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How should I annotate 2 rests in a row
- Thread starter pmatz2
- Start date
My ear isn't that good, since I'm transcribing my focus was to make it as easy to read as possible.
Dear Tina Weymouth I know this was a while ago, I'm was hoping you would remember when you were recording Life During Wartime, in measure 24 on beat 3 did you intend to play a quarter note staccato or an 1/8 note followed by a rest.
Tempo is a huge factor here. Also, bowed instruments pluck the strings on staccato notes which is pretty easy to hear. Guitars are palm or finger muted. Also easy. This is a difference in timber as opposed to note duration as already stated. Most percussion instruments would not matter. But why WOULD you notate a staccato note for them?
Since I'm not a mind reader, I could no decipher what you were trying to do with your original post. You asked which one was correct; I told you. Now you want to argue about it? I don't really care. Good luck.
Pictures 1 and 2 make the most sense.
Not bad form to put 2 rests back to back. I did 10 years of classical piano and orchestral music... back to back rests were very common.
I think you're confusing "staccato" with "pizzicato." A plucked note on a stringed instrument is "pizzicato" (as opposed to a bowed note, which is "arco"). A bowed note can be staccato (detached) or legato (connected). A pizzicato note can also be staccato or legato, especially on the lower instruments in the string family like cello or bass where pizzicato notes sustain longer.
#1, because putting notes or rests off the beat (as in #3) makes it harder to read.
#1 without the beam or #2 depending on the nuance of difference between a dotted quarter and a dotted eighth. I think #2 is easier to read.
EDIT: I should have said staccato instead of dotted
EDIT: I should have said staccato instead of dotted
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In practice, at moderate and higher tempos, there's not going to be a whole lot of difference between a staccato quarter note and an eighth note followed by an eighth rest *for a bass guitarist.* Sure, there can be a number of subtle differences for a violinist or a woodwind player--I just read a whole long post on them somewhere--but not so much for a bass guitarist.
The essence of staccato for us is not playing the note louder or harder or using a different technique to create it; it's separating the notes from the following notes. We basically do that by, well, shortening the duration of the first note--for example, by playing a quarter note as if it were an eighth note. The amount by which the note is shortened isn't necessarily prescribed exactly. A 50% shortening is often cited--I believe it's the default in the Sibelius notation program--but I've never understood that to be an absolute rule. However, it often sounds close enough to that in practice. Given a sequence of eighth notes at 150 bpm in an ensemble, it would take a better-than-normal ear to distinguish between a staccato quarter and an eight-plus-eighth-rest, and a better-than-normal player to execute such a distinction reliably and reproducibly.
The essence of staccato for us is not playing the note louder or harder or using a different technique to create it; it's separating the notes from the following notes. We basically do that by, well, shortening the duration of the first note--for example, by playing a quarter note as if it were an eighth note. The amount by which the note is shortened isn't necessarily prescribed exactly. A 50% shortening is often cited--I believe it's the default in the Sibelius notation program--but I've never understood that to be an absolute rule. However, it often sounds close enough to that in practice. Given a sequence of eighth notes at 150 bpm in an ensemble, it would take a better-than-normal ear to distinguish between a staccato quarter and an eight-plus-eighth-rest, and a better-than-normal player to execute such a distinction reliably and reproducibly.
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I think that it has become the standard for any music notation software that generates an output. Musescore and TuxGuitar do it the same way. I generated mp3 output and compared the wave forms to confirm.
Picture 3 is an absolute "no no". But, picture 1 and 2 are not the same as they do not mean the same thing. Picture one indicates a specific rhythm with specific note/rest values. Picture 2 indicates a specific rhythm with specific note/rest values, but the addition of a staccato does not make picture 2 the same as picture 1. A staccato is a style modification that does not affect the rhythm, though it does affect the length of the note. However, it does not automatically cut the note value in half. It depends entirely on the style and tempo of the music. A staccato can be anywhere from 90% of the note length to as little as 50% (any less and it would be considered staccatissimo). I don't know what song this is from (unless I missed it in the thread) so I can't tell you which one I would do. As someone who has written measures like these two too many times to count, I tend to go with picture 2 as it allows the performer more room for interpretation as picture 1 is more absolute.
So do I. It's not incorrect. If I see it in a score I'm not going to roll my eyes and complain. But it's also not strictly necessary here, and for many of us it conveys no advantage *in this particular context*.
This.
For me a staccato is not a shorter note, so I would play ir differently than what I'd play reading example 1 or 3. It would be a quarter note with a sharper attack than the previous two and muting slightly the previous quarter note before playing it, not an eighth note with a regular attack.
And I wouldn't normally link 4 eighth notes in a 4/4 bar, much less with a quarter note rest in the offbeat.
In the case that you are using a 2/2 bar, example 1 could make sense.
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