Home Guitar Music Theory Musical Note Values

"Learn Musical Note Values To Play In Time And Feel Rhythm"

Follow

Share

Musical note values are an integral part of learning rhythm and timing. Memorize this note value chart so you can read notes more effectively.

How to read guitar notes

Have you seen real notes on a staff before? They look like various types of notes on a staff? Learn how to read guitar notes before learning your note values.

Once you learn the basics of how to read real music notes, it's time to learn the rhythmic aspect of reading music.

Get the Best iPhone and iPad apps for learning guitar!

Rhythm and note values

Each music note contains information for where it is played on the guitar and how long. It's important to distinguish between these two pieces of information...

Look at the placement of the note: The placement on the staff (whether on a line or in a space) tells you the pitch of the note -- where it is played on your guitar.

Look at the shape of the note: The shape of the note will tell you how long it should be played using counting and beats.

Let's check out an example:

See how there are different types of notes in the musical staff above the tabs?

Musical note values

Here's the deal: The note will tell you whether it lasts 1, 2, or 4 beats by the way it looks (there are more kinds, but we'll start with these).

WHOLE notes: these last 4 beats.

HALF notes: these last 2 beats.

QUARTER notes: these last just 1 beat.

So how does all this come together? Imagine counting evenly while you play. When you play a whole note, count to four. When you play a half note, count to 2. And when you play a quarter note, count to 1.

The point of all this is to make sure your musical note values all fit together neatly rhythmically on the staff.

Now imagine this: you can only count to 4, then start over again. This means you should be counting in groups of fours evenly. Try counting while you play the next riff:

See how all the notes line up with the counts? You'll notice that using the words "beats" and "counts" are sometimes synonymous.

Note value chart

Ready for some basic math? Each incrementally smaller note is derived from dividing the bigger note in half:

Divide a whole note in half. What do you have? A half note.

Divide a half note in half. It gives you a quarter note.

Divide a quarter note in half and you get an eighth note.

Divide an eighth note in half and you get a sixteenth note.

This formula gives us two new types of notes: our eighth notes and our sixteenth notes.

But how can we count these if our quarter notes last one beat each? We need placeholders between the beats -- between 1, 2, 3, 4.

To do this for eighth notes, we say 1 & 2 & 3 & 4 &, pronouncing the "and" between the counts.

So in an example using eighth notes, you would count this way:

When learning musical note values, you'll notice that everything smaller than a quarter note has a flag coming off of it. When notes such as these are grouped together, the flags connect. When they appear alone, the flag hangs beside the note:

The flags serve a cool little function too. They group your notes neatly together in sets equal to one beat. 2 eighth notes tie together to make one beat, 4 sixteenth notes tie together to make one beat.

Do you understand the math of this?

To count sixteenth notes, we need a placeholder between the ones we used on our eighth notes, like this: 1 e & a 2 e & a 3 e & a 4 e & a. Pronounce the e's like they sound. Pronounce the a's like "uh".

J Danger says:

"It sounds weird, but it's how musicians are trained to count music!"

Now that we understand musical note values, try practicing songs along to a metronome to enhance your feeling of rhythm and timing in music.

Want to learn how to play any song, at any speed, just by listening to it?

To Top Of Page