Two Reasons Why Counting Music Is Important

Why Do I Need To Learn To Count?

Before trying to teach an instrument to a student I stress the importance of learning how to count music.  One of my teachers would tell me, “If you can’t count it, you can’t play it.”  The more I work with students the more I believe that this is true.  A student may learn the names of notes and even the fingering but without the ability to count the rhythms he is lost.

So why is counting music so important?

There are two main reasons:

1. If you don’t know the song, counting the music will allow you to play it correctly.
2. If you’re playing music with others, it will allow you to play with them in time.

As a start, I would show the student the correlation between math and music. Someone has said,

A good musician knows his alphabet from a-g and how to count to 4.

This means a student must have an understanding of what the time signature is and means for each song. The top number of the time signature tells us how many beats are in a measure. The bottom number tells us what kind of note receives the beat. In other words, it is the pulse of the song.  The easiest time signature to begin teaching is 4/4 time followed by 3/4 time.

One other piece to introduce into counting music is the three basic counting notes: the whole note, the half note, and the quarter note.  This is where some basic math skills are reviewed.  Since the half note and quarter note are a piece of the whole pie, a familiarity with fractions would be helpful here.  The whole note’s value is 4 beats, so a half note would be 2 beats and a quarter note would be 1 beat.

Now put the notes in a measure and begin counting.

In the above video, Chris did an excellent job improvising the concept of counting music.  It sounds great.