Browsing Tag: one

Hi. Welcome to this session on rhythm and
more precisely how we write down rhythm in music, and I’m hoping to explain
everything that you would need to know to pass grade one theory when it comes
to writing down rhythm, although of course you may not be interested in
doing grade one theory but you just want to know about rhythm. Well let’s start
off with a note that we call the semibreve, if you are in America you
might know this note as the whole note, and it’s simply written like this, and
that semibreve or whole note has four beats. So it simply means if I’m playing
a piece of music, I’m going to count four beats every time I see one of those
semibreves. One two three four, one two three four, and so on. Now we don’t want
to live in a world of semibreves, that would be rather boring wouldn’t it, so
how about this. If I write another semibreve and this time I put a stem on
it, that halves the value of the note, which in the American system is called
the half note. We call it a minim and it has two beats. Perfectly possible for the
stem on this note to go up instead of down and we’ll say a bit more about that
later. If the stem goes down it always goes down on the left-hand side of the
note, and if the stem goes up it always goes up on the right-hand side of the
note. I’ll just draw that so you can see exactly what I mean,
so it could be written either way. The next note, we start with the semibreve
again, we put the stem on it that we had for the minim, and now we’re going to
colour it in and this is called a crotchet, or in the
American system it’s called a quarter note and it’s worth one beat. After that
we can get even faster with our rhythm I could write another crotchet, and if I
put a little hook on the bottom of it like this, that’s called a quaver or in the American system is called an eighth note,
so that’s worth half a beat and I can carry on like that so if I put another
hook on the bottom of the note, there we are two hooks, it’s now a quarter
of a beat. That’s all you’d need to know for grade one theory on the basics of
notating rhythm, but I’ll just let you into a little secret if you put an extra
hook on the bottom of that so we have three hooks it will be an eighth of a
beat. If you put another hook on again it would be a sixteenth of a beat and so we
go on. Now what do those actually sound like? We started by thinking about the
semibreve a few moments ago. If this is a semibreve, one two three four, one two
three four, and then we move on to minims you’ll see how it works, one two,
one two, one two, one two, if we go onto crotchets we’ll have one note on each
beat, one two three four, one two three four. If we go to quavers, because they’re
worth half of a beat we would have two quavers to each beat, we’d have one & two & three & four & one, and so on. Semiquavers, they’re going to be four of
those to every beat, one two, one two. So you begin to see how these different
rhythms will interact in any piece of music. Now let’s be sure about the
spellings of these particular note values so the first one we said was
called the semibreve. This one, the two beat note remember, is called the minim. This one is called a crotchet, now be really careful how you spell this word. Because lots of people end up writing the word crochet, when they really mean crotchet. So this is how we spell crotchet. That’s the letter that gets missed out. This one is the quaver. This one, the quarter beat note is the semiquaver. Okay. Now another thing we can do is we
can put dots after each of these notes. Now you may be wondering what on earth
we would want to do that for, if you put a dot over a note or underneath a note
that’s what we call a staccato marking, which means that you’d play the note
detached rather than smooth. If I play group of notes smoothly they sound like
this, if I detach them they sound like this. That’s a staccato, so if you put a
dot above or below a note it’s telling you to play staccato. However if you put
a dot after a note it will affect the length of the note so let’s have a
little think about what that really means. Because when you put a dot after a
note, it increases the value of that note by half as much again. This is beginning
to sound like maths isn’t it but if I had a semibreve, we discovered a few
moments ago that a semibreve is worth four beats, but what about a dotted semibreve. You see, I’ve just put a dot after it, so I’d have four for the semibreve and I’d have to add on half of four for the dot, so half of four is two, which means that a dotted semibreve would be worth six beats. Now six beats is
actually quite a long time so you’re very unlikely to come across a dotted
semibreve. You’re much more likely to come across a dotted minim, so here’s a
minim with a dot after it and we do just exactly the same piece of maths again, so
we say we’ve got two beats for the minim and the dot must be worth half of two,
half of two is one, so the total value of that is three. That was called a dotted
semibreve, this is called a dotted minim. So you’re beginning to see how this works. It
starts to get a bit more complicated soon because we have to get into
fractions, but don’t panic too much. Here’s a
crotchet and we learnt that a crotchet is worth one beat, so if I put a dot after
that and make it a dotted crotchet I’m going to have one for the crotchet and
then half the value of one is obviously half, so the total value of a dotted
crotchet is one and a half beats. Now you may think well that must sound a bit strange when you play it because how do you have a note that’s one and a half
beats long? Quite often in music you find you have a dotted crotchet followed by a
quaver, so you have a note that’s worth one and a half beats and then you put it
alongside a note that’s worth half a beat, so it sounds like this if I put a
whole series of dotted crotchets and quavers together, one two & one two &
one two & one two & one, so that’s a rhythm you’ll have heard many times in
music. Okay let’s go a bit further what about a dotted quaver, well we know a
quaver is worth half of a beat so the dot must be worth half of a half, so
that’s going to be a quarter, which means that the total value of a dotted quaver
is three quarters of a beat, and again that may sound slightly strange but
sometimes you find a dotted quaver in a real piece of music has a semi quaver
after it. So if a semiquaver is worth a quarter, you can see that the three
quarters from the dotted quaver plus a semiquaver gives you a whole beat and that would sound like this, one two, so there again quite common in music. Well you could go on couldn’t you
and do a dotted semiquaver and so on as long as you can deal with your fractions
you’ve got the idea as to how the note values actually work. Now the other thing
we want to just say little bit about is that music is a combination of sound and
silence. So we can plot those notes when we want to make sounds but what do we do when we want silence? It can be very dramatic in a piece of music can’t it
when everybody’s playing and suddenly the whole Orchestra stops or the whole
choir stops and there’s a silence before we go on it can be a very effective
dramatic pause, so it could be a big rest or it may just be a whole series
of little rests. If you’ve ever been to listen to an orchestra or a choir or a
band you’re noticed not everybody is playing or singing all of the time
sometimes some instruments play them they have a rest while other
instruments are playing, and so we have to have signs for these silences or for
what we call rests. So we talked about the semibreve, here are the five lines of
music and the semibreve rest looks like this. It’s a little box that hangs down
from the fourth line of the stave, one two three four five, okay I just used that
word stave, I should explain what that means, music is written on five lines, one
two three four five. The five lines of music are called the stave. So the
semibreve rest hangs down from the fourth line of the stave, so that rest
is a semibreve rest with four beats. Not to be confused with this rest which
looks the same, so I’ve got my five lines of the stave again and this time I’m
going to draw another box just like the one we did above
but this time it’s going to sit on the third line. Do you see the difference,
that one’s hanging from the fourth line, this one is sitting on the third line up
on the stave, and that’s the minim rest and the minim rest is worth two beats.
We then have a crotchet rest which is written in various ways but there’s one
way of doing it. That’s a crotchet rest, and that of
course is worth one beat and if we go on from there the quaver rest looks like a
seven, so that’s a quaver rest and it’s worth half of a beat, and just as we did
with the length of notes, if I put an extra hook on that quaver rest there’s a
semiquaver rest, and that’s worth a quarter of a beat. And I could carry on
if I put a third hook on there it will be an eighth of a beat, if I put a fourth
hook on it would be a sixteenth of a beat and so we could go on. Two little things I
need to say before we move on from here. This is how a crotchet rest is usually
written, just sometimes in older music you’ll see it written as a backwards
seven, so if the seven is the right way round, it’s always a quaver rest worth
half a beat. If the seven is the wrong way round then it’s another way of doing
a crotchet rest and it’s worth one beat. And there’s just one more thing to say
about the semibreve rest, we’ve talked about this one that hangs down from the
fourth line that’s worth four beats but it also has a second meaning which is a
little bit confusing. The second meaning is if you have a whole bar of music
that’s empty you would use a semibreve rest. So it
doesn’t matter if the bars got four beats in it, or three beats in it, or two
beats in it, if the bars empty you would use one of those rests, so it has two meanings it’s either a semibreve rest
worth four beats or it’s telling you that the whole bar is empty. Now we can
put dots on these rests in just the same way as we put them on notes so if I put
a dot after that it would be a dotted semibreve rest or if I put a dot after
here a dotted minim rest or a dotted quaver rest or a dotted crotchet
rest and so on you get the idea, exactly the same thing applies the dot just
adds on half the value of the note. The main confusion with rests is between the
semibreve rest and the minim rest so here’s a little way to try and remember it. Semibreve suspended, minim mounted. You see the semibreve rest is suspended from the fourth line it hangs down from the
fourth line, the minim rest is mounted on the third line
it sits on that third line, and that gives us the basics of what we need to
know about writing down rhythm. Well if you want to know more come back for lesson two.