How to read sheet music? Lesson 1 for beginners: basic notation

We will make an introduction to basic and elementary topics needed to understand the language of music. The approach to each topic discussed in the post is very superficial, and will be explained in greater detail through other posts.

The issues addressed in this lesson are:

Staves

Keys

Notes

Barlines

Double barrarr

BASIC NOTATION

In order to express the music in writing, we use what we call stave. The same consists of five lines and four spaces as shown in the following image.

Stave

When starting a stave, we wrote a symbol that is called "key or clef". There are several keys to determine which will be the name of the notes read. The key that we will use is called g key and is what we use for reading scores we use in the blog, and the wind instruments used the g key.

We can observe the initial clef to the following stave:

G key

We begin by explaining the concept of note so you can familiarize yourself with it.

The notes are symbols used in the musical model to represent musical sounds with our instrument or even by voice.

The staves are written using musical notes.

The notes have two parts, the head and tail. The notes can have different durations.

The tail of a musical note can point up or down, this location depends on the height of the note in the stave, but the location does not change the name or the tone (Concept we will see later) of the note.

Musical notes

The notes are grouped in music staff or music measure. A measure is a division of a stave taking into account the length of time. Within a sheet music, we have an indicator of how long each measure.

The measures are delimited by vertical lines are called bar lines.

When you end a sheet music is indicated using a double slash. When we see a double bar, we know that it has completed the melody or theme you are interpreting.

In the picture above we see a stave made ​​up of 3 measures. We can also see the double slash indicates the end of the score. As mentioned above the g key will always be present for wind instruments we work on the site.