From the course: Learning Music Notation

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Dots and ties

Dots and ties

From the course: Learning Music Notation

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Dots and ties

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- [Instructor] The note values that we discussed to this point will enable you to notate most of the music that you'll want to create. The only issue here is how to notate the in-between note lengths, such as a duration of three beats or one and a half beats. You might also want to note's duration to extend from a measure into the next measure. For these notation issues, we just need to extend the duration of the note values that we've already learned. So one method of extending the value of a note or a rest is to add a dot. The dot added after a note increases its duration by half its value. So here we see a graphic in three four, we don't have any staff lines or anything, and this is just to demonstrate the value of these notes when we add the dots. So, for example, we're looking at a half note here. If a dot follows that, the dot is going to add one half the value, so that's gonna be two beats for the half note plus one beat for the dot, for a total length of a dotted half note…

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