Note values and counting
Five note shapes, five rests, and counting out loud — the difference between playing that holds steady and playing that wanders.
The previous lesson taught you which note to play. Now for the second half, the half that turns a string of notes into a song: how long each one of them is held.
It is also the widest gap between notation and tab. Tab shows you where to press and leaves you to guess the rhythm off the recording. Notation encodes time precisely, and that is what lets you play a piece you have never heard in your life and get exactly what the composer wanted.
A note has three possible parts: a head, a stem and a flag. Which of them are present is what decides the length.
| The shape | Name | How many beats |
|---|---|---|
| Hollow head, no stem | Whole note | Four |
| Hollow head with a stem | Half note | Two |
| Filled head with a stem | Quarter note | One |
| Filled head, stem, one flag | Eighth note | Half |
| Filled head, stem, two flags | Sixteenth note | A quarter |
Notice the pattern: every row is half of the row above it. The whole time system in music is built on dividing by two, so the moment one row makes sense to you, all of them do.
And when several eighth notes come along in a row, their flags get joined into a single straight beam across the top. It is the very same eighth note — the beam only makes it easier for the eye to see them as a group.
The beat is the pulse. It is the thing your foot taps without being asked whenever a song comes on.
Beats are gathered into equal groups called bars, and the vertical lines on the page are the borders between them. The two numbers at the start of the line tell you the size of the group: the top number is how many beats there are in a bar, and the bottom one is which note value gets one beat.
Four quarter notes to a bar — by far the most common time signature in Western music — is written as a four over a four. Three quarter notes to a bar, which is the waltz, is written as a three over a four.
This is precisely the idea taken apart in the lesson on bars and time signatures, and it holds for every instrument equally. All that changes at the piano is what you do with that time once you have it.
This is the part people skip, and it is precisely the part that works.
Count out loud: one, two, three, four. Not in your head. With your mouth. Somebody counting silently slows down in the hard bar without noticing it; somebody counting aloud hears himself slowing down.
For eighth notes you add an "and" between the numbers: one and two and three and four and. Now every half beat has a syllable of its own in the count, and you cannot skate over one without hearing it happen.
Metronome at 60 — that is the beat, and you count out loud on top of it
Here is how you build it, and it takes five days rather than five months:
The only rule: the tempo does not move when the music gets hard. Better to drop to forty and play it correctly than to play at sixty with a small stumble in every bar.
Everything so far has been about ratios — one note lasts twice as long as another. What decides how much that is in actual seconds is the tempo, and it is written at the top of the page.
Sometimes as a number, like a hundred and twenty, meaning a hundred and twenty beats a minute. Sometimes as an Italian word: adagio is slow, andante is roughly walking pace, allegro is fast and cheerful. The words are imprecise on purpose, because they describe a character and not only a speed.
And two practical notes that save a great deal of frustration:
The written tempo is not the tempo you practice at. A piece marked a hundred and twenty gets learned at sixty, sometimes at forty. Nobody starts at the final speed, and anybody who does is teaching himself the piece with the mistakes baked into it.
And a steady tempo matters more than the right tempo. A listener will forgive a song played slower than the record; a listener will not forgive a song that speeds up and drags. That is exactly why every lesson here opens a metronome.
Every note length has a rest of the same length, and every rest has a sign of its own on the page.
And here is a point beginners refuse to take seriously: silence is not the absence of music, it is a piece of it. One beat of rest before the chorus is what makes the chorus land. Fill it in with a sound and the song loses the exact thing that made it good.
At the piano this carries a practical edge the guitar does not have: to produce silence you have to lift the finger, and if the sustain pedal is down even that will not save you. A written rest is an instruction to stop the sound actively, a theme that comes back in the pedal lesson.
Worth saying plainly, because a lot of the people reading this arrived here from the guitar.
There is no time in tab. It shows which string and which fret, and leaves how long to hold each sound for you to pick up off the recording. That works beautifully when you are playing a song you already know, and falls apart completely when you are not.
The result is a habit: you learn to play what you heard, not what is written. And the moment you sit down at a piano with real notation in front of you, the pitch half feels new but manageable, while the time half feels like a foreign language — because you never once had to read it.
The good news is that it is the smaller of the two. There are five note shapes in daily use, and five rests that mirror them. That is a list of ten symbols, and you can close it in a week. Pitches take months; time takes a week.
Two small marks that turn up constantly and confuse everybody at the start.
A dot to the right of a note makes it half again as long. A two-beat note with a dot holds three. A one-beat note with a dot holds a beat and a half. That is the whole rule, and it works on any note you like.
A curve drawn between two notes of the same pitch fuses them into one long sound, and that one is called a tie. You press once and hold through both of them. Its most common job is to carry a sound across a bar line, because a note cannot cross that line on its own.
Now the thing that catches people out: the same curve drawn between notes at different pitches means something else entirely. That one is a slur, an instruction to play them smoothly connected — legato — rather than to press once and hold. English gives the two jobs two different names, but on the page it is the identical curve, and the only thing separating them is whether the two notes are the same pitch or not.
| What is happening | The likely cause | The fix |
|---|---|---|
| You speed up in the easy bar | Counting in your head, not out loud | Count aloud, even when it feels silly |
| The eighth notes come out uneven | No "and" syllable landing between them | One-and-two-and, out loud, slowly |
| The rests get walked straight over | Silence does not feel like playing | Count them aloud exactly like notes |
| The last note of the bar is swallowed | You stop counting before the end | Count all four, the fourth included |
| Halves and quarters keep swapping | You are reading the stem, not the head | The head: hollow is long, filled is short |
| It sounds right with no metronome on | Your ear is papering over the drift | Turn one on; a metronome does not flatter |
| Right notes, wrong song | The time is right, the tempo is far off | Move the tempo closer in stages, not in one jump |
What to keep from all of this: pitch tells you what to play, and time tells you what it actually is. The very same notes in two different rhythms are two different songs — which is how somebody can play every correct note and still not sound like the song.
You have pitches and you have time. What is left of the page is the black keys, and that is the next lesson.