Rhythm and Counting

The length of individual notes is easy to express simply by having a different symbol for each length. Also, it is necessary to specify periods of silence when required between notes. These silences are called rests, and they have symbols corresponding to the duration of the notes. Here are the common ones.

Notes and their equivalent rests

A dot placed after any note increases its length by half.

As previously mentioned, music is conventionally divided off into measures or bars. We usually prefer to use the term measure, because, as we shall see later, bar has an alternative meaning in guitar music.