Rhythms don't always occupy complete beats or

regular subdivisions, sometimes we want to extend the duration of a note.

We can do this by tying one note to another,

as you can see on your screen now.

That tie or line, connecting the crotchet to the quaver,

means that the note you are now going to play is one and a half beats long,

rather than two separate notes of one beat and then half a beat.

So we're not playing the note twice now,

rather we're extending the duration by tying the two together.

In this simple case of a quarter note tied to an eighth note,

we can use a dot to indicate exactly the same duration.

The clue is in the fact that the second tied note

is half the duration of the first.

If you see a note with a dot immediately to its right, then this

means that the indicated duration is extended by half its duration again.

So a dotted crotchet, or quarter note, would last one and a half crotchets.

On the other hand, you've got to be careful here.

A dot immediately above or below a note is another matter altogether and

nothing to do with rhythm.

It indicates a staccato or a detached type of note articulation.

Let's look at another example.

A dotted quaver or eighth note would similarly last one and a half quavers.

So that would be the equivalent of tying a quaver to a semiquaver, or

an eighth note to a sixteenth note.

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Dotting can be further extended by adding multiple dots.

Two dots would extend the duration of the indicated note by half of that duration

and half of that duration again.

So a double dotted crotchet or quarter note would actually be one and

three-quarter crotchets in length, one plus half, plus a quarter.

Triple or even quadruple dotted notes also exist, though they are a lot less common.

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Another notational symbol related to rhythm is the pause, or fermata.

When placed over any note or rhythm, this symbol indicates an out of time pause.

The length of the pause is determined by the musician, but

as a general rule of thumb, it's about twice as long as the indicated duration.

Now when you're writing rhythms yourself rather than just reading them,

you might ask yourself how to space them.

It would be reasonable to assume that a crotchet or

quarter note takes up the horizontal space of two quavers or eighth notes.

This is sometimes the case, some composers even prefer it that way.

But most publishers tend to squash longer durations into less horizontal space

than the requisite number of shorter durations.

So you can adopt this approach when writing yourselves.

The thing to bear in mind is that when you're writing more than one part,

then coincident notes have to vertically align so

that you can see which notes will actually sound together.