Idiot's Guides - Music Theory Read online

  Rhythm is what drives the music forward and gives it its beat. To learn rhythm, you have to learn about note values. This type of music notation isn’t that hard, really. All you need to learn is a little basic math and how to count to four.

  Before we start, however, let’s lay down some ground rules for this chapter. Although a lot of songs are written with four beats to a measure—one, two, three, four—that isn’t a universal. Some very popular songs only have three beats to a measure. (Think “My Favorite Things,” from The Sound of Music.) And other tunes, especially in the jazz and classical genres, have more than four beats per measure.

  To make it easier to learn the basics, in this chapter we’re only going to address four-beat measures—what we call 4/4 time. All the other types of beats—three, five, seven, whatever—will be covered in Chapter 6.

  And that’s why I said you only have to know how to count to four!

  Taking the Measure of Things

  Rhythm is about counting. Listen to your favorite pop song, and feel the beat. (Go ahead, tap your foot—it’s okay!) You’ll likely feel the beats fall into groups of four—one, two, three, four; one, two, three, four …. It’s easy to hear because it’s very natural.

  Let’s use a specific example: “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” The notes of the song fall into groups of four; just replace the words “Ma-ry had a” with “one two three four” and you see how it works.

  In this and other songs based around groups of four, each group of four beats is called a measure, a container that holds a specific number of beats. In standard 4/4 time, a measure holds the equivalent of four quarter notes. The beginning and end of a measure are signified by bar lines, like this:

  A group of measures on a staff; each measure is separated by left and right bar lines.

  The first beat in a measure is counted as one. The second beat is counted as two. The third beat is counted as three, and the last beat is counted as four. There is no five; if you count out five, you’ve counted too far! Whenever you hit four, the next beat is always one.

  Every time four beats go by—one, two, three, four—another measure is completed. If you put enough measures together—one, two, three, four; one, two, three, four—you have a song.

  Taking Note—of Notes

  Every time you sing or play a tone, you’re also singing or playing a note value. There are different types of note values, with each note value signifying a specific length of time—as measured by parts of a measure.

  To better explain, we have to get into a little math. (Don’t worry—there won’t be any story problems!) You see, each note value lasts a specific duration, and each duration reflects a ratio to duration. As you can see from the following figure, each shorter note is precisely half the duration of the previous note. So if you can divide and multiply by two, this should be easy.

  The most common rhythmic notes; each smaller note is exactly half the previous note.

  Whole Notes

  The most basic note is called the whole note. It’s called a whole note because, in 4/4 time (we’ll get to this soon—I promise!), it lasts a whole measure. Because 4/4 time has four beats in a measure, a whole note lasts four beats. A whole note looks like a big empty oval, nice and whole.

  Whole notes, at different places on the staff.

  When you put a whole note in a measure of 4/4 time, that’s the only note that goes in that measure; no other notes will fit. When you play a whole note, you sing or play your instrument once at the very beginning of the measure (on beat one), and then you hold that tone through the entire measure. In other words, one whole note should last a whole measure.

  Half Notes

  The whole note is the largest note; let’s go down one size and look at the next smallest note. Remember that I said each shorter note is exactly half the previous note? Let’s apply a little math and divide a whole note by two to see what we get.

  The next smallest note is called a half note. (It’s half of a whole note—pretty simple, eh?) Because a whole note lasts a whole measure (in 4/4, anyway), a half note lasts a half measure, or two beats—half the duration of a whole note. Put another way, you can put two half notes in a measure, because two half notes equal one whole note.

  A half note looks like a whole note with a line next to it. The line is called a stem; it can point up or down, depending on the pitch of the note. If the stem points down, it sits to the left of the notehead. If the stem points up, it sits to the right of the notehead.

  Two half notes—one with the stem pointing up; the other with the stem pointing down.

  DEFINITION

  A notehead is the big, oval part of a note. The stem is always attached to the notehead.

  When you play a half note, make sure the tone lasts a full two beats. If you let up after the first beat, you’re playing only half a half note—which is what we’ll discuss next.

  TIP

  If the notehead (the part of the note that isn’t the stem) is on or above the third (middle) line of the staff, then the stem should point down from the notehead. If the notehead is below the third line of the staff, then the stem should point up from the notehead. The only exception to this guideline is when you have a run of connected notes—notes where all the stems are connected, like a run of eighth or sixteenth notes. It’s okay to run two or more of these connected notes together with their stems in the same direction, even if they move past that third line of the staff, to make the music easier to read.

  Quarter Notes

  Let’s keep going. If a half note is half a whole note, what is half a half note? Well, do your math, and when you divide ½ by 2, you get ¼. This means half a half note is a quarter note.

  If a half note lasts two beats, then a quarter note—which is half that duration—lasts one beat. Put another way, you can fit four quarter notes in a measure; one to a beat. When you tap your foot to the beat of most popular songs, your foot is tapping quarter notes. One, two, three, four—each of those counts is a quarter note.

  A quarter note looks like a half note with the notehead filled in, as shown here:

  Two different quarter notes, pointing in both directions.

  Eighth Notes

  Just like those miniature superheroes Ant Man and the Atom (depending on whether you’re Marvel or DC), notes just keep getting smaller. Again, we’re operating on a 2-to-1 ratio, so let’s take a quarter note and divide it in half. Doing the math, ¼ ÷ 2 = ⅛—so the next-smallest note is the eighth note.

  Just as there are four quarter notes in a measure of 4/4 time (4 × ¼ = 1), each measure holds eight eighth notes (8 × ⅛ = 1). Put another way, there are two eighth notes for every quarter note (2 × ⅛ = ¼)—or two eighth notes for every beat.

  An eighth note looks like a quarter note with a flag on it. If you have two or more eighth notes in a row, the flags can be replaced with horizontal beams at the end of the normal vertical stems. (The flags don’t have to be joined together; sometimes it’s just easier to read that way.)

  A variety of eighth notes.

  DEFINITION

  A flag is the little doohickey dangling off the stem of eighth notes, sixteenth notes, and all smaller notes. (It actually looks like a flag flying on a mast.) The flag is always at the end of the stem, so if the stem is pointing up, the flag is above the notehead; if the stem is pointing down, the flag is below the notehead.

  Sixteenth Notes

  Okay, you know where this is going. Half an eighth note is (do the math!) a sixteenth note (⅛ ÷ 2 = 1⁄16). There are 16 sixteenth notes in a measure (16 × 1⁄16 = 1), or 4 sixteenth notes per one quarter-note beat (4 × 1⁄16 = ¼).

  A sixteenth note looks like a quarter note with two flags on it. As with the eighth note, if 2 or more sixteenth notes are next to each other, the flags may (or may not) be joined together.

  A variety of sixteenth notes.

  NOTE

  Although we’ll end this discussion with sixteenth notes, there are lots of notes even smaller
than that. Each successive note is half the value of the previous note and is indicated by an additional flag on the stem. For example, the thirty-second note is the next-smallest note after the sixteenth note; it has three flags on its stem. After that is the sixty-fourth note, with four flags. In actuality, you won’t run into too many notes smaller than the sixteenth note.

  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-a, two-e-and-a, three-e-and-a, four-e-and-a,” 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.

  The following table shows all the notes you’ve just learned and their corresponding rests.

  Notes and Rests

  Duration

  Note

  Rest

  Whole

  Half

  Quarter

  Eighth

  Sixteenth

  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 multiply 1 × 1½, you get 1½ beats—so a dotted quarter note is worth 1½ beats. You also could go about it by saying a quarter note equals four sixteenth notes, and 4 × 1½ = 6, and 6 sixteenth notes equal 1½ quarter notes. However you do the math, it comes out the same.

  TIP

  Another way to think about a dotted note is that it has a duration 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 dotted eighth note equals 3 sixteenth notes.

  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.

  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.

  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.

  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 important. 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.

  NOTE

  Triplets are the most common uneven rhythmic division, but not the only one. You can divide a beat any way you like, which can lead to groups of five or seven or any prime number. (If you divide a beat by a nonprime number, you’re actually dividing by two or more groups of a prime number. For example, if you divide a beat into six, you’re really dividing into two groups of three—or two triplets.)

  Exercises

  Exercise 5-1

  Name the following notes and rests.

  Exercise 5-2

  Write the count (“one-e-and-ah”) below each of the notes in the following measures.

  Exercise 5-3

  Fill in the balance of these measures with eighth notes.

  Exercise 5-4

  Write the corresponding rests for the following notes.

  Exercise 5-5

  Fill in the balance of these measures with eighth-note triplets.

  Exercise 5-6

  Tie each group of two notes (but not the rests!) together.

  Exercise 5-7

  Enter four whole notes, followed by four half notes, followed by four quarter notes, followed by four eighth notes, followed by four sixteenth notes.

  Exercise 5-8

  Draw stems and flags on these notes to make them eighth notes; make sure to point the stems in the correct direction.

  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 thre
e notes into a space that normally holds only two, those notes are called triplets.

  CHAPTER

  6

  Time Signatures

  In This Chapter

  Understanding how time signatures determine meter

  Learning both usual and odd time signatures

  Changing time signatures

  Subdividing odd time signatures

  In the previous chapter, you learned about measures, those containers that hold the beats of a piece of music. The start and end points of a measure are marked by vertical bar lines, and multiple measures combine to create a complete song.

  To simplify things, in Chapter 5 we limited our discussion to measures with four beats apiece, with each of those beats equaling a quarter note. That covers a lot of different songs, especially in popular music. Whatever type of music you listen to—rock-and-roll, soul, jazz, country, hip hop, or even reggae—most of the songs you hear are likely to adhere to this four-beat form.