The First Steps To Learning How To Read Music
April 7, 2011Many people respond with awe to pianists or other musicians who know how to read music, but it is fairly easy to learn the basic skills required. Once you have learned the basics, developing speed and fluency is simply a matter of regular practice.
The musical notes corresponding to the notes on a piano, violin, trumpet or other instrument are organized on what is called a musical ‘stave’ (plural ‘staves’). This is the group of five horizontal lines you see at regularly intervals arranged on a sheet of music. They look a little like telephone cables, with the notes like little birds that sit in between the lines or directly on them.
The symbol at the beginning of a stave is a clef, which shows where a specific note lies. The treble clef, also sometimes called the ‘G’ clef, is that twirling shape which you see in the top stave on a piece of piano music. This places the note G above middle C on the second line from the bottom.
In piano music, two staves are joined together by a curving bracket or a straight bracket, as the instrument has a wide range. The right hand generally stays in the treble clef, while the left hand plays in the bass clef. This clef is represented by a curving line with two dots next to it. These dots are positioned on either side of the second line of the stave, and show that this line is where the F below middle C must be drawn.
From the above, you can see that clefs provide a place to relate other notes to – if you know a note on the line which runs between the two dots in the bass clef is F, then you can easily work out what other notes are in relation to it, once you know how the lines and spaces work. When you are starting out this can all be confusing and it may take you time to find each note on your instrument, but with practice you should be able to find notes without thinking twice.
The duration of notes is shown by the way the note is drawn. If a note’s exact pitch is shown by its horizontal position on a stave, the length of time it must be held for is shown by the way the stem (the line extending up or down from the round part) is drawn, or how the note head is drawn – it is basically the appearance of the note itself rather than its position on the stave which determines its duration.
As you can see from the basic explanations given here, there are a lot of small details that you need to learn if you wish to know how to read music, so the best course of action is to purchase a music theory book which will teach you what you need to know to make sense of musical scores.
If you’re serious about wanting to learn how to read music, you can get a FREE Special Report on the topic from Speedy Music Reading
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