Music Theory: Rest Duration

In music notation and tab, we have certain ways of showing how long to play each note for (how long each sound lasts). This is called the note’s duration. That’s all well and good, but what about when you’re not supposed to be playing?

In a large majority of songs that you’ll play, there’ll be gaps between the notes, instruments will drop out and not play for certain sections etc…

…so how do we know when not to play?!

The Rest

The thing that tells us to be quiet in music is called the “rest”. Essentially it says “don’t play for this bit”. For each type of note, there is a rest that is exactly the same length in beats.

So, if you understand how note durations work, it’s time to learn how rest durations work (and what they look like)…

Semibreve Rest

Here is the semibreve (or whole note) rest.

It has exactly the same length as a semibreve, and the above example would be equal to a whole bar (four beats of silence) in ⁴₄ time. This rest is unique because it is also commonly used to fill a whole bar regardless of the time signature.

Minim Rest

Here is the minim (or half note) rest:

It is half the length of the semibreve rest and two of them (as shown here) would be used to fill a bar of ⁴₄ time. Be careful you don’t confuse this rest with the whole note rest! The semibreve rest hangs down from the second line of the stave, whereas the minim rest sits on the third line down.

Crotchet Rest

I guess, after the last two rests being so similar, they had to think of something different for this one? Either way, this is a crotchet (or quarter note) rest. It takes four of them to fill a ⁴₄ bar, and three to fill a ³₄ bar.

Compare the rests we’ve looked at so far with the notes of the same name. You should notice that they are exactly the same length.

Quaver Rest

From here on, things get simpler (just as with the notes of similar length). We start out with a vertical line with one little “flag” on the left, then as each note duration is halved we just add another flag on the left.

So here is the quaver (or 8th note) rest:

Two of the above rests tell you to be quiet for the same length of time as one crotchet. Then, we add another flag and it becomes a “semiquaver” (i.e. half a quaver in length).

Filling a Bar

You can probably tell by the above example that it takes 16 semiquavers (16th notes) to equal one semibreve and fill a whole bar in ⁴₄ time. Obviously it would be time consuming and difficult to read if we had to write out 16 of these rests in a bar.

The Trick is that you have to show where the beats are in the bar. For example:

In the above example (4 beats long), there is a note right at the end of the bar which takes up the last half of the last beat of that bar. When written this way you can see very quickly where the note should sound, because of the way it is written.

Always try to use the largest rest you can for a certain space. So, when (as above) we have a silence that is 3 and a half beats long, we first use the largest rest that fits: the semibreve rest. So that takes up two beats. Then we have one and a half beats still to fill, and for this we use a crotchet followed by a quaver rest.

This is much easier to read than writing 14 semiquaver (16th note) rests before the note!

Remember: music isn’t always about the notes, the silences between them are important too!
Rob.

July 1, 2011 at 8:00 am | Music Theory | No comments