These are generally referred to as tuplets and

can be any arbitrary division of a note, but the most common are in fact triplets.

There are as you might imagine,

three triplets quavers, or eighth notes to a quarter note, three in the time of two.

Or three triplet quarter notes to a half note.

Any basic rhythm could be subdivided in this manner.

So if I've got a beat that goes at this speed,

[NOISE] that would be quarter notes.

And triplets would be [NOISE] one, two, three.

One, two three.

One, two, three.

One, two, three. One, two, three.

One, two, three.

As mentioned, we can have other subdivisions, for instances, quintuplets.

So for example, I could divide a minim, or a half note,

into five quintuplet eighth notes.

That would go something like this.

[NOISE] One, two, three, four, five.

One, two, three, four, five.

One, two, three, four, five.

One, two, three, four, five.

Tuplets are generally notated in the simplest fashion by putting a number above

a beam, as in the triplet quaver or eighth notes we've already seen.

The three there implicitly means three in the time of two.

So whereas a crotchet, or a quarter note, would usually be divided into two quavers,

or eighth notes.

By putting the three above three quavers,

we indicate that we want these three triplet eighths to be in the time of two.

We can also use brackets with numbers if we have notes that we don't have flags or

beams for.

So to create triplet quarter notes, we would normally use the bracket to group

the three notes that we want played in the time of two.

And if it's not obvious how many shorter notes we want in the time of how many

longer notes, we could explicitly write a proportion such as 4:3.

[MUSIC]