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In music, a two hundred fifty-sixth note (or occasionally demisemihemidemisemiquaver) is a note played for 1⁄256 of the duration of a whole note. It lasts half as long as a hundred twenty-eighth note and takes up one quarter of the length of a sixty-fourth note. In musical notation it has a total of six flags or beams.
Notes this short are very rare in printed music but not unknown. They are principally used for brief, rapid sections in slow movements. For example they occur in some editions of the second movement of Beethoven's Third Piano Concerto (Op. 37), to notate rapid scales. Another example is in Mozart's Variations on "Je suis Lindor", where four of them are used in the slow twelfth variation. A further example occurs in Jan Ladislav Dussek's Fifth Piano Sonata, Op. 10 No. 2. They also occur in Vivaldi's Concerto, RV 444, and in bar 15 of François Couperin's Second Prelude from L'art de toucher le clavecin.
The names of this note (and rest) vary greatly in many languages: