The last lesson explained pulse and beat in music. The key takeaway is that no matter how many notes or how fast or slow or how angular and irregular the notes fly at you in a piece of music, the pulse is steady... but there's almost no music that ONLY plays music that lands exactly on the pulse all the time...

Every note has a duration: how long you hold it. Pitch is determined by how high or low the note is on the staff, a note's duration is determined by the shape of the note.

As before all of this will be explained in greater detail in the linked resources, but here are the basics:

A whole note lasts 4 beats. Open notehead, no stem.

A half note lasts 2 beats — half a whole note. Open notehead with a stem. Two of them fill the same space as one whole note:

A quarter note lasts 1 beat. Filled notehead, stem. Four quarter notes = one whole note:

An eighth note lasts half a beat. Filled notehead, stem, one flag:

When written in groups, the flags connect into a horizontal bar called a beam:

A sixteenth note lasts a quarter of a beat. Filled notehead, stem, two flags (or two beams when grouped).

Sixteen of them fill one measure of 4/4:

One whole note = two half notes = four quarter notes = eight eighth notes = sixteen sixteenth notes. It divides cleanly all the way down.

You can see it in the eighth note example above — when multiple eighth or sixteenth notes appear in a row, their flags get connected into horizontal bars called beams. Beamed notes sound exactly the same as flagged notes. Beaming just makes rhythms easier to read at a glance. Eighth notes get one beam, sixteenth notes get two.

One important thing: the "beats" above assume the quarter note gets the beat, which is the most common setup (4/4, 3/4, 2/4 time). But the system is relative — what matters is the ratio between note values, not their absolute length. We'll get into the specifics of how time signatures work in the next couple lessons.

This only just scratches the surface, so the resources here are a bit light. The next lesson takes you a little deeper and the resources there will pull it all together!

• The Talent House - How to count rhythms - Great video with plenty of examples.

• musictheory.net — Note Duration — Interactive animated lesson. Short, visual, covers all the standard note values and has a cool chart at the end which will help visualize how this works.

• Wikipedia — Note value — As usual, this is pretty exhaustive, you don't need to understand everything here, but taking a glance to know just how deep you can go is pretty useful.