UpbeatRhythms.com – the Practice Pad
Lesson III – Very Small Note Values – Part I
Welcome, or welcome back, to UpbeatRhythms.com and our continuing series of tutorials on rhythm, this is part one of our supplemental music lessons which go together with the third video music tutorial over in the Practice Pad, and today we’re talking about very small note values. The video covers 16th notes, 32nd notes, 64th notes, and 128th notes, as well as corresponding 16th note – 128th note rests.
To start off, keep in mind that 128th notes are usually of extremely short duration, and are pretty rare in music. You do see them on occasion in very slow music that requires very quick passages, but generally you’re not going to see a whole lot of 128th notes in your musical travels. However, it’s good to be aware of them and know exactly what they look like when you see them (aside from the massive amount of black ink on your page lol), and in this article you’ll see that figuring out the difference between the various smaller note values and rest values is quick straightforward, both in terms of appearance as well as exactly how much sustain/period of rest, in other words the exact time duration, you’ll need to give to each of them, now having covered whole notes, which require at least four full beats, all the way down to 128th notes (and of course rests as well). Coming up in the next couple of videos, we’ll also examine triplets and dotted notes, but we’ll leave that aside for the moment and concentrate on these very small note durations.
In previous music lessons we talked about whole notes, and half notes which are half the value of a whole note. Quarter notes which are half the value of a half note, and eighth notes which are half the value of a quarter note. The eighth note is almost exactly the same as a quarter note in appearance, except it has one flag. It should be noted here that when we see groupings of these smaller notes within the space of one beat, the flags become “beams” and are used not only to indicate note values but also to link the groups of notes together, making it easier to distinguish which are which within a beat as well as within a measure. By beaming them together you can more easily distinguish the main beats within your measure, see how the smaller notes fit together within each beat, and know at a glance which notes belong to which beats.
That concludes the first part of our supplementary article, be sure to check out the education video music lessons if you haven’t already, the link is provided below, and be sure to come back for the next part of this written supplemental article related to our education video which will be available early next week, and we will be continuing our series of videos and articles on all things rhythm with plenty more videos and tutorials, it’s full speed ahead here at UpbeatRhythms.com and you won’t want to miss anything! Thanks for checking out UpbeatRhythms.com, we really appreciate you stopping by. Talk to you next time. 
Very Small Note Values Article Part 2
video music tutorial for this article
