The Complete Idiot''s Guide to Music Theory

Duration
Note
Rest
Whole note
Half note
Quarter note
Eighth note
Sixteenth note
Taking a Note—and Dotting It
Sooner or later you’ll run into something a little different: a note or a rest with
a dot after it. When you run into one of these 
dotted notes,
that note should have
a longer duration than the normal version of that note—one and a half times
longer, to be precise.
Here’s where your math skills come back into play. Let’s take a dotted quarter
note as an example. A regular quarter note is worth a single beat. If you multi-
ply 1 
×
1
1
⁄
2
, you get 1
1
⁄
2
beats—so a dotted quarter note is worth 1
1
⁄
2
beats. You
also could go about it by saying a quarter note equals four sixteenth notes, and
4 
×
1
1
⁄
2
= 6, and 6 sixteenth notes equal 1
1
⁄
2
quarter notes. However you do the
math, it comes out the same.
So when you see a dotted note, hold that note 50 percent longer than you
would do normally, as shown in the following table.
Dotted Note Values
This Dotted Note …
Equals This
You can also have dotted rests, which work the same as dotted notes. When you
see a dot after a rest, that rest should last one and a half times the value of the
main rest.
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Part 2:
Rhythms
Taking Two Notes—and Tying Them Together
Another way to make a note longer is to tie it to another note. A tie is a little
rounded connector placed between two notes; it essentially tells you to add the
second note to the first note.
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A tie makes one note out of two.
When you see two or more notes tied together, you play them as if they’re a
single note; for example, two quarter notes tied together equal one half note.
What do you do if the tied notes are on different pitches? Well, this may 
look
like a tie, but it isn’t really a tie—it’s a 
slur
. A slur is a way of indicating that two
(or more) notes are to be played in a smoothly connected fashion, rather than as
distinctly separate notes.
Another way to think
about a dotted note
is that it has a dura-
tion equal to three of
the next-smaller note value.
For example, a dotted half
note equals 3 quarter notes,
a dotted quarter note equals
3 eighth notes, and a dot-
ted eighth note equals 3 six-
teenth notes.
Tip
This isn’t really a tie; it’s a slur.
Taking the Beat and Dividing by Three
There’s another little oddity in rhythmic notation—and this one is very impor-
tant. Everything we’ve done up to now has divided notes and beats by two.
What happens, then, if you divide by something other than two?
The most common division other than two is dividing by three; this is called a
triplet.
When you see the number three over a group of three notes (or three
rests—or any combination of three equal notes and rests), you know that those
three notes have to fit into a space that would normally hold just two notes.
The three notes of a triplet fit in the space of two regular notes.
Triplets have more of a rolling feel than straight notes and are counted as “trip-
ah-let.” You can have triplets of any note value, although quarter-note triplets
(where three of them are spaced over two beats), eighth-note triplets (three on
a single quarter-note beat), and sixteenth-note triplets (three in the space of a
single eighth note) are the most common.

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Chapter 5:
Note Values and Basic Notation
The Least You Need to Know
◆
Note values are named according to their duration. Whole notes last a
whole measure (in 4/4 time), half notes last a half measure, and so on.
◆
Each smaller note lasts half as long as the previous note. A quarter note,
for example, is half as long as a half note.
◆
Each note value has a corresponding rest of the same duration—which
indicates not to play or sing.
◆
A dot after a note or rest extends the value of that note by 50 percent.
◆
When you fit three notes into a space that normally holds only two, those
notes are called triplets.
Exercises