Tie and slur
Five cases, each one twice to hear: the same noteheads without a curve and with one. What changes is not in the picture but in the sound.
A curve between two noteheads always looks the same. What it means is decided by one thing only: the pitch of the heads it joins.
Same pitch: then it is a tie, and two notes become a single sound lasting as long as both together. The second head is never struck — it is there only to say how much longer the first one runs.
Different pitch: then it is a slur, and there are as many sounds as there are heads. They are simply played without a break, each one running into the next.
So every case on this page stands twice, with the same number of heads in both pictures. Count along and you will hear fewer notes behind a tie than you can see. That is the whole difference, and it is not a matter of interpretation but of listening.
The tie
Two identical notes with a curve between them: only the first is played, and it goes on sounding until the second would have run out too. Four heads stand in the picture, three sounds are heard. This is needed wherever a duration cannot be written as a single note value — which happens more often than you would think.
More than two notes
A tie always binds exactly two heads together. For a note to span three, two ties are written, one after the other; the middle note carries both ends. Still only one sound is heard, lasting as long as all the heads together. Any duration at all can be written this way, including ones that have no sign of their own.
Across the barline
A barline does not stop a note. If one begins at the end of a bar and is to carry into the next, it is split at the line and tied — there is no other way, since every bar has to add up on its own. None of this is audible: the note runs straight across the boundary as if it were not there.
The slur
Over different pitches the same curve says something else entirely: play this without a break. The notes stay what they are and each one is struck; what is joined is the manner in which they follow one another. On strings that means one bow for the lot, on wind one breath, at the piano fingers held down.
Syncopation
A tie across a beat shifts the weight. The long note starts not on the beat but beside it and runs straight over the top — the beat is there, but nobody plays it. Dance music, jazz and half of pop live on exactly this. In print it looks like a trifle; in sound you hear at once that something has tipped.
How to tell them apart
The panel shows the same curve twice, over two heads each time. On the left the heads share a pitch, on the right they do not — that is all there is to it, and all there needs to be. On the left you hear two long notes, on the right four short ones.
To tell a The tie from a The slur, then, do not look at the curve but at the heads beneath it. This holds even where it looks unfamiliar: a curve over three or more identical heads does not slur, it ties — each note to the next. And a curve over two heads a semitone apart does not tie, it slurs, however close the pitches may be.
What stands next to it
How long a note lasts without a curve, and which values exist, is with the Note values. How a note is started — short, stressed, sustained — is with Articulation; the slur belongs to that family, because it says the same thing as the word legato.
Music symbols · Note values · Articulation · Music notation glossary
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See AnotonaEvery note on this page is computed, not typed in — following the rule that also makes F# major spell its seventh degree E#, not F.