Question: I am trying to practice Smell like a teen spirit on drums and there is something I don’t understand with dotted notes.

Here is the sheet:[![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/XvWGI.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/XvWGI.jpg)

I don’t understand the use of dotted notes in this sheet. If there were no dots I would have played this measure the same way, that is to say crash and kick on the 1 and kick on the d. For me the dotted notes don’t bring any additional information on how I am supposed to play the song. Is there something I don’t understand ?

Thank you.

Answer: 
Just checking, do you understand [what dots do to rhythm](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dotted_note)? As Tom mentions, if you took away the dots you would have made the first note a quaver (or 8th note), and you'd have to make the kick note one as well, so you'd be playing it at a different time (halfway through the beat instead of 3/4 of the way through the beat).

If all of this is news to you, then we'll start at the beginning: a dot makes a note longer by adding half of whatever it already was. If a quarter note is a beat, then a dotted quarter is 1.5 beats. An 8th note is half of a beat, so a dotted 8th is 3/4 of a beat. To figure out how to play it, start imagining 16th notes inside all of the beats; you can try counting "One ee and a Two ee and a" (or many other types of patterns). Using that pattern, the kick note would fall on the "a" that represents the last of the four 16th notes that subdivide the first beat.
I appreciate that a lot of drum sounds cannot be made to sound longer than the fraction of a second they're hit, but there's more to music - particularly written down - .

Written music follows technical rules, one of which is that there must be the requisite number of notes in each bar.

Those dotted quavers can't make the actual sound any longer, but they need to be written as such, otherwise the semi-quavers that follow could be played too early or too soon. Without the dots, they're too short as notes.