Rests

After you've exercised for a while or you've studied for a long time, one thing becomes almost inevitable - REST !!!
Well, similarly in music as well you might have noticed that sometimes there's just small instances of silence in a song or a music piece. And that is what we call rest, the absence of notes and the presence of silence.

We all know that you cant Run and Rest at the same time, similarly you cant have a Note and a Rest at the same time. So in common everyday-life we never see rests and notes occupying the same place.

Taking a musical context for example,,, whenever we strum a chord on a guitar or strike a note on a piano it must be muted as soon as the rest arrives.

It provides a moment of relief or utter silence for the listener to digest the nuances and complexities of the piece and get a sense of the emotion hidden between the notes

 ( Is what a music geek would say)

A super cool tutor would say the exact same thing ,,, SORRY GUYS but yeah hate to go all nerdy on ya
But yeah, on a serious note again (pun intended)

Just like notes, rests are also represented in the stave and have different values.
Just like notes, there exists :  

Just like the notes we read about earlier, each of the rests also represents the same amount of silence as its counterpart note. Just as the Whole note lasts for 4 crotchet beats, the semibreve(or whole) rest also lasts for 4 crotchet beats, signifying 4 crotchet beats of silence. And similarly, the Minim rest means 2 crotchet beats of silence, a crotchet rest means 1 crotchet beat of silence (obviously), and a quaver rest stands for half a crotchet beat of silence.

Now, when I was learning about rests initially, I would always get confused between the Minim rest and the Semibreve rest; they just look so similar. Only one is above a line on the stave, and the other is below.
So, a cool mnemonic I learned was SEMIBREVE SUBMARINE, it means that, like a submarine, the Semibreve rest is also below the water (a stave line in this case).

Well, now for an interesting fact, we can actually use the semibreve rest to signify an entire BAR of silence instead of just 4 notes. (Now, what is a BAR in music? you'll get to know soon :) ) 

* Lastly, one thing to note both Semibreve / Whole note & others are acceptable and interchangeable, though the first is European and the latter is American.

And that’s All for this article ! To quench your intrigue and clear the plot holes that we created in this lesson do check out our other articles .

PEACE ! 🎼 👈 that’s a treble clef btw :)