How to read music - Tim Hansen

Like an actor's script, a sheet of music instructs a musician on what to play (the pitch) and when to play it (the rhythm). Sheet music may look complicated, but once you've gotten the hang of a few simple elements like notes, bars and clefs, you're ready to rock. Tim Hansen hits the instrumental basics you need to read music.

When we watch a film or a play,

we know that the actors

probably learned their lines from a script,

which essentially tells them

what to say

and when to say it.

A piece of written music

operates on exactly the principle.

In a very basic sense,

it tells a performer what to play

and when to play it.

Aesthetically speaking, there's a world of difference

between, say, Beethoven

and Justin Bieber,

but both artists have used

the same building blocks to create their music:

notes.

And although the end result

can sound quite complicated,

the logic behind musical notes

is actually pretty straightforward.

Let's take a look

at the foundational elements to music notation

and how they interact to create a work of art.

Music is written on five parallel lines

that go across the page.

These five lines are called a staff,

and a staff operates on two axes:

up and down

and left to right.

The up-and-down axis tells the performer

the pitch of the note

or what note to play,

and the left-to-right axis tells the performer

the rhythm of the note

or when to play it.

Let's start with pitch.

To help us out, we're going to use a piano,

but this system works for pretty much

any instrument you can think of.

In the Western music tradition,

pitches are named after

the first seven letters of the alphabet,

A,

B,

C,

D,

E,

F,

and G.

After that, the cycle repeats itself:

A,

B,

C,

D,

E,

F,

G,

A,

B,

C,

D,

E,

F,

G,

and so on.

But how do these pitches get their names?

Well, for example, if you played an F

and then played another F

higher or lower on the piano,

you'd notice that they sound pretty similar

compared to, say, a B.

Going back to the staff,

every line and every space between two lines

represents a separate pitch.

If we put a note on one of these lines

or one of these spaces,

we're telling a performer to play that pitch.

The higher up on the staff a note is placed,

the higher the pitch.

But there are obviously many, many more pitches

than the nine that these lines and spaces gives us.

A grand piano, for example, can play

88 separate notes.

So how do we condense 88 notes onto a single staff?

We use something called a clef.

A clef is a weird looking figure

placed at the beginning of the staff

and it acts like a reference point,

telling you that a particular line or space

corresponds to a specific note on your instrument.

If you want to play notes that aren't on the staff,

we kind of cheat and draw extra little lines

called ledger lines

and place the notes on them.

If we have to draw so many ledger lines

that it gets confusing,

then we need to change to a different clef.

As for telling a performer when to play the notes,

two main elements control this:

the beat

and the rhythm.

The beat of a piece of music is,

by itself, kind of boring.

It sounds like this.

Notice that it doesn't change,

it just plugs along quite happily.

It can go slow

or fast

or whatever you like, really.

The point is that just like the second hand on a clock

divides one minute into sixty seconds,

with each second just as long as every other second,

the beat divides a piece of music

into little fragments of time

that are all the same length,

beats.

With a steady beat as a foundation,

we can start adding rhythm to our pitches,

and that's when music really starts to happen.

This is a quarter note.

It's the most basic unit of rhythm

and it's worth one beat.

This is a half note and it's worth two beats.

This whole note here is worth four beats,

and these little guys are eighth notes,

worth half a beat each.

"Great," you say, "what does that mean?"

You might have noticed

that across the length of a staff,

there are little lines dividing it into small sections.

These are bar lines

and we refer to each section as a bar.

At the beginning of a piece of music,

just after the clef,

is something called the time signature,

which tells a performer how many beats are in each bar.

This says there are two beats in each bar,

this says there are three,

this one four,

and so on.

The bottom number tells us what kind of note

is to be used as the basic unit for the beat.

One corresponds to a whole note,

two to a half note,

four to a quarter note,

and eight to an eighth note,

and so on.

So this time signature here

tells us that there are four quarter notes in each bar,

one,

two,

three,

four;

one,

two,

three,

four,

and so on.

But like I said before,

if just stick to the beat,

it gets kind of boring,

so we'll replace some quarter notes

with different rhythms.

Notice that even though the number of notes

in each bar has changed,

the total number of beats in each bar hasn't.

So what does our musical creation sound like?

Eh, sounds okay, but maybe a bit thin, right?

Let's add another instrument

with its own pitch and rhythm.

Now it's sounding like music.

Sure, it takes some practice

to get used to reading it quickly

and playing what we see on our instrument,

but, with a bit of time and patience,

you could be the next Beethoven

or

Justin Bieber.