The Complete Idiot''s Guide to Music Theory

Part 2:
Rhythms
62
Taking Count
It’s fairly easy to write down a series of notes—but how do you communicate
notes and values to other musicians verbally? Do you go all mathematical and
say things such as “the fourteenth sixteenth note” or “the eighth note after the
two sixteenth notes on beat four”—or is there an easier way to describe your
rhythms?
Just as you describe absolute pitches by using letters (A through G), you describe
absolute rhythms by using numbers—and you need only to be able to count to
four.
It starts fairly simple, in that each beat in a measure is counted as either one,
two, three, or four. So if you’re counting off four quarter notes, you count
them as one, two, three, four. If you want to talk about the fourth quarter note
in a measure, you call it “four,” as in “in the last measure, make sure you play a
B-flat on four.”
If the beat is always one, two, three, or four, what about the eighth notes that
lay between the beats? It’s simple: count them as “and” as in “one-and, two-
and, three-and, four-and,” all very even. You’d talk about an eighth note like
this: “Make sure you play a C-sharp on the 
and 
after three.”
This is pretty easy—but what about sixteenth notes? This gets a little tricky, but
it’ll seem natural once you get into it. Use the nonsense syllables “e” and “ah”
to represent the sixteenth notes between eighth notes. So if you’re counting a
group of straight sixteenth notes, you’d count “one-e-and-ah, two-e-and-ah,
three-e-and-ah, four-e-and-ah,” all nice and even. Still not sure about this?
Examine the following figure, which shows how to count various groupings of
notes.
How to count various types of notes.
Taking a Rest
If a note represents the duration of a pitch, what do you call it when you’re not
playing or singing? In music, when you’re not playing, you’re resting—so any
note you don’t play is called a 
rest.
When you see four quarter notes, you play or sing four tones—one per beat.
When you see four quarter note rests, you don’t play four tones; you rest over
four beats.
Each type of note—whole note, half note, and so on—has a corresponding rest
of the same duration. So you have a whole rest that lasts a whole measure, a half
rest that lasts a half measure, and so on. Rests are used to indicate the spaces in
between the notes and are just as important as the notes you play.

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Chapter 5:
Note Values and Basic Notation
The following table shows all the notes you’ve just learned and their correspond-
ing rests.
Notes and Rests