Learning to Read Syncopated Rhythms at the Piano
In the ten years since I started back with piano, I've never succeeded at playing syncopated rhythms. When I came across syncopation in a song I didn't already know, I would subdivide the beats and count and play it as best I could, but I could never feel how it was supposed to go. If possible I'd listen to the song on YouTube so I'd know how it went, but that wasn't always enough to be able to play it. I'm disgusted with myself about it since syncopation is everywhere. I really want to play Sacrifice by Elton John but I try and it's impossible.
Reading notation, I've gotten pretty good at audiating pitch. If a rhythm isn't syncopated, I can read the right hand part of a piece and know how the tune goes before I play it. But the minute a phrase comes in on an upbeat, I'm lost. I can't intuitively count it. I have to think hard when a phrase is introduced on the "and" of 3 instead of on beat 4. I slow way down, I count, and half the time I'm still not confident I've got it right.
What I want is to be able to look at the notes in a bar of music and know what the rhythm is going to be without having to count. I want to recognize it at a glance and relate it to a rhythm I've heard before. The same way I can look at a bunch of notes stacked on the staff and know what chord I'm seeing. Right now I'm not worried about my ability to play syncopation well -- just reading it and knowing what it's supposed to sound like.
Even outside of piano rhythm has always been hard for me. I can hear rhythm fine, and I can tell when something is wrong with the timing, but I can't move my body to a beat. I can't even tap out a steady pulse regularly. I didn't grow up moving to music; I always just sat still and listened.
With piano, I had all the same hand-independence problems that everybody struggles with, and I worked through that. My hands can reproduce what's on the page and the rhythm happens as part of the music. But if I try to tap a steady beat with one hand or my foot while playing with the other hand, I can't do it. I've never been a person who could tap my foot while playing piano.
I found a YouTube channel called Piano Dojo and watched a video on Reading Syncopation. The instructor explained that syncopation is about skipping the downbeat to emphasize the upbeat. That was a clear way to think about it. His videos have a lot of hand-tapping exercises in them, where you tap the beat with one hand and tap the rhythm with the other. I tried it with a simple rhythm and I was bad at it. The kind of bad where your hands get confused and one of them just stops while the other keeps going. It's so hard that it's kept me from doing it, because every time I try I'm not good at it and I quit.
But I think about this: years ago I couldn't look at a chord on the staff and name it. I had to read each note individually and work out what chord it was. It was slow and painful and I couldn't do it while playing music at any reasonable speed. Over time, after seeing hundreds of chords on the page, I started to recognize them. Three notes stacked a certain way in a certain position on the staff -- that's a Bb Major chord. I know it by sight.
I want the same thing for rhythmic patterns. I want to see a bar with a dotted quarter note tied to an eighth note and immediately hear the rhythm in my head without having to count it. Getting there means I need exposure to a lot of syncopated patterns, and I need to hear them while I see them. The long-term goal isn't to get better at counting; it's to stop needing to count.
Piano Dojo has courses of rhythm lessons. The channel has short videos too, but most of the course lessons are 20 to 35 minutes long, which means I have to actually commit time to them. My plan is to work through the lessons and do any hand-tapping exercises even though I hate them. When I encounter syncopated rhythms in my regular sight reading, I'll stop and count them instead of skipping over them. I'm going to start collecting rhythmic patterns the way I once collected chord shapes.
I don't know if I'll ever be good at tapping a steady beat with one hand while playing with the other, or if that's even a requirement. I just need to look at a page of music and not be defeated by the rhythms.
Other skills I'm working on in 2026: