How To Read Music

This is very briefly how to read basic music. There are, in sheet music notation, each note gives you two pieces of information. One is what pitch or note the composer wants to sound and the other is how long the note lasts, and I'm going to start with that, start with the letter first.

So, anything to do with how long the music lasts is to do with rhythm. So, the first thing you need to do is to establish a beat, it's a steady beat and generally, while I get on to this later, generally, one-beat notes are the crotchets or the quarter notes as they are called in America and they are the black head notes with a tail either downwards or upwards, so that means that there is a different note each time there's a beat. And those are the crotchets.

The other rhythm variations are variations of note length. All of the variations apply to that beat. So, the semibreve or the whole note is four beats long.

Those are the circular or oval notes with no tail. With the tail but not filled in are minims or half notes and they change on every two beats. We then have subdivisions if you like, of the beats, so I'm going to slow the beat down to this.

The beat in my head now is, and we get on to notes like quavers or eighth notes as the Americans call them and two of those fit in to each beat evenly. So, I think of 1 and 2 and 3 and. Quavers are written with tails but linked generally in either pairs, threes and fours.

Sometimes, when they happen on their own, they have a tail going upwards. So, also in the subdivision of the beat, we have semiquavers or sixteenth notes where four go into the beat. 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4, like so.

They are written similarly to quavers but have two bars across the bottom and are often grouped in fours. The easiest way to think of a semiquaver pattern is to say the word caterpillar on every beat, caterpillar, caterpillar, caterpillar, caterpillar, because we've got 4 syllables. There are further divisions such as demisemiquavers or thirty-second notes which are half again so you're getting eight in each beat and so on and so on.

Dotted rhythms are where you have two notes, one longer than the shorter in a specific way. So, the easiest way is with the dotted minim to put a dot at the end of the note as half again to the note without the dots. So, a minim or a half note is two beats, 1, 2.

If I put a dot on the minim, it turns it into a three-beat note. Often, the dotted notes go along with the shorter one to create this rhythm where the short note is one beat and the long is three, so we have a three and a one representation. We can halve that in the beat, so we end up with a dotted crotchet and a quaver like this or even a dotted quaver and a semiquaver, something like that.

There are other rhythmic patterns which I may have time for later but let me just go onto the pitches. We have, in music, different clefs. The most common are the treble clef for the higher notes and the bass clef for the lower notes.

There are also the alto and the tenor for the middle register but they tend not to be used quite so often. The clef is designed so that most of the notes within the range of the instrument into the voice can be easily seen on the five lines. The notes, when you're reading them, use both the lines and the spaces between the lines to show which note the composer wants.

Going up the scale for example, it will go from line to space to line to space to line and so on. There are also, as it were, the notes in between. If the composer wants a note to be, to go a semi-tone above but not as far as the next line, it's called a sharp which is the crisscross sign to the left of any note and if the composer wants the note to go down with a semi-tone not as far as the next line, we use a flat which is a slightly squashed small b to the left of the note.

The only other thing about the reading of the music, what's on the map as it were, are the rests where each of the no