Lesson 24: Rhythm Review – Whole, Half, Quarter, Eighth, Sixteenth, Dotted Notes

Category: Lessons, Reviews

Its been a long time since I’ve talked about rhythm and the time values of notes. So perhaps a mini-refresher lesson is in order. (I know it is for me.) So far we have learned about the following notes:

• whole notes
• half notes
• quarter notes
• eighth notes
• sixteenth notes
• dotted notes

I’ll go over these one by one during this lesson so that we can move on to more complex rhythms during the next lesson.

OK, lets start with WHOLE NOTES.  The whole note looks like a white circle with no stem; the simplest note there is. The whole note is worth 4 counts.

Next, we discussed HALF NOTES. The half note is white with a stem. It is worth 2 counts. That means in the same time that you play one whole note, you could play two half notes.

QUARTER NOTES are worth one count. It is a black note with a stem. You can play 2 quarter notes in the time it takes to play a half note, or you could play 4 quarter notes in the time it takes to play a whole note.

The diagram below displays the whole note, half note, and quarter note, and how they would be counted in a piece of music.

Now it gets a little more difficult. An eighth note is worth half a count. This means two eighth notes can be played in the same time as it takes to play a quarter note. It makes things a little more difficult to count, but you can use the technique discussed in Lesson 14 (Figuring out rhythm). The eighth note is a black note with a stem and a flag. The flag can either be a fancy flag that is not attached to it’s neighbor, or they can be connected together with a bar (see the image below).  These two notations are equivalent, however the notation on the right is used more often when there are multiple eighth note runs. It just looks cleaner, and it can be easier to read.

So the SIXTEENTH note is worth half of the value of an eighth note. This means that 2 sixteenth notes could fit into an eighth note, and 4 sixteenth notes could fit into a quarter note. Again, it is more difficult to count than the other types of notes, but to help count these notes you can use the technique discussed in Lesson 14. The sixteenth note is a black note with a stem and two flags (as shown above). Like the eighth note, the flags can be (and often are) connected together if more than one sixteenth note occurs in a row.

Now for the DOTTED NOTE.  A dot can be slapped onto any note: whole notes, half notes, quarter notes, eighth notes, etc.  Putting a dot behind a note changes the duration of the note by increasing it by half of its original value.  For example: A whole note is worth 4 counts;  A dotted whole note would increase the duration of the note by half of it’s original value (+2), so a dotted whole note would be worth 6 counts. A dotted half note would be worth 3 counts. A dotted quarter note would be worth 1 and a half counts. (This is where it gets fun.) A dotted eighth note would be worth 3 quarters of a count, and on and on it goes.

Lesson 14 does not cover how to count dotted notes.  Keep you eyes peeled and your ears tuned for the next lesson where I will explain how to count out the most common dotted notes and commonly-used rhythm patterns that use dotted notes.

Lesson 13: Eighth Notes and Sixteenth Notes

Category: Lessons

Now is probably a great time to introduce two new kinds of notes to you.  The eighth note looks like a quarter note but it has a flag on it.  The sixteenth note has 2 flags. The eighth note is worth a half count, and the sixteenth note is worth a quarter count.  That means you can fit two eighth notes OR 4 sixteenth notes in the same amount of time that you would use to play 1 quarter note.

Take a look at the note hierarchy.  In this diagram you can see that a whole note is worth the same as two half notes.  A half note is worth the same as two quarter notes.  A quarter note is worth the same as two eigth notes, and so on.

With all of these types of notes, it becomes difficult to understand the rhythm.  There are several techniques you can use to count out the rhythm of a piece of music.  We will discuss these in the next lesson.

The last thing I want to talk about is when we have more than one eighth note or sixteenth note in a row.  In cases like this, instead of each individual note having a flag, the notes are joined together by bars.  For eighth notes, the notes are joined together with one bar.  For sixteenth notes, the notes are joined together by two bars.  Take a look at the phrases below.  The phrase with the flags and the phrase with the bars are equivalent even though they look different.

For more practice, check out the worksheet section.

Lesson 5: Time Signature, Quarter Note, Half Note, Whole Note

Category: Lessons, Music Theory

Piano music is divided by bar lines into small sections called measures.  These concepts are demonstrated in the image above.

Piano music also has numbers near the beginning of the music.  These numbers are is called the time signature.  The time signature is related to the rhythm of the music. Each time signature contains 2 numbers: the top number tells you the number of beats or counts in each measure.   The number at the bottom tells you which type of note gets the beat.  A 4 at the bottom means that the QUARTER NOTE gets one beat.  The 4/4 time signature is a very common time signature.

The QUARTER NOTE  is a black note with a  stem.  It receives one count, or one beat.  The HALF NOTE is a white note with a stem.  It receives 2 counts (1-2).  The WHOLE NOTE is a white note with no stem.  It receives 4 counts, or 4 beats (1-2-3-4).  In the image above, there are 4 counts in each measure.

This lesson introduces you to the basic rhythmic components of music.  Look in the worksheet section for downloadable practice worksheets.