From time to time I need some particular bit of music as a cello teaching aid, but I can’t find quite the right thing in my standard exercise books. So I type it up myself. Thought I might post some of these on the blog, in case they’re useful.

Here, then, is a quick walk through triplet subdivision:

This made for a relatively easy way to talk about dotted triplet rhythms, which look scary at first. On top, it’s not too hard to divide a quarter note beat into three even triplets. On the second line, you can split those in half to make triplet sixteenths. Then, at bottom, you glue some of the sixteenths back together to make the dotted rhythm.

So I lined all that up vertically, and have used the resulting visual to good effect. Hope it helps someone else! (Otherwise, I suppose, I’ll at least be able to find this quickly the next time I need it…) You can click on the image for a high-resolution version that is suitable for printing.

Feel free to reuse this, or any music teaching aid on my website, under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license.

And I should credit MuseScore, Inkscape, and Gimp, which I use to make this sort of thing.