How a note shows its length · From Zero to Mozart

In Stage 1 a note's height on the staff told you its pitch. Its shape tells you its length. Four parts of the drawing carry that:

The head — the oval. Filled in (a solid dot) = a short note. Open (a hollow ring) = a long one.
The stem — the vertical line off the head. A whole note has none; every shorter value has one.
The flag — the little curved tail off the end of a stem, on a note standing on its own. One flag halves the length; two flags halve it again.
The beam — a thick bar joining the stems of a group of short notes. Same job as flags, drawn across several notes at once.

Stem direction — pointing up or down — is only neatness. It never changes the length.

The same D, four lengths

Every note in this example is open D. Same pitch, same string, same finger — only the shape changes.

72 bpm

Bar 1: one whole note — open head, no stem, four beats. Bar 2: two half notes — open head plus stem, two beats each. Bar 3: four quarter notes — filled head plus stem, one beat each. Press play and watch the same D get shorter.

Open head against filled head

The trap is reading the head's position and skipping its fill. Here are two notes on the exact same line — same pitch — one open, one filled.

72 bpm

Bar 1: two open-head D's — held two beats each. Bar 2: two filled-head D's — one beat each, then a two-beat rest. Identical pitch, half the length. Check the fill every time, not just the height.

Name the shape

Work out each note's length from its drawing — filled or open head? stem? flag or beam? — before you tap to check.

66 bpm

Ten notes, four different shapes. Name each length from its drawing, then reveal.

A real tune's shapes

The opening of Twinkle, Twinkle — pitches left out, just the shapes. Two filled quarter heads, two filled quarter heads, two more, then an open half head.

76 bpm

'Twin-kle twin-kle lit-tle STAR' — six quarter notes and a half note. The shape of every note is telling you exactly how long to hold it.

The usual mistake

Reading the head's height (the pitch) and not registering the fill (the length). An open head and a filled head on the very same line are the same note held for completely different times — four beats versus one. Two questions on every note: which line, and filled or open.