Rhythm and numbers are two very closely related concepts. Both explore order and patterns in their own field of appreciation, and once we climb some steps, complexity appears and both can reflect qualities of each other. Since there are so many rhythmic subdivisions and permutations, a system to recognize them is necessary, and numbers are great for that purpose. Keep in mind this method is not intended to modify, change or replace any system of music notation, it is a personal method developed to identify rhythms with numbers, specially because I write many of them in my smartphone note app, and now, here in Gridmic I use it to differentiate one rhythm from another.

Also, keep in mind most of this first part is basic music theory focusing on note values, something most will be familiar with. If you are not, well, let’s get to it!

How many regular sixteenth notes can we fit in a 4/4 bar? Well, sixteen! This basic notion will give us the framework to understand the following values, since they all come from the sum of sixteenth notes.

For instance, how many sixteenth notes are equivalent to a single eight note? The answer is 2, which means eight notes will have the value of 2

Now, how many sixteenth notes are equivalent in time length to a quarter note? The answer is 4, which means quarter notes will have the value of 4.

Simple, right? So If I wrote the following number sequence separated by commas: 4, 4, 1111, 1111. We would have the following rhythm:

Dotted Notes and Rests

Dotted notes add half the value of the dotted note to itself, so using the same principle as before we can see that a dotted eight note is equal to 3, while a dotted quarter note is equal to 6. So the full note values would be:

Rests can be represented with the most obvious number choice: 0. The thing with rests is they can also be longer than a single sixteenth note, so how do we write them?

For rhythms with single sixteenth note rests like the following, we can simply write the 0 on the corresponding rest place followed by the number values.

For rhythms with eight note rest values, like an offbeat eight note, we can write: 002

For eight dotted notes, we can add three 0’s.

If it is a quarter note rest, it can be a single “0” with the corresponding commas before and after.

With this in mind, we can start assigning values and numbers to the different permutations on the sixteenth note spectrum, and we would get numbers like these:

This same notion applies to more permutations in higher subdivisions, including quintuplets, sextuplets and on!

As you can see this is quite a simple method to write down specific rhythms in non-notation software, it will help you know the rhythms we are talking about in our lessons and posts. On a future post, I will explain a more advanced notation system also using numbers and all kinds of tuplets, including hybrid rhythms.

So, if you suddenly see a weird number in one of our posts or on a product description, now you know what they mean!

Have you developed or adapted your own notation method? Let me know in the comments how it works!