Lesson 3: Half Notes and Half Note Rests
Overview: This video covers Half Notes, Half Note Rests, Whole Notes, and the 3/4 and 5/4 Time Signatures.
Assignment: Joel Rothman's Teaching Rhythm, pages 5 and 6 : Get The Book (paid link)
You can also get a metronome here: Get the Metronome (paid link)
All rhythms represent durations or lengths of sound. As you'll learn in this series of lessons, the different rhythms indicate different durations. In earlier posts, I wrote about how the staff represents time passing by. I also said the time signature tells you how long each measure lasts in terms of a number of beats.
You already know that when you see a measure in 4/4 time, the measure will last for four beats and that the quarter note is what's getting the beat. In measure one of the example below (Fig. 1), we are now adding a new type of note, the Half Note. It’s the note with an empty note head and a stem. A half note takes up the same amount of time that two quarter notes take up. It lasts for two beats.
Fig. 1 - The Half Note Source: Teaching Rhythm, Joel Rothman (c) 1967 Joel Rothman
When you're playing a pitched instrument, like a trumpet, you would actually hold that note out for the full duration of two beats. Since I'm assuming you are drummers, you won't be able to hold out the note. If you hit a snare drum, the sound is short no matter what. Because of this, you may not hear a big difference between these exercises and some of the quarter note rest exercises from the first four pages in Teaching Rhythm.
The decision to use a half note verses a quarter note and a quarter note rest comes down to what the composer wants. In many cases, it's simpler to use a half note because it makes the music easier to read. However, a composer might use a quarter note and a quarter note rest if he or she wants you to mute the instrument's natural sustain after a beat.
A seasoned performer might also be able to project the feeling of length by using body language that connects with the audience. They would be, in effect, calling attention to the sustain of the instrument (the residual sound from a cymbal crash, for example). In a blindfold test, it might be difficult to actually hear a difference, so the concept might be a little tough to grasp without seeing it in action.
As you have silence for a single beat you can also have silence for two beats. The symbol for that is called a Half Note Rest and it looks like a little black bar sitting on the middle line (Fig. 2). Like the half note, this can be used to simplify the look of the music, because you can use this single symbol as opposed to using two quarter note rests.
Fig. 2 - The Half Note Rest Source: Teaching Rhythm, Joel Rothman (c) 1967 Joel Rothman
This section of Joel Rothman's book also introduces two new time signatures. All time signatures work the same way. The top number tells you how many beats there are in a measure. In the 4/4 time signature, you know there are four beats. The bottom number tells you the type of note that gets the beat. In this case, the four means quarter notes. It's a little bit like a fraction, where 1/4 is also known as a quarter.
Now that you know about half notes, you could put a 2 at the bottom of a time signature. That would mean the half note gets the beat, although we haven’t had any examples of music that use that time signature yet. A 1 on the bottom would mean the whole note gets a beat, but time signatures with that are pretty rare.
In the exercises on pages 5 and 6, the first new time signature you see is the 3/4 time signature. Let's break that down. The top numbers is a 3. That means there are three beats in the measure. In 4/4 you would count to four; in this case you count to three. The bottom number is still a 4; so you know you are counting quarter notes.
Fig. 3 - Quarter Notes and Rests in 3/4 Source: Teaching Rhythm, Joel Rothman (c) 1967 Joel Rothman
In the example, you'll see this measure only has three quarter notes (Fig. 3). You can use any combination of quarter notes, quarter note rests, half notes and half note rests in the measure as long as you only put 3 beats in the measure. No more or no less. You have to use up all the time designated by the time signature and you can't go over. You can't put four quarter notes in a measure of 3/4*. To a practiced musician, the time signature can actually be figured out by knowing how the rhythms add up and knowing this rule.
Below that there’s a summary in 5/4 time (Fig. 4). This time signature follows the same rules. 5 is the number of beats in a measure and 4 means the quarter note is the beat. The time signature is saying that these measures have five quarter notes in them.
Fig. 4 - Quarter Notes and Rests in 5/4 Source: Teaching Rhythm, Joel Rothman (c) 1967 Joel Rothman
For some reason, 5/4 as a time signature has a stigma against it. It's considered odd time because much of the music we listen to in the west doesn't use it. There are a few notable exceptions and they owe their unique feel to the 5/4 time signature. As a drummer, the ability to count and keep time no matter what the time signature is becomes very important, and so it's not worth getting too worried about odd time signatures. Remember, you are simply looking for five quarter notes in these measures and you count to five instead of four.
Finally, you’ll notice another new note right in the final measure of music (Fig. 5). This one is called a Whole Note, and it takes up the time of four quarter notes. You'll recognize it because it's just an empty note head. It doesn't have a stem.
Fig. 5 - Whole note and all previously learned rhythms in 5/4 Source: Teaching Rhythm, Joel Rothman (c) 1967 Joel Rothman
*As an exception, I have seen Whole Notes in measures of 3/4. In those cases, the note doesn't represent four beats as much as it represents a single note taking up the WHOLE measure (whole note, whole measure; half note, half measure; quarter note, 1/4 of the measure; see the pattern?). I don't think this is a good practice and would personally figure out a different way to notate a three beat duration.
So that sums up the new challenges posed in this section of Teaching Rhythm. You can practice these concepts on pages 5 and 6 with a metronome set between 80 and 120 BPM. There’s a link to purchase the book at the top of this article.
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For now, that covers rhythms that lengthen the duration of a note past one beat. In the next few lessons, you'll learn about rhythms that shorten the durations within a single beat. I'll see you next time.