Notating rhythm is a sore point in music teaching. Classical notation assumes children know note values — and many stall there before they ever get to making music. So we developed our own system for beatbox. It appears in both our books and has been used in workshops since 2006.

The principle

Every sound gets an abbreviation, every stroke gets a slot. The rest is reading left to right.

b     = kick drum
ts    = hi-hat
k     = K snare
ksch  = snare
hi    = breathe in

Strung together, that is a beat. The markers ll: and :ll open and close a repeat — like a repeat sign in classical notation, only without staves.

ll:  b - ts - k - ts  :ll        60 BPM

The bar line | separates bars:

ll:  b - ts - k - ts | b - ts - hi - ts  :ll

And that is the complete notation. There is nothing else to learn.

The beat dictation

The notation makes possible an exercise otherwise reserved for sheet music: dictation. You call out a beat, the children close their eyes, listen, and write it down afterwards. At the end you put the answer on the board.

It trains three things at once — close listening, telling kick, hi-hat and snare apart, and the writing itself. And it is the one exercise in this area where children are quiet.

Watch for: Start easy and raise the difficulty only afterwards. Mention the closed eyes — it genuinely helps with picking sounds out.

Building beats from cards

The second route uses cards. Each card carries one sound. Children lay them side by side and have a beat they can shift, reorder and try out without ever rubbing anything out.

B - Z - B - Z                  four cards  = one bar
B - Z - B - Z - Z - Z - K - Z  eight cards = two bars

In groups of four or five, each group is asked to build two beats — one of four cards, one of eight. At the end the cards go onto a poster that hangs in the classroom. Children genuinely look at those posters during breaks and reconstruct the beats.

You can hand out prepared cards or blank ones, in which case the children write the sounds themselves.

Why a separate notation and not the usual one

There is an objection to this, and it is a fair one: why learn a system that only applies to beatbox?

The answer is practical. A child writing down a beat for the first time in year five should not be learning note values at the same moment. Once the rhythm is understood and can be written, the road to classical notation is shorter, not longer — the structure is already grasped, only the spelling is new.

And for children who think they are unmusical, it is the first moment they can read something musical. That is worth more than it sounds.

The teaching concept behind these exercises was developed jointly by Thomas Rieder and Werner David Wiechenthaler and tested in workshops since 2006. It also produced ”The Real Beatbox School”, published by Doblinger Musikverlag Vienna.

More exercises

All exercises at a glance: Beatbox exercises for groups.