Tie

A tie is a notational device, drawn as a curved line, between two notes of the same pitch to indicate that they are to be treated as if they were one note; they must sound like one note rather than two.
- The second note must be exactly the same pitch as the first note.
- The total length that the note sounds for is the addition of the two note lengths.
- The curved line is drawn between the two note heads, except when this would be confusing (for example, when there are two parts on the stave), when it can be drawn at the stem end.
  hear it!
They are used or needed in the following cases:
- If a note is to continue sounding across a bar line a tie is required:
  hear it!
  This will sound like this: but here there is a bar line missing.
- Within a bar, a tie is sometimes needed:
  - A tie should only be used when absolutely necessary, an ordinary note or a dotted note is preferable where possible.
  - A tie is normally used when a note is to continue to sound from within one grouping of notes into part of another grouping. Within a grouping, a tie is not normally needed, but it may sometimes be used for clarity.
- For example: when the time signature is four crotchets in a bar, the rules of grouping say that the first two crotchets are a group, and the last two crotchets are a group. So in this example the tie is required:
  This will sound like this: but is not normally written like this.
- Within a grouping they are sometimes used:
  hear it!
  This will sound like this: and can easily be written like this.
More than one tie can be used consecutively to indicate that a note extends across bars
The only other way of increasing the length of a note is by the addition of a dot.
The same curved line is also used in different circumstances as a slur.
- The way to tell them apart is that a tie can only join two notes of the same pitch, whereas a slur can go across many notes.
- If a slur only goes between two notes, they will not generally be two notes of the same pitch.

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