subject: How To Read Sheet Music - Getting Started [print this page] The first main idea to understand when working out how to read sheet music is basically how to inform how high or low the pitch of a note is - understand this and, believe it or not, you are already well on the way to reading music.
Note pitches are named after letters A-B-C-D-E-F-G. Instead of going onto H-I, etc.. it will start again at A. This run of 8 notes from A-A or B-B, C-C, etc.. is called an octave. These notes can be played on any tuned device. On a piano, these notes correspond to the white tips.
Clearly, the 1st standard thing that you need to understand in order to be able to read sheet music is what note to play when. Instead of creating out letters on a page, the general way of communicating which notes are to be played is via the employees.
The Staff
Staff notation is constructed on a series of 5 lines called a staff (or stave) and is the basis upon which music is written.
A note can be placed on distinct lines or spaces - the higher up the stave, the higher the note sounds. Obviously music uses a lot more than just the 9 notes of a stave (5 lines and 4 spaces), so we want a few method of being able to represent these additional notes.
Ledger Lines
Ledger Lines are extra lines which can be put above or below the staves to expand the pitch range of the stave.
OK. But using ledger lines steady leaves us with 2 troubles...
Our music is going to look very confusing if we just hold including ledger lines above and below the stave.
We still don't know what notes are on which lines/spaces.
Happily, help is at hand in the form of Clefs....
Clefs
Clefs are icons put at the beginning of a stave to assign particular lines/spaces to specific pitches. The easiest way to grasp this is to consider the note Center C. Middle C is this note that you learn about lots. In truth, there's nothing particularly special about middle C; it's not actually in the middle of anything! It does happen to be the C which is nearest to the centre of a piano. (In order to find a C on the piano look for the white note to the left of the 2 black notes. In order to find center C look for the one which is nearest the center of the piano?) Center C is assigned to a specific line when we put a clef at the start of the stave.
By using these clefs we have dramatically elevated the number of notes that can be shown on just these 5 lines and 4 areas? Combine this with some ledger lines and you have a lot of notes!
O.K. So we acquire the concept of the stave, ledger lines and clefs. The next step when studying how to read sheet music is to work out which lines/spaces refer to which notes in these 2 clefs. The the easy way learn the note names is through the following easy rhymes...
The Note Rhymes
For the Treble Clef lines:
Every
Good
Boy
Deserves
Food
For the Treble Clef spaces it is simple as the spaces make the word "FACE".
For the Bass Clef lines:
Good
Boys
Do
Fine
Always
For the Bass Clef spaces:
All
Cows
Eat Grass
Feel free to create up your own...whatever works perfect for you and helps you learn how to read sheet music quickly.
