Ghost note (of Motown), Rocco Prestia (for Tower of Power), and Chuck Rainey (for Steely Dan, Aretha Franklin, and others) all include "tons of ghost notes done right" in their playing. In vocal music, especially in musical theater, a ghost note represents that the lyrics must be spoken rather than sung, retaining the marked rhythm but having indeterminate pitch. Notes with value less than a half note use an "X" instead of an oval as a note head. Occasionally a half note or whole note is represented with an open diamond note head, often representing a scream or grunt. As an extreme
Note value duration, as at the end of a piece (e.g. at the end of Mozart's Mass KV 192). A single eighth note, or any faster note, is always stemmed with flags, while two or more are usually beamed in groups. When a stem is present, it can go either up (from the right side of the note head) or down (from the left side), except in the cases of the "longa" or "maxima" which are nearly always written with downward stems. In most cases, the stem goes down if the notehead is on the center line or above, and up otherwise.