Understanding Musical Notation

Music has its own language. If you want to learn piano, you have to learn to read the language of music. You can easily learn the conventions and rules for written music. For piano, written music is arranged on sheet music that’s propped before the pianist so s/he can read and play at the same time.

The first thing to notice about a piece of sheet music is that all the lines of a piece are set in a series of evenly separated lines and spaces. All the notes and other parts of music will be written.

The staff is split into two halves: treble and bass, and these halves are what are composed of the five lines and four spaces. From low to high, the bass staff’s lines are remembered by the device ‘Good Boys Do Fine Always’: G, B, D, F, and A. The spaces are “All Cows Eat Grass”: A, C, E and G. Meanwhile, on the treble staff, the lines are ‘Every Good Boy Does Fine’: E, G, B, D, and F, and the spaces are the word ‘face’: F, A, C and E. If the symbol ‘#’ appears to the left of a note, play it a half-step up, or a black key immediately to the right. If you see ‘b’ play it a half step down, or a black key immediately to the left. Right between the two parts of the staff is the note middle C, which is the first note many people learn to play on any instrument. The lowest note in the bass part of the staff is a low G, which is about an octave and a fourth interval below middle C.

That’s all for the pitches of the notes. Rhythm has its own way of showing how to play it. The note, the stem and the tail/s are the three part sof the note that determine its rhythm and duration Look at the staff first, and note how it’s seperated into measures. Measures are a series of beats, and 4 is the most commonly used amount. Notes are named by how much of the measure they take up. For example, a whole note uses 4 beats, half note uses 2, a quarter note is one, etc.

Depending on how the note is written (colour, stem and tails), it’s played for different lengths.Whole notes are written as an unfilled oval shape with no stem or tail. Half notes are also unfilled, but they have a stem. Meanwhile, a quarter note is coloured black inside the note. Eighth notes, which are half of a quarter note, have a single tail at the end of the stem – when you link them together there’s a bar instead of a single tail. More bars furhter divide the notes, but you’re likely not going to need to know anything but eighth notes to start.

Other symbols give other means of denoting rhythm – a dot, for instance means to extend that note’s length by half its own count. Like, for instance, a dotted half note would be 3 counts because of the 2 counts on the note plus one count with the dot.