Music Theory 101: Reading Music Part I
Hello everyone, today we’re going to get into actually reading music (YAY) So the first thing we want to touch base on is the basics of the language because yes, music is its own language. I wonder, does that make us bilingual? Anyhow So let’s start by looking at the “paper” we use to write our language.
When you sit down to write a term paper or a letter you usually use lined paper. College ruled most likely. Well when you write music, your paper is called a “staff”. This staff is made up of 5 lines and four spaces. The staff is broken up or divided by measures (see image).
So now that we can see our lines in our paper, we can start reading music. It’s a lot easier than you think. Now hopefully I don’t confuse you with this next section. Let’s say you’re in a spanish class and you have your college rule paper. If you’re going to write a spanish paper, your words will be in spanish not english. The line paper doesn’t dictate what or how you read what you write, the language does. It’s the same with the staff.
When you have a staff you need to know what to read. There are things called “CLEFFS” that will tell you what notes to read.
Cleff – Any of several symbols placed at the left-hand end of a staff, indicating the pitch of the notes written on it.
There are 3 types of clefs. Bass Clef, Treble Clef, and C-Clef. I will get into later on, today we’re going to focus on the treble clef which is the most common.
Now that we know we’re using the treble clef, we can start putting notes down. The treble clef lets us know what notes each line and space will be. As you can see in the image the bottom line now becomes E. So if I were to play a dot (which we will talk about next time) on that line you would play E on your instrument. Remember we are talking about notes and not chords. If you go up to the next line up and put a dot there you would play G. If you placed a dot on the first space from the bottom up, you would play F. That, my friends, is reading music.
There is just one other thing. Music is not just about tones and notes, but rhythms and patterns. So when you have a staff and notes you need to know how the pattern goes. We all do this automatically, when you hear a song you might bob your head or tap your foot. You’re not just enjoying the music you are listening to, but your counting to the music. On a staff after the Treble clef usually you’ll see a number. This is called “time signature”. A time signature tells you how the music is to be counted
The top number of the time signature tells you how many beats to count. This could be any number. Most often the number of beats will fall between 2 and 12.
The bottom number tells you what kind of note to count. That is, whether to count the beats as quarter notes, eighth notes, or sixteenth notes. So the only numbers you will see as the bottom number (the denominator) will correspond to note values:
1 = whole note (you’ll never see this)
2 = half note
4 = quarter note
8 = eighth note
16 = sixteenth note
You could continue on with 32, 64, but you will hopefully never encounter them! After a while it gets a bit unwieldy. The most common bottom numbers are 4, 8 and 16. Now we will get more into that next week. Look at the image and you can get a basic idea of this. *Note please excuse the misspelling in the visuals.
