Chapter 3

Giving It a Rest

In This Chapter

Talking about when not to sing or play

Counting out the values of rests

Mixing up notes and rests and counting them out

Sometimes the most important aspects of a conversation are the things that aren’t said.
Likewise, many times it’s the notes you don’t play that can make all the difference in a piece of
music.

These silent “notes” are called, quite fittingly, rests. When you see a rest in a piece of music,
you don’t have to do anything during it but keep on counting off the beats. Rests are especially
important when it comes to writing down your music for other people to read — and in
reading other composer’s music — because rests make the rhythm of that piece of music even
more precise than musical notes alone would.

Rests work particularly well with music for multiple instruments. Rests make it easy for a
performer to count off the beats and keep time with the rest of the ensemble, even if the
performer’s instrument doesn’t even come into play until later in the performance. Likewise,
in piano music, rests tell the left or right hand — or both — to stop playing in a piece.

But don’t let the name fool you. A rest in a piece of music is anything but nap time. If you don’t
continue to steadily count through the rests, just as you do when you are playing notes, your
timing is going to be off, and eventually the piece will fall apart.

Continuing with Chapter 2’s alphabet analogy, think of rests as the spaces between words and
sentences in a written sentence. If those spaces weren’t there, you’d just be stringing one long
word together into gobbledygook.

Figure 3-1 shows the relative values of rests, ranging from a whole rest at the top to sixteenth
rests at the bottom.

Figure 3-1: Each level of this tree of rests lasts as many beats as every other level. At the top is
the whole rest, below it half rests, then quarter rests, eighth rests, and sixteenth rests.

Whole Rests

like a whole note, a whole rest is worth four beats (in the most common time signature, 4/4 —
see Chapter 4 for all you need to know about time signatures). Look at Figure 3-2 for an
example of a whole rest.

The whole rest looks like an upside down hat. You can remember this is the whole rest by
imagining it is a hat that has been taken off and set down on a table, because this rest is the
longest.

Figure 3-2: A whole rest looks like an upside down hat.

Even better than a double whole note for the wornout musician is the rare double whole rest,
which looks like Figure 3-3. When you see one of these in 4/4 music, you don’t have to play
anything for eight beats.

Figure 3-3: You’ll rarely encounter the double whole rest, but if you ever do, this is what it
looks like.

Half Rests

You’re probably way ahead of us when it comes to the next kind of rest. If (in 4/4 time) a
whole rest is held for four beats, then a half rest is held for two beats. Half rests look like
Figure 3-4.

Half rests look like a hat. It’s right side up because there’s no time to lay it down on a table.

Figure 3-4: The half rest lasts half as long as the whole rest.

Take a look at the notes and rest in Figure 3-5.

If you were to count out the music written in Figure 3-5, it would sound like this:

CLAP two three four CLAP two one two

Again, rests don’t get claps (or notes from instruments or voices). You just count them out in
your head. Just remember to stop playing your instrument while you’re counting.

Quarter Rests

See where this is going? Divide a whole rest by four, or a half rest by two, and you get a
quarter rest. A quarter rest lasts one quarter as long as a whole rest. A quarter rest looks like
Figure 3-6.

Figure 3-6: A quarter rest, written like a kind of squiggle, is like a silent quarter note.

Figure 3-7 shows a whole note and a half note separated by two quarter rests.

Figure 3-7: Two quarter rests tucked w between notes.

You would clap out the music in Figure 3-7 as follows:

CLAP two three four one two CLAP four

Eighth Rests and Beyond

Eighth rests, sixteenth rests, and thirty-second rests are easy to recognize because they all
have little curlicue flags, a little bit like their note counter-parts. An eighth note (see Chapter 2)
has one flag on its stem, and an eighth rest has a flag on its stem as well. A sixteenth note has
two flags, and a sixteenth rest has two flags. (More rarely, a thirty-second note has three flags,
and you can probably guess how many flags a thirty-second rest has.)

An eighth rest looks like Figure 3-8.

Figure 3-8: An eighth rest has a stem and one little curling flag.

As you might imagine, thinking back to eighth notes in Chapter 2 (if you read it already), eighth
rests can be as tricky to count out as their note equivalents. An eighth rest lasts half as long as
a quarter rest, and this usually means less than a whole beat (Chapter 4 is about time
signatures, which affects just how many beats are in a note or rest). There are eight eighth
rests in a whole rest.

Getting a metronome to help count out notes and rests may be the best way to figure out a
piece of music. You can assign the ticks of the metronome to be any portion of the beat that
you like. Having a quarter note equal one beat may seem natural much of the time, but instead
of trying to think about half beats, you can also assign an eighth note to equal one tick. Then a
quarter note would equal two ticks, a half note four, and a whole note eight ticks. The relation
among the different notes and rests always stays the same no matter how many metronome
ticks in a whole note.

A sixteenth rest looks like Figure 3-9. It has a note value of 1-16 of a whole rest. In other
words, there are sixteen sixteenth rests in a whole rest.

Figure 3-9: A sixteenth rest is rarely encountered and has two little curly flags.

You will probably never encounter one, but a thirty-second rest looks like Figure 3-10.

A thirty-second rest has a value of one thirty-second of a whole rest. That is, there are thirty-
two thirty-second rests in a whole rest.

Dotted Rests

Unlike notes, rests are never tied together to make them longer, so don’t bother looking for
tied rests in music. Rests are, however, sometimes dotted when the value of the rest needs to
be extended. Just like with notes, when you see a rest followed by an augmentation dot, the
rest’s value is increased by one half of its original value.

Figure 3-11 shows a dotted half rest.

A dotted quarter rest is extended by another half of a quarter rest.

If there are two dots behind the rest, as shown in Figure 3-12, then the time value of the
dotted rest is increased by another quarter of the original rest. Luckily, it is almost certain that
you will never, ever encounter a double-dotted rest.

Figure 3-12: Double-dotted rests are as rare as hen’s teeth.

Mixing It All Up

The best way to really hear the way rests affect a piece of music is to mix them up with notes.
To avoid adding to the confusion, we use only quarter notes in the following exercises.

The five exercises shown in Figures 3-13 through 3-18 are exactly what you need to practice
making a beat stick in your head and making each kind of note and rest automatically register
its value in your brain. Each exercise contains three groups of four beats each.

In these exercises, you clap on the CLAPs and say the numbers aloud. Start out counting and
then dive in after you count four.
Chapter 4

Time Signatures

In This Chapter

Introducing the musical staffs

Deciphering time signatures

Knowing the difference between simple and compound time signatures

Finding out what makes a measure

In case you were wondering how you’re supposed to keep track of where you are in a long
piece of music, never fear. The geniuses who came up with music notation figured out a way to
make order out of the onslaught of notes and rests. Once you’re familiar with time signatures
and the structure of the musical staff, including the concept of measures (or bars), all you
really have to be able to do is keep counting out the beat.

Meet the Staff

Notes and rests in music are written on what we call a musical staff (sometimes called a stave
— you’ll find out a good deal more about staffs, or staves, in Chapter 7). A staff is made of five
parallel, horizontal lines, containing four spaces between them, as shown in Figure 4-1.

Figure 4-1: The two primary staffs: On the left you see the treble clef staff, and on the right, the
bass clef staff.

Treble and bass clefs

Notes and rests are written on the lines and spaces of the staff. Which particular musical notes
are meant by each line and space depends on which clef is written at the beginning of the staff.

Look again at Figure 4-1. That cursive “G”-like marking at the beginning of the left-hand staff is
called a treble clef. In the right-hand staff in Figure 4-1, the spiral “9”-like marking is called the
bass clef. Basically, the treble clef is for higher notes, and the bass clef is for lower notes. In
music for some instruments, such as piano, when both staffs are used, the treble clef is placed
on top of the bass clef, and the result is called the grand staff. (Chapter 7 is all about the grand
staff.)

Time signatures

In printed music, right after the clef at the beginning of the staff, you’ll see a pair of numbers,
one written over the other, three variations of which are shown in Figure 4-2.

Figure 4-2: Three typical time signatures, read as “three-four time,” “four-four time,” and “six-
eight time.”

The pair of numbers is called the time signature, which, incidentally, is the main character of
this chapter. The time signature is there to tell you two things:

Number of beats in each measure: The top number in the time signature tells you the number
of beats to be counted off in each measure. If the top number is three, then each measure
contains three beats.
Which note gets one beat: The bottom number in the time signature tells you which type of
note value equals one beat — most often, eighth notes and quarter notes. If the bottom
number is four, then a quarter note is one beat. If it’s an eight, then an eighth note gets one
beat.

Measures

A measure (sometimes called a bar) is any segment of written music contained within two
vertical bars that span the staff from top to bottom. Measures follow one another throughout
a piece of written music, and each one contains as many beats as is indicated by the top
number in the time signature.

A strong accent is put on the first beat of each measure, the “1” beat. The top number of the
time signature lets you know how many beats are to be in a measure, as shown in Figure 4-3.

Figure 4-3: The vertical lines here represent measures. Notice that given the 3/4 time
signature, each measure contains three beats, and the quarter note equals one beat.

As we made clear in Chapters 2 and 3, continuously counting beats in your head while you’re
playing is incredibly important to the resulting sound. Timing is everything in music. You must
become so comfortable with the inherent beat of whatever you’re playing that you don’t even
know you’re counting beats anymore. Practicing counting through measures is a great way to
make sure you are playing the piece of music in front of you according to the beat chosen by
the composer. (See Chapter 2 for all about beats.)

Counting beats according to the time signature is a lot like Driver’s Ed in high school. The
teacher repeatedly tells you to keep your eyes on the road ahead of you, because the rest of
your body (and car) will be drawn to the space your eyes are focused on. After you become a
relatively experienced driver, you don’t even realize that your body and mind are constantly
focused on that space on the road in front of you. Even when you’re fiddling with the radio or
talking to the person in the seat next to you, you’re focused enough on the act of driving
straight that you don’t wobble all over the road when you answer difficult questions or pop a
CD into the stereo. It’s all about training your mind to follow the beat automatically, and once
you have that down, you don’t have to worry about consciously counting musical beats in your
head — you just do it.

There are two types of time signatures:

Simple

Compound

Simple Time Signatures

Simple time signatures are the easiest to count, as a one-two pulse in a piece of music feels the
most natural to a listener and a performer. Four requirements are necessary to make a time
signature a simple time signature:

1. Each beat is divided into two equal components.

This is most obvious when it is applied to eighth and smaller notes. In simple time, two eighth
notes are always connected together with a bar called a beam, as are four sixteenth notes, or
eight thirty-second notes. (If you have two sixteenth notes and one eighth note, those three
notes, which equal one beat, are also beamed together.)
Put another way, if there is more than one note in one single beat, they are always grouped
together to equal one beat. Figure 4-4 shows the progression of how notes are beamed
together in simple time.

2. The note that gets one beat has to be an undotted note.

When you’re counting a song out in your head, you’re only going to be counting undotted,
divisible-by-two notes. Usually this means quarter notes, but it can also mean half notes,
whole notes, or, sometimes, eighth notes. In 4/4 time, for example, when you’re counting out
the measure, in your head you’ll be counting, “One-two-three-four” over and over again. In
3/4 time, it’ll be “one-two-three” over and over again. In 2/4 time, “one-two.”

Figure 4-4: Each level of this tree equals every other layer. In simple time, multiple notes
within a beat are always grouped together to equal one beat.

3. The top number is not divisible by 3 except when it is 3.

For example, 3/4 and 3/8 are considered simple time signatures, whereas 6/4, 6/8, and 9/16
are not.

4. The number of beats is the same in every measure.

Every measure, or bar, of music in a simple time signature has the same number of beats per
measure throughout the song. Once you get into the groove of counting out the time, you
don’t have to worry about doing anything but making sure the notes in the song follow that
beat, all the way through.

Measures and counting in simple time

Measures (or bars) were implemented specifically to help performers keep track of where they
are in a piece of music and to help them play the appropriate beat. In simple time, the
measure is where the true rhythm of a piece of music can be really felt, even if you’re just
reading a piece of sheet music without playing it.

In simple time, a slightly stronger accent is placed on the first beat of each measure. This
means that when you see a line of music that looks like Figure 4-5, then the beat is counted off
like this:

ONE two three four ONE two three four ONE two three four

Figure 4-5: 4/4 time satisfies the requirements of simple time.

Again, the bottom number 4 tells you that the quarter note gets the beat, while the top
number 4 tells you that there are four beats per measure, or four quarter notes (and only four)
in each measure.

Here are three common examples of simple time signatures:

4/4: Widely used in popular classical music, rock, jazz, country, blue-grass, hip-hop, and house
music

3/4: Used for waltzes and country and western ballads

2/4: Used in polkas and marches

4/4 time is so often used in popular types of music (classical, rock, jazz, country, bluegrass, and
most modern dance music) that it’s referred to as common time. In fact, instead of writing
“4/4” down for the time signature, some composers just write a large “C” instead. So if you see
a “C” instead of a time signature, the piece is in 4/4 time.

If the time signature is 3/4, as in Figure 4-6, then the beat is counted like this:

ONE two three ONE two three ONE two three

Figure 4-6: 3/4 time also satisfies the requirements of simple time.

Here’s a tricky one. If the time signature is 3/8, then the eighth note gets the beat, as shown in
Figure 4-7.

Figure 4-7: 3/8 time is also simple time.

You would count out the beat of the music shown in Figure 4-8 like this:

ONE two three ONE two three ONE two three

3/8 and 3/4 have almost exactly the same rhythm structure in the way the beat is counted off
— however, because 3/8 uses eighth notes instead of quarter notes, the implication is that you
play a song in 3/8 time twice as fast as you play a song in 3/4 time, because eighth notes carry
half the value of a quarter note.

If the time signature is 2/2, also called cut time, then the half note gets the beat. And because
the top number determines that there are two beats in the measure, there are two half notes
in each measure, as seen in Figure 4-8.

Figure 4-8: In 2/2, or cut time, the half note gets the beat, and each measure contains two
beats.

You would count the music in Figure 4-8 like this:

ONE-and TWO-and

Time signatures with a 2 as the upper number were widely used in Medieval and pre-Medieval
music. Music from this period used a rhythm structure, called a minim that was based on the
rhythm pattern of a human heartbeat.

Practicing counting beats in simple time

Using the information from this section, practice counting out the beats (not the notes) in
Figures 4-9 through 4-13. When counting these beats out aloud, remember to give the first
beat a slight stress.

Compound Time Signatures

Just a wee bit trickier than simple time signatures are compound time signatures.

Here is a short list of rules that help you immediately tell when you’re dealing with a
compound time signature:

1. The top number is evenly divisible by 3, with the exception of time signatures where
the top number actually is 3.
Any time signature with a 6, 9, 12, 15, and so on is a compound time signature. 3/4 and 3/8 are
not compound time signatures because the top number is 3. The most common compound
time signatures are 6/8, 9/8, and 12/8. See Figure 4-14 for an example.

Figure 4-14: 6/8 is a compound time signature.

2. The beat is a dotted quarter note or three eighth notes.

3. Each beat is subdivided into three components.

Again, this is most obvious when it is applied to eighth notes and beyond. In simple time, two
eighth notes are always beamed together, as are even numbers of sixteenth notes. In
compound time, three eighth notes are beamed together, as are six sixteenth notes.

Figure 4-15 shows the “three-based” grouping of beamed notes used in compound time.

Measures and counting in compound time

One big difference between music in a simple time signature and music in compound time
signature is that they feel different, both to listen to and to play.

In compound time, an accent is not only placed on the first beat of each measure, as in simple
time, but a slightly softer accent is also placed on each successive beat. Therefore, there are
two distinctly accented beats in each measure of music with a 6/8 time, three accents in a
piece of 9/8 music, and four accents in a piece of music with a 12/8 time signature.

Two examples of compound time signature are:

6/8: Used in fast waltzes and mariachi music

12/8: Found in 12-bar blues and doo-wop music

To determine the number of accents per measure under a compound time signature, divide
the top number by three. This helps you find the pulse in the music you’re playing and,
therefore, where you put the accents in. In a piece of 6/8 music, for example, you would put
the accent at the beginning of each measure, but you also would put a slight accent at the
beginning of the second group of eighth notes in a measure, as shown in Figure 4-16.

Figure 4-16: In 6/8 time, a compound time signature, you add an accent on the second group
of three eighth notes (on the four beat)

Therefore, the beat accents in Figure 4-16 would go like this:

ONE two three FOUR five six ONE two three FOUR five six

If the time signature is something scary, like 9/4, an example of which is shown in Figure 4-17,
you would count off the beat (not the notes) like so:

ONE two three FOUR five six SEVEN eight nine

Figure 4-17: You’d better believe 9/4 is a compound time signature.

With simple time signatures, the beat of a piece of music can be broken down into two-part
segments. In compound time signatures, the beat is broken down into three-part segments.

Practicing counting in compound time

Using the information from this section, practice counting out the beats in Figures 4-18
through 4-20. When counting these beats out aloud, remember to give the first beat a slight
stress and put an additional stress at the “pulse points” of the measure, generally located after
every third beat. (The ands in the captions are meant to capture the lilt of the some of the
notes within the beat. We admit this is not a very scientific method, but it should give you a
general idea of how to count out beats in different time signatures.)

Asymmetrical Time Signatures

Asymmetrical time signatures (also sometimes called complex or irregular time signatures)
generally contain five or seven beats, compared to the traditional two-, three-, and four-beat
measure groupings we have looked at so far. Asymmetrical time signatures are very common
in traditional music from around the world, both in European folk music and in Eastern
(particularly Indian) popular and folk music.

When a piece of music with an asymmetrical time signature is played, the pulse, or beat, of the
song feels and sounds quite a bit different than music written under simple or compound time
signatures. For example, in Figure 4-21, the pulse is defined by the placements of the half
notes in each grouping making the stresses fall on the third beat in the first measure and on
the fourth beat in the second measure. In Figure 4-22, the beaming of the eighth notes shows
where the stresses are to occur — on the first eighth note of each set of beamed notes.

Music with 5/4, 5/8, and 5/16 time signatures is usually divided up into two pulses, either two
beats + three beats or vice versa. The stress pattern does not have to repeat itself from
measure to measure — the only thing constant is that there are still five beats in each
measure.

Music with 7/4, 7/8, and 7/16 time signatures looks like Figures 4-23 and 4-24. Again, the
stress patterns don’t have to stay the same from one measure to the next.

It should again be noted that asymmetrical time signatures are only considered “complex”
from a Western point of view. Irregular time signatures have been used regularly throughout
history and around the world, including ancient Greece and Persia, and can still be heard in
Bulgarian folk music, for example. Modern Western composers and ensembles as diverse as
Steve Albini, Beck, Dave Brubeck, June of 44, Andrew Lloyd Webber, Frank Zappa, Pink Floyd,
Yo-Yo Ma, Bobby McFerrin, and Stereolab have all used asymmetrical time signatures in their
music. A whole genre of rock, called math rock, is based around using complex time signatures
like 7/8, 11/8, 13/8, and so on, in order to break away from the 4/4 time that is the rock
standard.