Rests, dots and metres

In the last chapter there was only one kind of bar: four quarters, everything in it falling on even beats. Now try a waltz with what you know. Put on any Viennese waltz and tap along "in four", the way you're used to: tap, tap, tap, tap, and the strong one again. After a couple of bars your strong tap lands in the middle of the dancers' light step, and a bar later on yet another step. Your hand keeps perfect time, and it still doesn't fit the music.

Tempo has nothing to do with it, and neither do the note lengths. A waltz goes in threes: one heavy step and two light ones. A march goes in twos, left, right. An Irish jig goes in twos as well, but each step splits into three. That is what metre is: which groups the beats fall into, and which beat in each group leads. Musicians recognise a metre by its movement before they see it written down, and in a few minutes you will too.

Music also falls silent. Without rests a rhythm is like speech without breaths, and without dots and ties you can't write a note a beat and a half long. Let's walk through the dance hall: a march, a waltz, a jig, and at the end a song that starts before its first bar does.

The same notes

Below is a single tune: 24 eighth notes up the scale and back down. Its notes never change. Only one thing does: which of them are louder. Press Listen and switch metres while it plays.

In 2/4 the strong beat comes on every other quarter: LOUD-soft, LOUD-soft. The tune starts to march. Switch to 3/4 and the same scale begins to turn: one loud beat, two soft ones. 6/8 has as many eighths in a bar as 3/4, six, but the loud ones come every three eighths instead of every two. The scale starts to rock, like a boat on the waves. All this time you heard the same notes at the same tempo.

A loud beat among soft ones is an accent, which you met in chapter 6. Accents are what a metre is made of: the strong beat opens the bar, and the weak beats up to the next strong one fill it. You read the time signature the same way as 4/4 in chapter 7: the bottom number says what you count in (4 for quarters, 8 for eighths), and the top one says how many of them fit in a bar. 3/4 is three quarters, 6/8 is six eighths.

Now pick "With drums". The strong beats get a kick drum, as in dance music, and you hear the metre at once. Then press "Mystery metre": the grid hides and the widget picks a metre for you. Try to tell it by ear. 2/4 and 4/4 are the hardest pair: in 4/4 the gap between the strong beat and the "medium" one is small, and many marches could be written either way. A waltz or a jig you won't mistake for a march.

The "Use this metre in the Notebook" button changes the metre of your track. Try setting 3/4 and opening the Notebook at the end of the chapter: the piano roll is now marked in bars of 12 cells instead of 16.

The march: left, right and silence

A march is written for feet. People have two, so the most common metre for a march is 2/4: the strong beat on the left foot, the weak one on the right. Here is a march on a drum machine. The kick is on every strong beat, the snare on every weak one. The sixteen steps here are two bars of 2/4.

Take out every other hi-hat, or move the second kick an eighth earlier, and the march starts to limp, but the two-step tread stays. The kick and the snare carry it.

Now do the hardest thing a drummer ever has to do: not play. Take the snare off step 13. Where the hit was there is a hole, and the march goes on: you hear the step, though nothing sounds. That is a rest.

A rest is silence with a length. You count it just like a note: a quarter rest lasts one beat, a half rest two, an eighth rest half a beat. Each rest has its own symbol, and none of them looks like a note, so the eye never mistakes sound for silence.

A quarter, a quarter rest, two quarters; then a half note and a half rest.

Beginners get rests wrong in one of two ways. The first is to tap on the rest as if it were a note: the hand is used to hitting every beat. The second is sneakier: you swallow the rest. You rush and play the next note early, because the silence feels empty and you want to get past it. The widget below catches both. Tap through four bars, and on a rest keep your hand in the air.

Green triangles are taps on a note, red ones are taps into silence. If the note after a rest lights up red and its triangle sits before it, you rushed it: you swallowed the rest. Switch to "Click only" and the rhythm stops sounding. Holding the rest gets harder, with only the click and your memory to go on. Pattern C in 3/4 and pattern D in 6/8 will come in handy later, when we reach the waltz and the jig.

Now from the page. First rests in 4/4, then a march in 2/4, where each pattern takes two short bars.

And the other way round: listen to a rhythm and find how it is written. Watch the rests most closely: the ear easily hears a silence as a long note.

The dot and the tie

A dotted quarter already slipped into the last chapter. Time to find out what it is for. Note values have one awkward feature: each is exactly half the one before. Whole, half, quarter, eighth: 4, 2, 1, ½ beats. So what if you need a note a beat and a half long? Or three beats?

Listen to the end of the first phrase of "Ode to Joy". The next-to-last note, E, is held longer than the others, and the D after it is short, as if it had tripped. That is what makes the phrase recognisable.

Beethoven's "Ode to Joy": the last bar has a dotted quarter, an eighth and a half note.

The long E lasts a beat and a half. It is written as a dotted quarter. A dot to the right of a note makes it longer by half its own length. A dotted quarter is a quarter plus an eighth: 1 + ½ = 1½ beats. A dotted half is 2 + 1 = 3 beats, exactly one bar of 3/4. A dotted eighth is ½ + ¼ = ¾ of a beat. A rest can take a dot as well.

There is a second way to make a note longer: the tie. It is a curve joining two notes of the same pitch. You don't play the second note again, you just keep holding: the lengths add up. A quarter tied to an eighth sounds exactly like a dotted quarter. So why have two ways? See for yourself.

While the note sits at the start of the bar, the dot and the tie give the same result: listen to both, and the sound is identical. Now pick "From beat 4" and choose the dotted quarter. The note starts on the last beat of the first bar and ends in the second. The bar line cuts it in two, and you can't write such a note as a single value: each bar has to hold exactly its own beats. That leaves the tie: a quarter before the bar line, an eighth after it, and a curve between them. The tie can do what the dot can't: carry a sound across the bar line.

You can tell a dotted rhythm by its "long-short": a dotted quarter and an eighth. Tap it. The eighth after the dot falls on the second half of a beat, and it is easy to play it too early, turning "long-short" into two even notes.

The double dot

A note can also carry two dots. The second dot adds half of what the first one added: a double-dotted half is 2 + 1 + ½ = 3½ beats. You will hardly ever meet a double dot in songs or dance music, but it does turn up in scores from the 18th and 19th centuries. If you see one, add it up by the same rule.

Build a bar

Now you have the whole set: notes, rests and dots. Writing rhythm comes down to one rule: each bar holds exactly as many beats as the time signature promises, no more and no fewer. Put it to the test. Each bar already has a beginning; add note values until the bar is full. The scale under the notes shows how much room is left.

Some bars fill in one move, others make you think. In 3/4, after a dotted quarter there is a beat and a half left, and you can close it with an eighth and a quarter, or with an eighth rest and a quarter. In 6/8 the scale counts in eighths: a bar is six eighths, two groups of three. The last bars come with a rule: no credit without a rest, or without a dot. Once a bar is full, it plays twice.

The waltz: one heavy step and two light ones

A waltz is danced turning round the floor, and its step goes in three: a heavy step with a turn on beat one, two light steps on beats two and three. That gives the accompaniment you hear in every waltz: a bass note on the strong beat, two chords on the weak ones. Musicians call it oom-pah-pah. On a drum machine it looks like this:

Twelve steps make one bar of 3/4: four sixteenths for each of the three quarters. Try adding a kick on step 5. The waltz turns heavy and starts to limp, because beat two now weighs as much as beat one. Take it off again and put the snare on steps 5 and 9: now it is the "waltz" of a pop ballad, with the weak beats brought forward.

Now you tap. The metronome counts in a bar of three and marks every first beat. Your job is to keep all three taps steady without skipping the weak ones.

And now rhythms in 3/4. Here a full bar is three beats, and a dotted half fills it completely. The "quarter, two eighths, rest" figure is pattern C from the rest widget.

If rhythms with rests and dots came easily, the trainers page has the levels "Rests", "Eighths", "Dotted notes" and "3/4 time", and rhythm dictation works its way up to dots and syncopation.

The jig: two steps of three

Go back to the first widget and compare 3/4 with 6/8. Both have six eighths. But in 3/4 they come in three pairs, one pair per quarter, and in 6/8 in two threes. That makes two big steps, each split into three. This is why 6/8 moves in two, like a march, but sways like a waltz.

The difference has a name. In a simple metre each beat divides in two: in 2/4, 3/4 and 4/4 the beat is a quarter, and it splits into two eighths. In a compound metre each beat divides in three: 6/8, 9/8 and 12/8 have two, three and four beats, and each beat is three eighths. So 3/4 is simple with three beats, and 6/8 is compound with two, though both bars hold six eighths. The beat in 6/8 is a dotted quarter. No note without a dot can write a beat like that, which is one of the reasons the dot exists at all.

These are the same twelve steps as in the waltz, but you read them differently: each eighth takes two steps, and the bar splits in half, steps 1–6 and 7–12. The kick is on the first big beat, the snare on the second. The hi-hat ticks all six eighths. Add a kick on steps 5 and 9, as in the waltz, and hear the jig fall apart: the ear starts dividing the same six eighths into three pairs.

The jig was danced in the British Isles as early as the 16th century, and in Ireland and Scotland it became one of the main dances. From there it crossed to the Continent, and in the Baroque era the gigue became the dance that closed a suite. Each of Bach's six suites for solo cello ends with one. Jigs are most often written in 6/8 or 12/8, that is, in a metre with beats of three.

A compound metre doesn't have to sound like a dance. The nursery song "Row, Row, Row Your Boat" is in 6/8, and you can hear the boat rocking from the first notes:

"Row, Row, Row Your Boat" (the tune was printed in 1881): the first four bars.

And here is a twist that surprises many people: a march can be in 6/8 too. "The Washington Post" by John Philip Sousa, from 1889, is written that way. The feet still march in two, but each step splits into three, and the march comes out springy and bouncing. In those years people danced the fashionable two-step to it. A metre is set not by the instruments or the name of the genre, but by how the beats are grouped.

Now tap 6/8 yourself. The metronome doesn't click every eighth, only the big beats: two clicks per bar, one for each group of three eighths.

Test your ear. Four bars play: drums, a bass line and a short tune. Name the metre.

The pickup

The last room is for a party. Everyone knows "Happy Birthday", and it hides a secret.

What metre is "Happy Birthday" in?

3/4, and it starts before the first strong beat 4/4, like most songs 6/8, because it sways 2/4, like a march

The song is in 3/4: every bar has one strong beat and two weak ones, as in a waltz. And the first two short notes come before the first strong beat: they are a pickup. The first strong beat falls not on "Hap-" but on "birth". "Hap-py" is the run-up to it.

Many songs don't start on a strong beat. One or two notes lead in, and the main beat arrives a moment later. This incomplete bar at the very start is called a pickup. Find where the first full bar of "Happy Birthday" should begin. Choose the note that gets the first strong beat and listen: the strong beats play louder and with a kick.

Put the strong beat on the first note and the song stumbles: the accent falls on the short run-up, and the long notes end up on weak beats. Try the second, fourth or fifth note: none of them sounds natural. Everything falls into place only when the strong beat lands on the third note: the two short notes go into the pickup, and both long notes start a bar. Switch to 4/4 and move the choice around: no position puts both long notes on strong beats. The song needs three beats.

A pickup comes with a bookkeeping rule. An incomplete first bar doesn't break the law of full bars: by tradition the last bar of the piece is often left short as well, and together they make exactly one whole bar. If a pickup in 3/4 takes one beat, say, the last bar takes two.

Next

Now you can tell a march, a waltz and a jig apart from a single listen, hold a rest without swallowing it, and you know that a dot makes a note half as long again while a tie carries it across the bar line. You can build full bars in four metres and find the pickup. With that you can read the rhythm of almost any song.

But in every rhythm in this chapter the notes sat neatly on the beats or exactly halfway between them. The liveliest music works differently: the accent is placed off the strong beat on purpose, and that is what makes a rhythm groove. That is the subject of the next chapter: syncopation, swing and quantising on a drum machine.

The Notebook can now set a metre: 2/4, 3/4, 4/4 or 6/8, and the piano roll is divided into bars of the right length straight away. Empty cells between notes are rests, long strips are dotted or tied notes, and the grid shows you when a bar is full. In the next chapter the Notebook gets a drum track.