Reading Music Lesson 1a: Note Values

Reading Music Lesson 1a: Note Values

Reading music requires two skills: understanding how long or short a note would be held for based on the shape of the note, and understanding what pitch a note is (i.e., the letter name) based on its position on the staff. This lesson will explain the first of them.

Music is counted in small units that we call beats. I usually say that a beat is the length of a clap, but they can be as long or as short as you want them to be *as long as they're all the same length within the piece you're playing*.

We divide music up into units called bars or measures (these words are synonyms for each other and therefore can be used interchangeably), separating bars with a vertical line we call a barline. At the beginning of a song, a symbol called the time signature will tell you how long the bars will be; that is, how many beats will be in the bars. There are many different time signatures, but the most common one has 4 beats per bar and is called 4/4 time. 

Here is where a link will eventually be to show an example of a time signature and barlines!

Note: I find it easiest to remember notes by using math, since the names of the notes are fractions. However, if the idea of adding math to music is upsetting to you, you can just memorize the values of each note :-)

Because 4/4 is the most common time signature, we refer to differently shaped notes by how much of the bar they take up. So since the bar is 4 beats long....
? A whole note fills the whole bar, making it worth 4 beats.

? A half note fills half of the bar, making it worth 2 beats.

? A quarter note fills a quarter of the bar, making it worth 1 beat.

? An eighth note fills an eighth of the bar, making it worth a 1/2 beat (meaning ?? = ?)

? A sixteenth note fills a sixteenth of the bar, making it worth a 1/4 beat (meaning ???? = ?)

We also have a "dot" that can be put beside any note. Dots sound complicated at first, but it's just a trick! Don't be frightened! A dot adds half of the value of the note that it's on to the full length of the note (the formula would be "dotted note" = "note" x 1.5 ). This means that...

?. A dotted half note is worth 3 beats (because [2 + half of 2] = [2 + 1] = [3])