13: Rests

Rests, as much as notes, are an indispensable part of the musical experience. They look different from the note values to which they correspond, but the good news is that that’s really the only difference, other than that notes signify sounds and rests signify silence. All values are exactly the same—a whole rest is worth twice a half rest, which is worth twice a quarter rest, which is worth twice an eighth rest, and so on; and you can apply any legal number of dots to a rest, which function exactly the same way as dots do on notes.


The most important thing, then, is to learn to identify the rests’ values based on their shape.

Whole rests and half rests look like, in order, (this is cheesy, I know, but it’s the way you teach eight-year-olds in a way they’ll never forget) a hole in the ground, and a hat on someone’s head. More precisely, a whole rest is a filled-in rectangle hanging from the fourth line, and a half rest is that same rectangle (still filled in) sitting on top of the middle line.

Quarter rests look somewhat like a lightning bolt, and, if you’re writing music by hand, it’s perfectly acceptable to approximate them by a kind of scribbled “3”, and they live between the second and fourth lines of the staff.

Eighth rests and beyond are all similar, just like eighth notes and beyond. Notes have flags or beams, and rests have flags, even if you have several of them in a row (you don’t beam them together like you would notes, but you can replace, let’s say, two consecutive eighth rests with a single quarter rest, if you’d like). An eighth rest, just like an eighth note, has one flag; a sixteenth has two, a thirty-second has three; and so on.

This image, all in one, shows you almost every rest you’ll ever encounter (some people, like whoever made this image, call things "whole note", "half note", etc. rests; I grew up just calling them "whole rest", "half rest," and so on, but they mean exactly the same things-- rests that are equivalent in duration to the correspondingly-named notes):




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