HOW TO WORK OUT NOTE LENGTHS
Let's look at the most common note lengths: whole notes, half notes, quarter notes, eighth
notes, and sixteenth notes.
When learning to read sheet music, you need to ask yourself 3 questions about the
appearance of a note to determine its length...
Is the notehead filled in?
Does the note have a stem?
Does the stem have a tail?
note lengths
These 3 variables together tell you how long a note should be held. Let's take a look at the
most common note lengths.
WHOLE NOTE OR HALF
The whole note (or semibreve) is the easiest note to write in music because it is a note head
with no stem/tail and it is left blank:
Whole note symbol
You will often hear it said that a whole note or half note is worth "4 beats".
While this is true in time signatures such as 4/4, 2/4, and 3/4, it is not always correct – e.g. in
compound time.
You have to be careful not to assume that the duration of a note is always so clearly linked to
the beats, because it depends on the time signature in which a piece of music is written.
HALF NOTE OR MINIM
A half note (or minim) is half the value of a whole note. Therefore, 2 semitones add up to the
same length as one whole note.
The symbol of half notes is a note head with a stem:
half note symbol
QUARTERNOTE OR BRACKET
A quarter note (or crotchet) is a quarter of the value of a whole note. Therefore, 4 quarter
notes add up to one whole note.
Here is the symbol for the quarter note/crotchet. You can see that the notehead is filled in:
quarter note symbol
EIGHTH COMMENT OR QUAVER
Eighth notes (or quavers) are half the value of a quarter note. As a result, 8 eighth notes
equals 1 whole note.
The symbol for an eighth note is a quarter note with an added tail:
eighth note symbol
SIXTEENTH NOTE OR HALF SEMI-FRAME
Sixteenth notes or quarter notes are half the value of the eight notes and so there are 16 in a
whole note.
Their symbol has 2 tails:
sixteenth note symbol
You may also encounter bills with 3 tails (hemidemisemiquavers), but these are very rare!
NOTE LENGTHS SUMMARY
Here is a summary table of the note lengths and how they relate to each other:
You can see that the quarter note (crotchet) has a filled note head, a stem, but no tail.
Unfilling the note head and removing the stem will lengthen the note length. As you add
more tails to the stem, the note gets shorter and shorter.
NOTE IS UP OR DOWN
Note length symbols with stems can be written stems up or down, depending on where they
are placed on the staff:
When a note is above the middle line of the staff, the stems of the note are pulled down
(starting on the left side of the notehead).
When a note is below the middle line of the staff, the stems are written from the note
upwards (starting on the right side of the note head).
When a note is on the middle line, the stem can be pulled up or down depending on the
surrounding notes and whether they have predominantly up/down stems.
Quarter note stem direction
WHAT ABOUT NOTES WITH BEAMS?
A lot of my students get confused about blasted notes — the good news is they're actually
really simple. If you put 2 eighth notes (quavers) side by side, instead of writing 2 separate
notes with 2 tails, you join the tails together to make a bar. So all the notes in the score
below are the same length….
sheet music blasted vibrations
You can do the same with 2 sixteenth notes (half quarter notes) by joining both pairs of tails
to make 2 bars....
sheet music blasted quarter notes
You can even mix and match….
combined roasted nuts
There are a few guidelines for blasting notes in traditional music notation.
For example, eighth notes should not be beamed together across the middle of a 4/4
measure, while shorter notes are beamed together in beats.
If you want to explore more complex note lengths, you may want to take a look at my
lessons on dotted notes and bound notes.
