Note values: how long a note lasts

Written music has to say two things about every note: which one, and how long. Pitch gets the vertical axis. Duration gets the shape of the note head and whatever is attached to it, and the system is simpler than the vocabulary suggests.

Everything halves

There is one whole note. A half note is half of it, and two of them fill the same time. A quarter note is half again, and so on down.

The American names tell you the arithmetic. The British names are older and tell you nothing, but they are shorter to say out loud, which is why players who grew up with them keep using them. Neither is more correct.

The quarter note is usually the beat

In most music you will meet, a quarter note gets one beat, which is one tap of your foot. Two eighth notes fit in a beat, four sixteenths fit in a beat, and a half note takes two beats.

Usually, not always. That is what the bottom number of a time signature is for, and in six eight the beat is a dotted quarter, which is why six eight feels like two rather than six.

Dots add half

A dot after a note makes it one and a half times as long. A dotted half note lasts three beats instead of two. A dotted quarter lasts a beat and a half.

That last one turns up constantly, because a dotted quarter followed by an eighth is the lopsided long-short pattern behind an enormous amount of folk music. Once you can feel it you start hearing it everywhere.

Ties join, rests subtract

A tie is a curved line between two notes of the same pitch, and it means hold through both rather than play twice. Ties exist because bar lines are strict: if a note needs to last across one, it has to be written as two notes tied together.

Rests are silence, and every note value has a matching rest. Beginners tend to treat rests as a gap in the music. They are not. They are part of it, and a rest played at the wrong length is as wrong as a note played at the wrong pitch.

The bit nobody writes down

Written values are exact and played values are not. In swing, two written eighth notes come out long-short, roughly two to one, and no jazz score bothers to notate that. In a lot of folk fiddling the first note of a pair is nudged slightly early. Classical players stretch the end of a phrase.

The notation is a set of instructions, not a recording. If you want the thing itself you still have to listen to someone play it, which is a good argument for spending less time reading about rhythm and more time hitting something in time.