MUSIC THEORY - 2

MUSIC NOTATION - WRITING AND READING

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Music writing and Reading is as important as playing any instrument. Some people has a amazing ability to play any instrument without formal studying. We call those guys “self-taught” musicians. They can play but sometimes they play in their own positions and styles, this can cause a serious musical and physical limitation to the musician. But sometimes when they are really good, rarely special, we call them “Virtuosos”  

Music reading is made of elements that are used for music writing just like our alphabet (ABCDE..) in music we use: Notes, Pauses, Cliffs, Signs. With these elements we can write music in a sheet of paper called “pentagram” a pentagram is a group of five lines and four spaces where we write music. Just like as a notebook has many lines a musical sheet also has lines to help us on our “musical” composition, or essay. Just for your curiosity: Penta means Five and Gram means Lines. It’s a Latin word.


Just to make sure I told you everything.: A pentagram can have more lines than the existing five lines. It goes down or up so you can have lower or higher notes on the pentagram.. we’ll see that in the future. Don’t worry. If you learn to read music, you’ll be able to play any instrument. That’s why is so important to learn it.

MUSICAL SIGNS OR FIGURES

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Those guys help us figure out how long we are supposed to hold (play) that note. It’s what musicians call SOUND DURATION or SILENCE DURATION. When it sounds we call them NOTE when doesn’t sound we call them PAUSE. These figures are just like coin$$, you know how much each coin values by its figure, color, shape, size, (one cent is small and red for example). They are different for many reasons.. to make it easier to count or to blind people can recognize each coin’s value. When a note is played in any instrument or object, when this action of playing vibrates the material we call these notes as POSITIVE FIGURES, positive is good, up and is on, it has sound and vibrates. When the note is not playing, vibrating we call it PAUSE or NEGATIVE FIGURES, no sound, silence, zero.. off. So we only have two positions: ON and OFF just like in computer programming this is called BINARY LANGUAGE. The switch is ON or OFF.


Each note (Positive Figure) has it’s pause (Negative Figure) and they are equivalent, they have the same time value, but one is ON and the other is OFF. Just check this chart it will help you to see how they look like.

These are the most used ones:

All you have to understand now is very simple:

You have to think music notes as coins: $1.00 coin can be compared to a WHOLE NOTE. $0.50 will be a HALF NOTE. $0.25 equals a QUARTER NOTE in music we also have an EIGHTH NOTE and the SIXTEENTH NOTE, there is no similar in coins for these two notes. TIME in music is also money.. no I’m joking. In music Time as a figure, is visual and they look like those notes above. So.. Let’s do an exercise here:

Think about a 4/4 song. It means that in each measure “time frame” of four beats you can have: A WHOLE note witch is the longest note and you will hold the sound for four beats like this (You Play and hold 1…2…3…4… for four beats). You can also have two HALF notes instead of a WHOLE note the only difference is that you will play two notes instead of one note in that space of time (bars) or time frame (You Play and hold 1…2… play and hold 3…4…). You can also have four QUARTER notes in the time frame you will (play 1… play 2… play 3… play 4…). Or you can have a Half Note and two quarters note (You play and hold 1..2.. play 3.. play 4) or you can have two Quarter notes and one Half note (You play 1.. play 2.. play 3..4..) can also have eight notes on the time frame of four beats and also sixteen notes in the same time frame.. WOW! That’s fast!!

Just take a look at this chart and you will understand the difference.

One last thing for now.. To make music reading easier we group together the notes with the same value:

That's all for now.. I really hope that you are enjoying reading this material as I am enjoying to write it. Just leave a comment so I can see if I'm going in the right direction.

Porfirio Gueiros
Family Ministry