Reading Music

Reading Music Lesson 1a: Note Values Reading music requires two skills: understanding how long or short a note would be held for based on the shape of the note, and understanding what pitch a note is (i.e., the letter name) based on its position on the staff. This lesson will explain the first of them.   Music is counted in small units that we call beats. I usually say that a beat is the length of a clap, but they can be as long or as short as you want them to be *as long as they're all the same length within the piece you're playing*. We divide music up into units called bars or measures (these words are synonyms for each other and therefore can be used interchangeably), separating bars with a vertical line we call a barline. At the beginning of a song, a symbol called the time signature will tell you how long the bars will be; that is, how many beats will be in the bars. There are many different time signatures, but the most common one has 4 beats per bar and is called 4/4 time.  Here is where a link will eventually be to show an example of a time signature and barlines!   Note: I find it easiest to remember notes by using math, since the names of the notes are fractions. However, if the idea of adding math to music is upsetting to you, you can just memorize the values of each note :-) Because 4/4 is the most common time signature, we refer to differently shaped notes by how much of the bar they take up. So since the bar is 4 beats long.... ? A whole note fills the whole bar, making it worth 4 beats. ? A half note fills half of the bar, making it worth 2 beats. ? A quarter note fills a quarter of the bar, making it worth 1 beat. ? An eighth note fills an eighth of the bar, making it worth a 1/2 beat (meaning ?? = ?) ? A sixteenth note fills a sixteenth of the bar, making it worth a 1/4 beat (meaning ???? = ?) We also have a "dot" that can be put beside any note. Dots sound complicated at first, but it's just a trick! Don't be frightened! A dot adds half of the value of the note that it's on to the full length of the note (the formula would be "dotted note" = "note" x 1.5 ). This means that... ?. A dotted half note is worth 3 beats (because [2 + half of 2] = [2 + 1] = [3])

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Reading Music Lesson 1b: Rests Now that you've practiced the note values, let's go over their partner: rests. Rests are the way your music tells you when to not play notes. To make our life easier, all of the rests directly parallel the notes in name and value, allowing us to drop them into the same chart we've sorted the notes into: ? = ? =  whole (note/rest), 4 beats ? = ? = half (note/rest), 2 beats ? = ? = quarter (note/rest), 1 beat  ? = ? = eighth (note/rest), 1/2 beat  ? = ? = sixteenth (note/rest), 1/4 beat    While dots technically can be used on any of these rests with the same effect as they have on the notes, typically we avoid "dotting" rests. Since two spaces beside each other would sound the same as one longer space, you can put two rests beside each other to fill the space required.   It's important to make sure you always count rests as meticulously as you would count notes, as they add just as much to the rhythm! Some frequent notes I give to students are Don't ignore the rests and Hold every note and rest for it's full value!

Reading Music Lesson 2: Pitches and Staves It's time now to move onto the second skill required for reading music: pitches.   Pitches The pitch of a note is the "music" part of it—it's the actual sound produced when you press a key on a piano or pluck a string on a guitar. In Western English-language music, we refer to pitches by letters of the alphabet (Sorry, Sound of Music fans...you'll need to go somewhere francophone if you want to use Do-Re-Mi!).  There are seven "main" pitches, going from A to G; you keep looping and looping for eternity, so that the note after G is A. With younger students (who have a more...shaky grasp of the alphabet), I'll write two sets of the musical alphabet at the top of their page... A B C D E F G A B C D E F G ...so it's easier to see why two notes after F is an A, and not an "H". On a piano keyboard, every white key is one of these letters. There are also some in-between pitches (represented on the piano by the black keys), which we refer to using the terms sharp or flat, so that the black key between A and B could be called either "A sharp" or "B flat". For now, though, we're just going to work with the white keys and those main letter names.   Staves (Q: What does "Staves" mean? A: It's the plural form of the word "Staff") A little bit of history... "In ancient times, notation consisted of only a single line with squiggles above and blow it to represent different pitches. We don't understand exactly what these squiggles meant, but we know they gave only approximate pitches and were not very accurate. Over time, notation became more exact, and for the music of the early Christian church (about 600 AD) musicians began using a staff of four lines. Pitches were shown more accurately using square notes on the lines and in the spaces. As instruments improved and could play more high notes and more low notes, more lines were added to the staff. Today, our staff can has as few lines or as many as we need, though the standard size is usually eleven lines. This is called the Great (or Grand) Staff. [...] This staff has so many lines that it is very hard to tell which note is which. So to make it easier on our eyes, we don't draw the middle line; it stays invisible. This invisible middle line separates the Great Staff into two smaller staves; one of five lines above the middle line and one of five lines below the middle line."  †   A piece of music tells you which pitch it would like you to play using a system of lines and spaces that we call a staff.  To know which pitches belong to which line or space, there will be a symbol called a clef at the beginning of every line. In piano, we use two staves (five lines each) with two different clefs:  ? The treble clef is usually on the upper staff, and   ? The bass clef is usually on the lower staff. We'll work with the treble clef first.   †: taken from "Conservatory Canada Theory 1" by Steven Fielder & D.F. Cook © 2002 Waterloo Music and © 2014 Conservatory Canada, ISBN 978-0-88909-225-9

Staves, con't Each staff is comprised of five lines and four spaces. The easiest way to remember the pitches of each line/space, we have a little mnemonic device. I've heard many variations from many different people, but I'll be teaching the ones that I myself was taught. Starting at the bottom of the Treble Clef and moving up: The lines are: Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge The spaces spell out the word FACE Starting at the bottom of the Bass Clef and moving up: The lines are: Good Boys Deserve Fudge Always The spaces are: All Cows Eat Grass Notice that this means that the musical alphabet goes line to space to line to space (etc). This means that if you went from a line to a line, you'd skip over a note (that belongs to the space between the lines). This also means that the musical alphabet advances forward (from A to G) when the notes move up the page, so that the note above an A would be a B, then a C, and so on!   If this feels like a lot to memorize, don't worry! I encourage all students to keep a "Cheat Sheet" on their piano beside the music they're trying to read (the image above is from it!). Having an understanding of why the notes are organized the way that they are can help you remember a bit, but the most effective way to keep all of the lines and spaces straight in your head is by practicing note reading. As long as you don't pencil in the letters on your music, referring to the Cheat Sheet won't hamper you learning the notes. And before you know it, you won't need the Cheat Sheet anymore! You can also figure out a note by comparing it to the last note you played. Remember that any notes that are beside each other (e.g., if one is on a line, and the other is on the space directly above or below the line) will go to the very next letter in the alphabet. So if you just played the line note E, and your next note is the space above it, you can confidently know that your next note is an F. Or, if you just played that line note E but your next note is the space below it, you can confidently know that your next note is a D! You can download a copy of my cheat sheet here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1BrwTO1fUU3u4XESnqjro-GyjaFjYrtP7/view?usp=sharing