UpbeatRhythms.com – the Practice Pad
Lesson III – Very Small Note Values – Part III
This is the third and final installment of the corresponding music lessons related to our video music lesson on very small note values. Links to the previous two installments can be found at the end of the article.
Welcome back! Moving right along and continuing the mathematical process we next come to 64th notes. Once again, all you need to do notation-wise is to add one flag, so a 64th note possesses four flags. And just as a 64th note has four flags, a 64th note rest has four hooks as well. It takes sixty-four of these notes to fill up one bar in 4/4 time, so clearly we are in the realm of the very short note durations at this point. It takes twice as many of these notes to fill up your measure, and they’re half as long in duration. As the note values get shorter and shorter, we simply keep adding flags one by one and halving the duration of each note compared to the previous type.
And finally, you’ve got your 128th note, which has five flags, and is an extremely short note value to say the least. And of course in the case of a rarely seen 128th note rest, you’d be looking for five hooks as well.
Whether you’re looking at individually flagged notes, or groupings of beamed notes, the number of each is your most important bit of information in order to ensure rhythmic accuracy. Now that you know how many flags belong to each note value, and the fact that each value is twice as quick as the previous one (or half as long in duration, whichever way is easiest to conceptualize), we no longer have to stare at an inky black page full of tiny notes and rests without knowing how the heck we’re going to spit out all those notes without getting chastised by the conductor or band leader. 
In upcoming music lessons on notes and notations, we’ll begin talking about triplets, and also dotted notes. You might have heard of them, if not don’t worry, we’ll talk about all that stuff in detail as continue on with our comprehensive examination of reading rhythms, approaching rhythms, and handling rhythms in any music that you happen to come across.
Thanks for checking out UpbeatRhythms.com, we hope you’re enjoying the video music lessons as well as the related blog articles and we really appreciate you stopping by. And please come back for the next series of videos, because it’s full speed ahead and you won’t want to miss anything! See ya then.
Very Small Note Values Article Part 1
Very Small Note Values Article Part 2
video music tutorial for this article
