If you applied yourself to the past two months’ columns, you should now be able to recognize all the notes from an open low E up to a high G at the 15th fret of the high-E string. You should also be able to count them as quarter-notes (one note per beat) or eighth-notes (two notes per beat, as in “one-and-two-and, etc). Sharp-eyed readers (which we all aspire to be) have also noticed that sometimes bars contain things we haven’t really discussed, such as rests—corresponding moments of silence that are divided up just like their notey siblings: quarter-rests, eighth-rests, etc. Hopefully you figured that out on your own, because for these lessons to avoid getting bogged down in minutia (or drag on forever), you’re going to need to take some initiative, put two and two together, and draw on the musicality you already possess to keep cracking this code. All of this info is readily available on the web. What we’re trying to do here is keep it fun and guitaristically relevant. To use the language metaphor yet again: I’m not trying to teach you how to conjugate 1,000 verbs in Spanish. I’m trying to give you enough info so you can order a beer and crack some jokes on your next trip to Cabo. Still, though, we need some building blocks, so here you go.
Most rock music is in 4/4, as designated by the fraction or “time signature” you see at the beginning of a line. Think of the top number as the number of beats per measure, the bottom as the type of beat, so in this case four quarter-notes (or their equivalent) per measure. If you see 3/4 (waltz time), think three quarter-notes per measure. 6/8