Crotchet or not to Crotchet – What does it mean?

I am going to embarrass myself by showing my ignorance.

Here it goes: Crotchet, is this a stunted, very brief, flat, muffled, stifled, thump or brief note? It almost sound like and accident but I like the briefness. It seems it is a note with mostly attack and little or no decay and no sustain. Is this attained by the foot pedal? Did I get the definition wrong? In any case can someone clue me in on what is a stunted, very brief, flat, muffled, stifled, thump or brief note called. This is not heard often on a piano recital but find it pleasant.

I found it here: http://www.imperfectsamples.com/website/samples/steinwayconcertgrand/compare.php “true Crotchet”.

Comments?

By the Way I love Imperfect Samples' Steinway & Sons 1908 Walnut Concert Grand.

PS. Sorry if I posted in the wrong forum.

A crotchet is a quarter note. I am not sure what it is on that website though.

I once crotcheted a rug.

The word "true crotchet" is not really something we would discuss in musical terms, it's more of a technological description for a sampled piano. I believe what it is describing is a group of samples based on the length of a crotchet beat. On a real piano, if you play normal crochets, you release the key just before each new crotchet which briefly activates the damper. If a sampler does this, it will sound more realistic than if there are only long samples which are cut short and re-triggered each time a crotchet is played. Without "true crotchets" you wouldn't hear the sound of the dampers in between, which is a slight detachment.

Hello,

Looks like I am getting special help form the Piano World elite. Thanks for your input.

So a quartet note is identical to a crotchet or just similar?
In Cubase I tried very short midi notes of sampled pianos but did not achieve the effect I describe herein.

The sound I am referring to which I occasionally hear from a piano recital reminds me of a percussive sound. As stated earlier a stunted, very brief, flat, muffled, stifled, thump. So again does this have a name? Is the quarter note/crotchet? An audio example would be extremely helpful.

I do not at present have a keyboard to check anything out on my own. Looking a the Roland RD700NX or the RD700GX but may settle on a midi keyboard controller.

Crotchet is the British term for quarter note, so, yes, they are exactly the same.

You may be referring to a note that is to be played "staccato." That is a term applied to notes that are played (from the Dolmetsch on-line music dictionary)

Staccato (French m. from the Italian staccato) detached, jerky
staccato (s.), staccati (pl.) (Italian) detached, jerky (for example, [...] manner of playing a musical line), separato (Italian), abgestoßen (German), gestoßen (German), détaché (French), piqué (French)

There are, of course, varying degrees of staccato from lightly detached without emphasis to sharply detached and strongly accented. I would hesitate to use the work "jerky" when talking about staccato playing, as, more often than not, a phrase with staccato notes is played as regularly as any other phrase, while "jerky" implies - to me - an irregular rhythm.

I'm not sure what this has to do with crotchet, however. As others have mentioned, in many English-speaking countries "crotchet" is the same as "quarter-note."

I did find, on the same Dolmetsch site the following for "crotchet" :

Crotchet : on early pedal harps, small metal Ls which are drawn by the action towards the neck to shorten the sounding length of the harp

so, in the context of the web-site you linked, it may indeed have something to do with the duration of a sampled note.

Regards,

That website you linked to also has "true staccato", but it doesn't seem to have any samples of it.

Perhaps staccato is what I am referring to. For some reason I always thought of staccato of a series of notes but it seems it can be a single note. I have a lot to learn yet.

It seems that a single staccato note is accomplished in a different manner than a crotchet note. Staccato is shorter in duration than a crotchet. Correct?

Yes, I emailed Imperfect Samples and asked for an audio example but should have also asked for a staccato audio example.

Well, yes, in principle. You should keep in mind, however that staccato refers to a type of approach or manner of playing a note while crotchet is a term indicating relative duration in time of a note, i.e. relative to a semi-breve (whole note) minim (half-note), quaver (eighth-note), semi-quaver (sixteenth-note), etc.

Regards,

I received this from www.imperfectsamples.com

TrueCrotchet just means that slow crotchets of around half a second in length were recorded (varying), and you can load it up as an instrument. In this sense, they aren't spliced together like most samples. Practically, this instrument can be used as a special effect if you're interested.

The Steinway has a round robin feature for repeated notes, which pitch shifts samples from above and below to create different repeat notes. This however, I find, is rarely necessary and I prefer the instrument on all its default settings. In fact, all the demos were done with default settings.

Crotchet, breve, minim, quaver, semi-quaver and mensural notation--all seem like a holdover vocabulary from the middle ages to me, that is somewhat still in use in Great Britain, and much less so in the USA. I have no sense of how these words and concepts are used in non-English speaking nations.

Tomasino

... and surely we don't want to forget :
- demisemiquaver (32nd note)
- hemidemisemiquaver (64th note) and
- semihemidemisemiquaver (128th note), a.k.a. quasihemidemisemiquaver!

Cheers!

Don't forget that the British are (or used to be) people in love with words. Just read Shakespeare, Dickens, or even Jane Austen: 'It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.' (Pride and Prejudice). How can one reduce that to the mundane 'A rich man needs a wife'?

Similarly, why say 'one sixty-fourth note' when you can say (pompously) 'hemidemisemiquaver'?

Well they're also used here in Australia. I grew up with them and don't find them a problem. I do have to stop and work out what a 64th note is when I read about it here on PW, however!

And that explains why the Brits drive on the wrong side of the road.

Tomasino

We have one word in common, the longa. Long live the longa!