Note values

Subdivision lab

One pitch — the open A string (A1) — at four densities. Nothing changes except how many attacks fit in a beat, so what you are hearing is purely the subdivision. Set the tempo here and the practice bar at the bottom follows it — turn its click on and the beats will land under the accented notes.

Subdivision BPM Play the bar Stop

Say the count out loud along with it. The louder note in each group is beat 1, 2, 3 or 4 — if you cannot hear which is which at sixteenths, slow the BPM until you can.

The values in 4/4, and the job each one usually does under a band:

• Whole — 4 beats. One attack a bar. You are the floor; the drums own the grid. Ballads, ambient sections, and half-time choruses that need to feel enormous.
• Half — 2 beats. Root and fifth, or root and root. Enough motion to imply the harmony without competing with anything.
• Quarter — 1 beat. You are the grid. Jazz walking and driving straight-ahead rock both live here, and both are unforgiving: with one note a beat there is nowhere to hide a late attack.
• Eighth — half a beat. The default rock and metal engine. It pushes the band, and it costs you space — a bar of eighths has no room left for a fill.
• Sixteenth — a quarter of a beat. Funk, gallop shorts, ghost streams. At this density the muting hand is doing as much rhythmic work as the plucking hand, and the register you play in starts to matter (below).

Read that list as a set of trade-offs, not a difficulty ladder. A whole-note part that sits perfectly is worth more to a song than sixteenths that fit nowhere.

Here is the constraint no other room has to deal with. Pitch is vibration, and your ear needs several complete vibrations before it can decide what note it heard. High notes finish a cycle quickly; the bottom of a bass does not.

• A low E (E1, about 41 Hz) takes roughly 24 milliseconds to complete one cycle.
• Open A (A1, 55 Hz) takes about 18 ms.
• Open G (G2, 98 Hz) takes about 10 ms.

Now put a sixteenth note next to those numbers. At 120 BPM a sixteenth lasts 125 ms — about five cycles of that low E, and about twelve of the open G. Five cycles is near the edge of what an ear can turn into a pitch, which is why fast lines on the low string stop sounding like notes and start sounding like thuds. Nothing is wrong with your hands; the note simply was not given long enough to become a note.

What players do about it, and what you can do about it today:

• Move dense lines up. The same sixteenth figure played an octave higher keeps its pitch. This is why funk sixteenths tend to live on the A and D strings rather than crawling around the bottom of the E.
• Let the low notes be the long ones. Roots down low, movement up top — an arrangement rule you can hear on almost any well-mixed record.
• Use ghosts instead of pitches. If the part needs sixteenth-note energy down low, most of those sixteenths can be dead — that is precisely the job of ghost notes, and it is why funk sounds busy without sounding muddy.

Play the lab at sixteenths, then play the same thing on the low E string on your own bass. The difference is not subtle, and once you have heard it you will stop writing parts that fight it.

The common gallop cell is one eighth plus two sixteenths — long, short, short. Add it up: a half beat plus two quarter beats is exactly one beat. Four of those fills a bar, and every one of them starts on a beat.

The cell that gets confused with it is the eighth-note triplet: three even notes in the space of one beat. They are not the same rhythm and they are not close.

• Gallop — four sixteenths' worth of time, played as three notes of uneven length. Count it “1 — & a”: the first note is twice as long as the other two.
• Triplet — three notes of equal length. Count it “1 trip let”, all three the same.
• The test. Set the lab to sixteenths and to triplets and switch between them at the same BPM. Sixteen notes a bar against twelve — once you have heard the two side by side you cannot un-hear the difference.

Playing a lopsided triplet and calling it a gallop is the single most common rhythmic error on the gallop page, and it is why that page insists on the click.

Four bars at each density, in order, then back down: quarters → eighths → sixteenths → eighths → quarters. One pitch throughout. The rule is that the beat never moves — the click should sound identical under all of it, and only the number of your attacks changes.

Two things to watch, both of which the lab will not do for you:

• The transitions. Most people are even inside a density and rush the first group of the next one. The bar where you change is the bar that matters.
• The mute. Your muting has to get better as the grid gets denser, or sixteenths turn into one continuous ringing note. If the density is outrunning your mute, the tempo is too high — not your right hand's fault.

• Calling every fast thing “sixteenths.” Count it. Twelve notes in a bar is not sixteen.
• Gallop cells that do not add up. Long-short-short must total one beat, or the bar is longer than a bar.
• Skipping rests. A rest has a value and a place in the count. Playing through it and stopping when you feel like it is not the same rhythm.
• Sixteenths on the low string. Not a counting fault — a register fault. See Low notes need time.

You almost never get to pick freely — the drums and the section have already narrowed it. Three questions, in this order, will get you to a defensible choice faster than trying ideas out:

1. What is the drummer's densest hand doing? Match it or sit one level underneath it. Eighths on the hi-hat means your eighths will disappear into them and your quarters will feel deliberate. Going denser than the drums is a decision you should be able to name a reason for.
2. How busy are the guitars or keys? The busier the middle of the arrangement, the sparser you want to be. Two instruments playing sixteenths in different registers is not twice the energy — it is half the clarity.
3. Where does this section need to go next? If the verse is already at sixteenths, the chorus has nowhere to climb to. Keep a level in reserve; that is what makes a chorus arrive.

Then commit for the whole section. Changing density mid-section reads to a listener as uncertainty, unless the change is the point — which is what density against space is for.

When dense playing goes wrong, it is almost always in one specific place: the final note of each group arrives early, which steals time from the next downbeat and drags the whole bar forward. You will hear it as “rushing” without being able to point at where.

Isolate it. It is the fastest fix in this page:

• Play sixteenths but only sound the “a” — the fourth note of each beat. Count the other three silently. The note you play should land exactly a sixteenth before the click, every time.
• Then play only the “e” and the “a”. Then all four. The rushing has nowhere to hide, because you have been practising the note that was doing the rushing.
• Same drill on gallop cells: sound only the second short note, the one immediately before the next beat.

This is worth five minutes at the top of a session. It is not glamorous and it is the difference between fast playing and fast playing that a drummer enjoys.

A rest is a note value with the same arithmetic and the same requirement to be exact. Practise bars of half notes plus half rests, then quarters plus quarter rests, and treat the moment the silence begins as an attack you have to place — the mute is a rhythm event, which is the whole argument of Muting.

The test is that all your rests come out the same length. On bass they usually do not, because a rest only starts when the string actually stops.

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