Note Lengths & Durations

Interactive rhythm tools are coming soon — for now, listen to music you love and feel the patterns described.

A note length (or note duration) is how long a note lasts, measured in beats. The length of a note is shown by its shape — whether the notehead is filled or open, and whether it has a stem and flags.

Notes can last for very different amounts of time. Some fill a whole measure. Some are tiny fractions of a single beat. Listen to the difference between a long, held note and a quick, clipped one.

Here are the five most common note lengths and how many beats each one lasts (in 4/4 time):

Whole note = 4 beats (the longest common value — fills a whole measure of 4/4)
Half note = 2 beats
Quarter note = 1 beat (the 'normal' beat you tap your foot to)
Eighth note = ½ beat
Sixteenth note = ¼ beat (the shortest of the common values — fast!)

Each note is exactly half the length of the one before it. It's a simple doubling/halving system: two eighth notes fit in one quarter note, two quarter notes fit in one half note, and so on.

Which note lasts the shortest?

Of these common values, the sixteenth note lasts the shortest amount of time — just ¼ of a beat. (Even faster notes exist, like thirty-second and sixty-fourth notes, but the sixteenth is the shortest you'll usually meet.) The whole note is the longest, at 4 full beats.

How long is a beat?

A beat is the basic unit of time in music — the pulse you'd tap your foot to. By convention a quarter note gets one beat (in the most common time signatures), so "how long is a beat" and "how long is a quarter note" are usually the same question. A beat's length in seconds isn't fixed, though — it depends on the tempo (BPM). At 60 BPM one beat lasts exactly one second; at 120 BPM it's half a second.

How long is each note, in beats and seconds?

A note's duration in beats is fixed; its duration in seconds depends on the tempo. At a moderate 60 BPM (one beat per second), here is how long each music note lasts:
Whole note — 4 beats — 4 seconds
Half note — 2 beats — 2 seconds
Quarter note — 1 beat — 1 second
Eighth note — ½ beat — 0.5 seconds
Sixteenth note — ¼ beat — 0.25 seconds
At faster tempos every note is proportionally shorter — at 120 BPM a whole note lasts 2 seconds — but the ratios between the note lengths never change.

Imagine one measure of 4/4 (4 beats total). You could fill it many ways:
• One whole note (4 beats) held the whole measure
• Two half notes (2 + 2 beats)
• Four quarter notes (1 + 1 + 1 + 1 beats)
• Eight eighth notes (½ each)
• Or a mix: a half note + two quarter notes (2 + 1 + 1 = 4 beats)

The note lengths in a measure always add up to the beats the time signature allows. Try mixing long and short notes: long notes create space, short notes create energy.

• Long notes = Ballads, slow songs, emotional moments
• Short notes = Dance music, excitement, energy
• Mix = Most interesting music

Each of these durations has its own symbol on the page — a hollow or filled notehead, with or without a stem and flags. Note lengths only mean something once they're grouped into measures. For the notation side, RealMusicTheory's guide to notating rhythm covers how each note value is written.