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Two notes in one beat

Often you will need to play more than one note per beat.

As we saw before, if you have one note in a beat, you have a quarter note. Well now, if you have two notes in one beat, you have two notes that are called “eighth notes”.

An eighth note looks like an quarter note, with one part added: the flag. It looks like this:

Eighth notes are often grouped together. Two eighth notes can be written like this:

So there are two ways to write down two sequential eighth notes. Most of the time you’ll see the connected ones.

=

When we include the eighth notes, this is how they all relate:

To count eighth notes, you keep on counting to four. However, you also count between the beats with “and”:

One - and - two - and - three - and - four - and

One and a half beat

There is no single note for one and a half beat. To write one and a half beat, you use the same approach as for notes that last three beats: you use a tie or a dot. There is no difference between the two.

or

You only strum/clap on the ones that are underlined.

Note: later in this tutorial you'll listen tot audio examples.

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