beat tends to speed up and slow down by small amounts, and it’s much more unusual to find a steady drum beat going on in the background. But even without a steady background beat that you can hear, we can still normally feel what the beat is.
Learn More About Rhythm
If you’d like to learn lots more about rhythm, please consider joining one of my Video Courses! We start with the basics of rhythm notation in Grade 1 Music Theory. See the Course here:
