dotted notes, the one josephine caught me on
last lesson was the metronome, and I hated it, and you probably hated it too, and that's fine. today we're using it for something specific: dotted notes, which is where a lot of people's counting quietly falls apart and nobody tells them.
here's the thing behind the thing. a dot after a note means "add half its value again." that's it. that's the whole rule. but people hear "dot" and their brain does something weird and skips a step, and I say this as someone who did exactly that for longer than I want to admit.
what a dot actually does
a dotted half note is a half note plus half of a half note. a half note is worth 2 beats, so half of that is 1 beat, so a dotted half note is worth 3 beats total.
a dotted quarter note is a quarter note plus half of a quarter note. a quarter note is worth 1 beat, so half of that is half a beat, so a dotted quarter note is worth 1 and a half beats.
write that down somewhere you'll see it again, because the math is simple but your brain will try to shortcut it under pressure, and that's exactly where mistakes hide.
the dotted quarter is the one that gets people
the dotted half is easy for most beginners because 3 is a whole number and it feels clean. the dotted quarter is the troublemaker because 1 and a half beats doesn't land on a beat, it lands in the middle of one, and your foot or your metronome click doesn't help you feel that automatically. you have to count it.
this is where josephine comes in.
josephine plays clarinet in the school band, and she's my daughter, and she's also better at reading rhythm than I am, which I don't love saying but it's true. she was looking over my shoulder at a hymn arrangement with a dotted quarter followed by an eighth note, and I was counting it wrong, confidently, out loud, the way you do when you've decided something is correct without checking.
she stopped me and said it was one and a half beats, not one. I told her to show her work before I'd believe her, because that's fair, she's corrected plenty of my grammar over the years and I've made her show her work on that too. she counted it out: "one-and-two-and," clapping the two-and-a-half beat where the note actually cuts off, and she was right. I'd been rushing the dotted quarter by a half beat every single time and never noticed because nothing else in the measure was there to catch it.
I'd rather be accurate than smooth, and that measure was smooth and wrong for probably a month before she caught it.
how to count it at home
grab something with a dotted quarter followed by an eighth note, which is the most common combination you'll run into. count it out loud like this before you touch the keys:
- "one" — play the dotted quarter, hold it
- "and" — still holding
- "two" — still holding, this is the extra half beat, the dot's contribution
- "and" — play the eighth note here
say the numbers and the "and"s out loud, slowly, before you play a single note. this feels silly. do it anyway. your mouth catching the rhythm before your fingers try it is what stops the mistake from getting baked in.
then turn the metronome on, slow, and do it again with sound. follow it twice, once counting out loud without playing, once playing while you still count under your breath. don't skip to just playing it and hoping it feels right, because "feels right" is exactly how I got away with being wrong for a month.
a caution
don't speed the metronome up to cover for shaky counting. if you're rushing the dotted quarter, a faster tempo just makes the rushing happen faster and you'll stop noticing it at all. slow down until you can count it correctly every time, then bring the tempo up in small steps. slower and even beats faster and lopsided, every single time, no exceptions I've found yet.
practicing it
pick one line with a dotted rhythm in it, from whatever piece you're working on. count it out loud five times before you play it once. then play it five times slow with the metronome before you try it at a normal speed. it's tedious. it's also the only way I've found that actually sticks, and I have the corrected measure to prove it.
before next time
find one dotted quarter note in your piece and count it out loud, slow, until it stops feeling like a guess. if you don't have a piece with one yet, ask me and I'll point you to a line.