Alright, so we have a question here from Tabasco. It says, for my video, what the notes mean, he responds like this. He says, “How do I know when to play a tie on guitar that I learned from a book” and he came to the section that teaches you how play a tie, but he doesn’t understand it.
Okay, you got to think of the tie as being—what do you call it, as being like a—by the way, let me show the chat here, I’m sorry. You got to think of the chat behind—wow sexyco, I haven’t seen you in a minute. You have to think of the tie as being a plus sign okay. So if you have two quarter notes and there’s a tie right here, okay, this quarter note obviously gets one beat, this quarter note gets another beat, right? But that when you see the tie, what it’s telling you is that you have to play it one beat plus an additional beat.
So you are actually going to play these quarter notes combined for a total of two beats. So if you see note, an eighth note tied to a quarter note and maybe tied to another half note or something because maybe there’s a measure there, I don’t know, this is telling you to play for two beats plus one beat, plus a half beat. It’s telling you to play for three and half beats.
You just hold out for three and a half beats. It’s the same as having a quarter note tied to an eighth note, okay? And that’s how ties work. It’s just that simple. Now, there’s a difference though. You have two things. If a note is three, four, five, if a note is the same on the same line and there’s a tie and there’s a line right here, that’s a tie.
If the line—if the note rather is on a different line and the tie—and the line goes down, then what this is, this is called a slur and slurs are not ties. They have nothing to do with ties.
Ties are when you hold the note out, slurs are when you literally have the note played higher or lower through legato and that could either be through hammer-ons or pull-offs. Pull-offs are when they are lower; hammer-ons are when they’re higher. And legato means to play smooth, so you are playing smooth. You make it an overlapping, very smooth effect, not so much of a staccato but a legato—connected, okay? That’s what that is.
I hope that answers your question. I hope that answers a lot of your questions, everyone’s. That’s a great question.
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