Hi there! Dimitri here with a new course, this time, we will learn the basics of reading sheet music! First what is sheet music? It is a form of music notation, or a way to write which pitch we play, in which order and for how long, if we actually play something. We find all of these information on the staff:
But to know where goes each note we put a symbol at the beginning of the staff, a clef. In contemporary music we use mostly two of them: the treble clef and the bass clef. The treble clef contains notes of a higher pitch than those of the bass clef and vice versa, here are their notes:
The first clef is the treble, or G, clef and the second one the bass, or F, clef. Do not focus on the notes' symbols, the circles, we will learn more on them later. What matters is the position of theses symbols, they are always in this order, to help you remember them, you can look at the clef. For the treble clef, look at the curl, G ,the second line from the bottom, passes through it, yes like its name. And for the bass clef, it is the F which passes between the two dots. So, the G clef passes through the G line and the F clef passes through the F line, pretty straight forward isn't? If you can remember this, you will always have a landmark to help you read the staff.
If you see a treble clef, it means that the notes which occupy the lines will be, from bottom to the top, E, G, B, D and F, and the one in the spaces will be F, A, C and E. You can use this mnemonic phrase to remember the notes on the lines "Every Good Boy Does Fine" and for the notes on the space, if you didn't noticed, use the word FACE. There are notes outside of the staff, the one above the staff are higher than the ones on the staff. And the notes below the staff are obviously lower than the ones on the staff. To name them, you go use the notes sequence:
C D E F G A B C
For example, the higher note on the staff, if we have a treble note, is F, then the next, it will be atop the staff, will be G, the next, will be A and so on.
If you use a bass clef, the notes on the lines will be G, B, D, F and A, sorry no mnemonic phrase for this one, and the notes A, C, E and another G will be on the spaces (higher than the previous one). There are other clef but they appear so rarely that it is not necessary for me to put them in this basic course, maybe in another one.
As you can see, piano is a great instrument to learn music because of its linearity, all notes are spread in front of you. It is more complicated on guitar.
If you can't read tabs, I will soon put a course on it, sign up to our newsletter or to our twitter to know when it comes out, go at the bottom of the article. On tab, you have the notes on the staff and below them, their different positions on the neck, knowing most them is part of the mastering of the guitar's neck.
If you know about accidentals, if not go here, you may have noticed that they do not appear anywhere on the staff. That is because instead of having a different position for G and G# or Gb, we put a sharp, #, or a flat, b, in front of G, or any other note we need.
In music notation, there is a third accidental, "natural", the one at the right. You may ask yourself why do we need a symbol for natural notes. If you have read the previous course, here, you may remember that one of the good points of sheet music is that it gives more informations on the song than a tab.
Imagine that you have wrote a song in the key of A, which means you used those notes:
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A B C# D E F# G# A
You have three notes with a sharp (if you do not how I found the key go here, or if you do not know what a # or a b does, go here), C#, F# and G#, if you were to write your song, you would have to put the sharps before the same notes over and over.
To gain time and space, instead of writing the sharps before the C, the F and G each time you use them, you should put the sharps at the beginning of the staff. These three sharps indicates that every C, F and G you will come across will be sharped. But, what happens if you want to use a simple C ? You use the "natural" accidental before it.
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But this notation has another advantage, imagine this time that you did not wrote the song and you did not know its key, only by looking at the sharps at the beginning of the staff, you can guess that the song is either in the key of A major or F# minor, which narrows the possibilities, doesn't it? Each key and its relative always have the same sharps of flats (never the two at the same time), and can be recognize by their key signature (the number of accidentals). You already know that A major and F# minor have three sharps but F major and D minor have one flat and C major and A minor have no sharps nor flats at all. We will go deeper on this subject in another course.
It is all for now, you should be able to read the notes, next time we will learn how to read rhythm!
Prepare yourself for the next lesson or you can check on the Musikal Knowledge timeline on facebook or twitter, click on the icons and check out my books.
Hi there! Dimitri here with another book: I Can Read Music - Book 1
In addition to its role as a traditional note speller, this book brings forth emphasis on guide notes with unique visual reinforcements, emphasis on reading the small intervals – step and skip (teaching pattern recognition in addition to note recognition).
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