>Step by step

Exploring dots and ties

1 To start with, here’s a note that we all know and love: the basic crotchet, also known as a quarter-note. The reason it’s called this is to do with its duration – whatever tempo the music is at, a crotchet always lasts for exactly one quarter of a bar, hence the quarter-note moniker.

2 If you look at how the crotchet is represented in the piano roll, its quarter-bar duration is easy to spot – the note length shown here is exactly a quarter of the bar it appears in. It fills up exactly one of the four beats in the bar. In fact, if we look at four of them in sequence, their length fills the entire bar.

3 If we were now to go back to our single quarter-note and view it against a 16th-note grid in the piano roll, we can see that, in terms of 16th-notes, it lasts for a duration of four 16ths. What will happen when we extend this note’s length to six 16th notes?

4 So we’ve extended the note by an additional two 16ths. Looking at the newly lengthened note in the score editor, we can see that a dot has appeared to the right of the head of the note. In music notation, this is what’s used to represent a note that’s been extended by half its original length.

5 Here’s a diagram showing the equivalent beat length values of the most common dotted notes. We can see that a dotted quaver is equivalent to a quaver and a semiquaver added together, a dotted crotchet is the same as a crotchet and a quaver added together, and a dotted minim is the same length as a minim plus a crotchet.

6 Now let’s look at two quarter-notes, both with the pitch of C, placed on beats 1 and 2 of the bar. As it is, they’re both occupying a single quarter-note beat, so notation-wise, they can be represented on the score as standard crotchet notes.

7 Now let’s move these notes so that they’re maintaining the same duration but playing on the offbeats. They’re now effectively crossing over the beat line, so we split each crotchet into two quavers and link each pair with a tie – the little ‘smiley face’ curved line that joins the heads of the two notes together.

8 The centre two of the four quavers are linked by a beam across the top of the note stem. Notes smaller than a crotchet – eg, quavers and semiquavers – have tails attached to their stems. Beams group together notes of the same duration into whole beats by joining their tails, which makes them easier to read.

9 Let’s now look at an example of a bassline that contains both dots and ties. To start with, we’ve just got straight eighth-notes, or quavers, as shown here, gathered into groups of four and linked together by beams. But what happens when we move some of the notes around and play with their durations?

10 Let’s focus on the second note. Like most of the other notes, it currently takes up two 16ths, so qualifies as an eighth-note. If we stretch it out to three 16ths in length, it turns into a dotted eighth-note, or dotted quaver. With the following note shifted one 16th to the right and shortened to compensate, that first phrase feels very different.

11 Moving onto bar 2 and those top Eb notes, let’s remove the F Eb grace note, then extend the start of the note that falls on beat 3 backwards so that it doubles in length. It’s now a quarter-note value in the piano roll, but because it now crosses the beat, it’s notated as a tied pair of eighth-notes in the Score Editor.

12 If we then repeat the above process in the second two bars of the phrase, it underlines just how different the part can be made to sound with just these couple of rhythmic tweaks. The second note in bar 3 is Bb now a dotted quaver, while a tied pair of quavers crosses the beat at bar 4 beat 3.