These 6 Rhythms Completely Changed the Way I Make Music

Just like chords and scales—there are rhythm patterns that artists use across all genres and styles of music.

In this video Matt Burns unpacks a handful of the most basic rhythm patterns used in popular music.

Believe it or not, so much music is inspired by the Afro-Cuban claves and tresillos used in salsa, mambo and bossa nova music.

Learning how to identify important rhythm patterns like The Charleston, the tresillo, the hemiola and the son clave is an incredibly valuable skill for learning to modern music and finding inspiration to write better tracks.

00:00 Introduction
00:31 The Charleston
01:21 The Tresillo
02:08 Hemiola
03:07 4/3
04:20 The Double Tresillo
05:11 The 3:2 Son Clave
05:51 Wrap up

[theplaylister]

A shame the chords and background music made it hard to hear/focus on the rhythms. It'd be great to hear 5sec of the rhythm alone then add another instrument and keep the background music more neutral at a lower volume. The visuals are great though!

[HaliPuppeh]

All the noise made it hard to hear the rhythms. There should have been more of a focus on playing the rhythms in question by themselves so we can get the feel.

[ty-lar]

This video is the best thing that's ever happened to me

[nyxmt]

Great vid but I wish you showed the examples inside the daw

[stysnappin]

If you want to dig deeper, The Geometry of Musical Rhythm by Toussaint is a good overview of rhythms from around the world. It’s very academic, but not too dense. I found that using a circular sequencer like Patterning for iOS is a great way to explore the rhythms, it’s also an amazing drum machine.

[AngelHadzi]

Those rhythms are the foundation of most Latin American folkloric music, it´s odd to see them as something "new" Great video, greetings from Argentina

[scattermish]

Great video! But examples at the end of each description to help hammer it home pls 🙏🏻

[joelcurtis]

Is the block notation used to picture these rhythms explained somewhere? I don't find them intuitive at all.

[cvltmxnd]

I just noticed that LANDR is me forever

[arunkumarparimi]

One of the great video I have seen in ma life

[ashleighvilk]

I love this thanks so much, I'm a vocalist and do all by feel, now I know what these are called ;) Thanks!

[RameshKumar-ngnf]

Explanation is well. Would be helpful if you show it in practical in the music instruments. Also request you completely stop background music when explaining rhythms . Was very distracting to me understanding it. Thanks for the lesson 🙏

[timothytlftc]

do a video about "Resolving" as mentioned here 4:58 and here 5:04 What is this Resolve you speak of?

[toddthing]

Useful overview of some key rhythms AND it would have been nice to hear each rhythm with nothing else going on (like others are saying it seems). Especially the Double Tricero, which is a new one to me! I can hear the keyboard chords are playing it, but they're also doing some kind of additional accents. What exactly IS going on?!

[pianocrasher]

I like the way you teach stuff.
Visualize the rhythms, short recap of the origin, mention some popular examples, explain which feeling it creates & make some jokes to ease the “boring” theory. It’s very entertaining.

LANDR please invite Matt more often to your channel & let him explain the mysteries of beat making 😉

[didgeproject]

Thanks for adding more great rhythm knowledge to youtube

[colemanskitchen]

would have been good to hear ... any ... of the examples he sowed us. Or hell could we have at least heard some version of each beat? I guess not.

[magdalenamiamor]

Love the video, you may want to look into the history of the word “exotic”

[brunomarinheiro]

The video is great, but as Brazilian, I'm sorry to say that the salsa clave is not the basis of bossa Nova rhythm

[cedzimagination]

Charleston Rhythm reminds me of Fresh Prince of Bel Air, Carlton doing his dance!