Notating music can be a tricky subject. Clefs, Staves, Sharps, Flats, yada, yada, yada. I'm going to discuss one of the most important aspects of music notation...the NOTES and their rhythmic value!
The length of tones/hits are dependent upon the tempo(how fast or slow), and the rhythmic use of symbols on a staff. These symbols are what everyone knows as NOTES! When you see a note on a staff, it is usually related to a specific tone you should be playing, although in straight rhythmic notation(drumming) the notes may implicate a specific drum you should be playing instead. For now, we're not going to worry about how to understand which tone/drum you should be playing. We're just going to concern ourselves with "how long" you should be playing each tone/drum. Every note represents a certain portion of time related to the piece being played. Meaning, if you see "this" note, you play the specified tone for "this" long in the tempo of the piece.
The length of tones/hits are dependent upon the tempo(how fast or slow), and the rhythmic use of symbols on a staff. These symbols are what everyone knows as NOTES! When you see a note on a staff, it is usually related to a specific tone you should be playing, although in straight rhythmic notation(drumming) the notes may implicate a specific drum you should be playing instead. For now, we're not going to worry about how to understand which tone/drum you should be playing. We're just going to concern ourselves with "how long" you should be playing each tone/drum. Every note represents a certain portion of time related to the piece being played. Meaning, if you see "this" note, you play the specified tone for "this" long in the tempo of the piece.
Confused Yet?
It's really basic math skills that'll help you understand the rules of breaking down notes. To keep it simple, I'm going to stick to 4/4 or Common time for this explanation. Using fractions is a good way to understand this concept. In reference to measures of music...a whole note = 1 measure, a half note = 1/2 of a measure, a quarter note = 1/4 of a measure, an eighth note = 1/8 of a measure, and a sixteenth note = 1/16 of measure.
So, how do these notes breakdown?
As you can imagine, if you play a really long tone, you could play the same tone twice in the same amount of time. You'd just play the tone twice as fast, twice :-) Yikes!
Here's a quick view of the breakdown from a whole note to a sixteenth note.
They easily split right in half, or twice as fast.
In the place of a whole note, you can play two half notes, or 4 quarter notes, or 8 eighth notes, or 16 sixteenth notes. It all about the Breakdown...Mathematical!
Hopefully this has helped explain how all those little notes on a piece of sheet music are written in such a way that musicians are able to understand what rhythm they're supposed to be playing. Without the notes we would have no way of communicating what rhythm we want played without playing it ourselves first.
Thank goodness for those little symbols!
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