Day Ten - Types of Notes, Rests and Dynamics

Still away from my beautiful new instrument, I decided that it was time again to pursue with the learning of the language otherwise known as Music. Again, I turned to my trusty companion, T'Internet. Lo and behold, I also used my fancy graphics software to help to depict what I was learning.


While there are more than the above, this will suffice for now I think. We start from the left, where we can see a single note (A Semi-Breve) on it's lonesome filling up the whole 4/4 measure. In the next, we have two half-notes (Minims) that make up a full bar. Then we have four Quarter-Notes (Crotchetts), eight Eigth-Notes (Quavers) and finally a bar of Sixteenth Notes (Semi-Quavers). Essentially, we're breaking up the bar (of a fixed length) into a number of parts, each of which we fill with a note. Which leads onto the question - what happens if you don't want a note (and want some quiet from the awful racket that your violin is currently making)?

Thus, the lord brings us Rests. Luckily, these come in the same flavours as the above, giving us essentially 'silent notes' as depicted in the following diagram;


Last but not least for this lesson, something simple to finish on. It also seems that they sometimes stick letters on the staff to ask you alter the volume (and they also tend to call this Dynamics, luckily, not of the applied mathematics type...) They are as follows;

ppp	???	Very, Very Quiet
pp	pianissimo	Very Quiet
p	piano	Quiet
mp	mezzo-piano	Slightly Quiet
mf	mezzo-forte	Medium Loud
f	forte	Loud / Strong
ff	fortissimo	Very Loud
fff	???	Extremely Loud
cresc	Crescendo	Gradually Get Louder
decresc	Decrescendo / Diminuendo	Gradually Get Quieter

That concludes todays lesson to myself. Don't hesitate to come back tomorrow for the rest of Reading Music 101.