The Complete Idiot''s Guide to Music Theory

Chapter 5:Note Values and Basic Notation

The following table shows all the notes you’ve just learned and their correspond-
ing rests.

Notes and Rests

Duration Note Rest

Whole note

Half note

Quarter note

Eighth note

Sixteenth note

Taking a Note—and Dotting It

Sooner or later you’ll run into something a little different: a note or a rest with
a dot after it. When you run into one of these dotted notes,that note should have
a longer duration than the normal version of that note—one and a half times
longer, to be precise.

Here’s where your math skills come back into play. Let’s take a dotted quarter
note as an example. A regular quarter note is worth a single beat. If you multi-
ply 1 × 11 ⁄ 2 , you get 1^1 ⁄ 2 beats—so a dotted quarter note is worth 1^1 ⁄ 2 beats. You
also could go about it by saying a quarter note equals four sixteenth notes, and
4 × 11 ⁄ 2 = 6, and 6 sixteenth notes equal 1^1 ⁄ 2 quarter notes. However you do the
math, it comes out the same.

So when you see a dotted note, hold that note 50 percent longer than you
would do normally, as shown in the following table.

Dotted Note Values

This Dotted Note ... Equals This

You can also have dotted rests, which work the same as dotted notes. When you
see a dot after a rest, that rest should last one and a half times the value of the
main rest.

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