Rests
In this lesson, you'll meet the seven rests, learn to recognize and draw them, and find out exactly where the whole rest and the half rest sit on the staff.
Let's begin with a simple idea: music is not made of sounds alone. The moments when the sound stops are part of the message too, just like punctuation in a sentence. The signs that tell you to stop the sound are called rests, and each one lasts a precise amount of time.
The seven rest values
You already know the seven note values. Rests work the same way: there are seven of them, and here they are from the longest to the shortest. Their British names are in parentheses.
- the whole rest, which matches the whole note (semibreve rest);
- the half rest, which matches the half note (minim rest);
- the quarter rest, which matches the quarter note (crotchet rest);
- the eighth rest, which matches the eighth note (quaver rest);
- the sixteenth rest, which matches the sixteenth note (semiquaver rest);
- the 32nd rest, which matches the 32nd note (demisemiquaver rest);
- the 64th rest, which matches the 64th note (hemidemisemiquaver rest).
Where do they go?
Now that you know their names, let's see where they sit. Two of them have a fixed position, and that position is the only way to tell them apart, because they share the same shape: a small filled rectangle.
- The whole rest hangs below the 4th line.
- The half rest sits on the 3rd line.
The other rests can go anywhere on the staff, but in practice they are centered on it. Every now and then, when two voices share the same staff, the whole rest may hang from a different line and the half rest may sit on a different line, simply to keep things clear.
Two historical shapes
You may also come across two shapes that look a little different. In older editions and in handwriting, the quarter rest often looks like a reversed 7, a mirror image of the eighth rest, and Danhauser in fact groups these two signs together. And the double whole note, which is worth two whole notes and is called a breve in the UK, has its own rest: the double whole rest, or breve rest. It is a filled rectangle that fills a whole space, the one between the 3rd and 4th lines.
Each row lasts exactly one whole note. Click a row to hear it over 4 metronome beats: each value is half of the one above.
Write the name of each of the following rests above it.
Draw the rest that matches each of these names: quarter rest, half rest, 32nd rest, whole rest, eighth rest, 64th rest, sixteenth rest.
Take a page of music, a piano score or an orchestral part for example, and name every rest you find on it.
Next, we'll compare the rests with one another and with the notes. But first, see how much you remember with a few questions.