Lesson 5: Endurance of Notes
Lesson 5: Endurance of Notes
The names of the NOTES come from the fraction
of a whole note that they make up. No matter how long you hold a whole note, a half note will almost
always be held half as long; A quarter note will almost always be held 1/4 as long as (25% of) a whole
note; etc... As you saw in the previous section, the whole note has no
stem. Each note has a definitive characteristic. Starting with the eighth note, each of the following
notes has one or more FLAGS. Each flag indicates
a cut in half from the previous endurance. A sixteenth note has two flags - one more than the eighth
note - so it is held out half as long as an eighth note (or a sixteenth of the length of a whole
note.)
There is also such thing as a DOTTED
NOTE. When a note is dotted, such as a half note, you would say "a dotted half note."
This means that the note is held for the normal length of time plus half of that. (It makes a note 3/2
of its original length.) To make a note dotted, you just add a dot after the note. This is what a
dotted half note and quarter note look like:
You may also see a DOUBLY DOTTED NOTE.
This adds a half of the normal length plus a quarter of the normal length. (It makes a note 7/4 of its
original length.) This looks similar to a single dotted note. The second dot occurs directly behind
the first.
There is another way to add length to a note. When two notes are
"TIED" together, they are played as one
note with an endurance equal to the sum of the two notes. This is used often to carry a note into a new
MEASURE since you can't put more than a certain
amount of notes in each measure. Be careful not to confuse a tie with a
SLUR. Ties are bow-shaped and go from the first
note to the next. They can only tie together two of the exact same notes. It wouldn't make sense to tie
A and B together since they have different sounds. Ties that hook more than two notes
together must go from each note to the next. Examples of ties include:
The notes in the BASS CLEF are struck
simultaneously (this is true if they share the STEM).
They are struck only once and held for the length of five times the endurance of a single quarter note
since there are five of them.
The notes in the TREBLE CLEF are
individual eighth notes. Some of them are tied together. At certain times, notes with flags are
BEAMED together. You determine what the note is
by counting the number of beams extending from the stem. This is the same as the number of flags that
normally occur. Examples of beamed notes include:
The first four notes are eighth notes. The first note in the second group is an eighth note because
of the single beam, and the notes following it are both sixteenth notes since they have two beams at
most extending from at least one side of the stem. The third group is sixteenth - eighth - sixteenth.
Here's a quiz to test your knowledge of notes: take the quiz
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