How to Read Music: Part III The Piano

Welcome back!

In this segment of our continuing series on how to read music, we're going to talk about the piano. If you think back to the first lesson in this series, we talked all about pitch. Music uses 7 letters of the alphabet to help designate pitch.

A, B, C, D, E, F, G

Remember, when we get to G, we just start the sequence over with 'A'. If you'd like to practice recognizing these pitches on the treble clef staff, remember you can always practice at MusicTheory.net. (You can also teach yourself Bass and Alto clef!)

Here is our piano:

The easiest way to begin to learn with letters go where it to memorize the very first note: C.

As you can "See" (get it? See? C? Nevermind) the letter C is the white key on the piano that always comes before the two grouped black keys. If you can memorize and identify 'C' on the keyboard, that will give you a solid foundation for the rest. As you go 'up' on the piano, you'll want to go forward through the alphabet. When you get to G, simply start over with A. The result is this:

There is an exercise/game that will help you learn to identify the keyboard notes here, thanks to wonderful folks at musictheory.net. You can also do an exercise where they will show you a note on the staff, and you have to click the correct note on the keyboard. They are all great activities to teaching yourself the language of music.

Let's get a very simple song, Mary Had a Little Lamb.

Notice all of the elements we've covered in other posts: the bar lines, the rhythms, the pitches, etc. Since you already (hopefully) know how the song goes, you can use this old knowledge to sync it to your new knowledge.

What is the first note in the song? It is a quarter note, and its letter name is B. Find B on the keyboard.

Now, look at the music again. Does it go up or down from B?

It goes down! If you refer above to the keyboard, it goes down twice from B. So your first 3 notes in the song are B, A, G.

Using this knowledge, you should be able to figure out every letter note in this song, and match it to a key on the piano. You can easily and quickly learn this song on the piano! (I won't give you all the notes for the song, since then there would be no motivation for you to do the work!)

Let's talk about some piano technicalities quickly.

Have you even watched someone who is unfamiliar with a keyboard trying to type? They do so very slowly, and by using one finger to tap each individual letter key. Someone who uses a keyboard frequently would tell you there is a much easier way. There is a specific position you lay your hands in on the keyboard that allows you to quickly and efficiently type using the entire hand.

The piano is the same way: we DO NOT want to individually pick at each key with one finger. Rather, there is a specific position we need to put our hands in. The song above is in treble clef: on the piano, only the right hand uses treble clef.

Let's look at our hand (isn't mine just lovely). Each finger gets a number.

Finding our 'C' note, we are going to line up our thumb (#1) on C and let the rest of our fingers naturally have placements on the following notes. (Try to find middle C, or the C most in the middle of the keyboard).

Your hand position should look like this.

Your thumb is lined up on C (1), and then index finger on D (2), middle finger on E (3), ring finger on F (4), and pinky on G (5).

This is the basic playing position for most beginners and the most basic songs. However, sometimes a song doesn't start in this position, it starts in a different position. Our song Mary Had a little Lamb starts on a B, which our fingers do not reach if we are in our C-G position. So let's shift our position so that our thumb (1) starts on G instead of C. It should look like this.

Now, our hand position should be our thumb (1) on G, our index finger (2) on A, our middle finger (3) on B, our ring finger (4) on C, and our pinky (5) on D. Now we are in the correct position to play Mary Had a Little Lamb. Here again is the music. I won't label it for you, since that's cheating! I highly encourage you to use rote memorization for your music notes and piano keys. It's just like your multiplication tables: you just need to memorize it!

If you have a piano or keyboard handy, give it a try. If not, go here: Online Piano There are a ton of resources available online if you search for easy beginning piano music, and there are also a lot of tutorial videos on YouTube. Hopefully this gives you a better understanding of where to get started.

Next week, we will focus on the LEFT hand of the piano, which reads music in an entirely different way than the treble clef. It's called the bass clef!

See you next time.

-DMM

How to Read Music: Intro

Oh boy, here we go.

This post starts another series, on a topic that is searched for constantly on the internet: How to read music.

Let's be real: it's similar to learning a new language. It takes time, effort, practice, and if you go years and years without using it, you can lose it. Whether you've read music before or are a fresh newbie, we're going to start at the most basic concepts and build your knowledge from the ground up.

Let's get started.

All music exists on what we call a "staff". It consists of five lines, and four spaces.

We always count the lines and spaces from the bottom going up.

An oval on the staff is called a note. Notes can be either on the spaces, or on the lines.

Now, we will place one note on the second line, and one note on the third space.

Try answering the following question: Which note is on the fourth line?

The answer is B. If you count up from the bottom line, the second note (letter B) is on the 4th line. Practice doing two more:

Which note is on the 3rd space?

Which note is on the 2nd line?

The answers are C and A. Get the idea? Each music note is either on a line or a space.

The higher the oval is located on our staff, the higher the sound. The lower the note is on the staff, the lower it sounds. Can you tell which notes are higher?

In the top example, the second note is higher. In the bottom example, the first note is higher.

Other parts of the staff look like this:

Double Bar Line : It means the song is over.

Bar line: Line that separates beats of music in order to read them more clearly.

Measure: The unit that contains a small grouping of beats. Beats are usually grouped in units of 2, 3, and 4 most commonly.

The Clef: The clef tells the musicians how to read the notes on the lines and spaces. Different instruments can use different clefs, depending if their instrument is high sounding, or low sounding. The piano uses two clefs at once.

Out of the clefs above, we're going to start with the first one on the left: The Treble Clef.

Here are some of the instruments that use the treble clef:

-Female voice

-Child's voice

-Violin

-Clarinet

-Flute

-Trumpet

-French Horn

-Saxophone

-Bells/Xylophone

-Right hand of the piano

-Guitar

The Treble Clef circles around the second line on the staff. We call this line the "G" line. This is also why the treble clef is sometimes called the "G" clef.

All notes that we place on this second line are the note G.

To read music, all you really need to know are the letters of the alphabet. If you know that, you're set! The musical alphabet uses only 7 letters out of the 26 letters in the alphabet.

A, B, C, D, E, F, G.

What happens once we get to G? There is no "H". We simply start over again on "A".

Moving up the staff (higher), we go forward in the alphabet.

Notice again that we can start with our second line "G", and then we start over on A. Then we progress up and forward through the alphabet. Notice that each line and space steps up to the next letter.

Likewise, when we go lower on the staff, we go backwards in the alphabet.

When we get all the way back to A, we jump backwards to G, and continue to go backwards in the alphabet again. As long as you remember the 2nd line (the one the treble clef curls around) is G, you can just count up or down to identify notes. Next, I'll show you a few tricks and cheats to help remember which lines and spaces are which letters. The tricks are helpful, but first make sure you understand the relationship between the lines and the spaces. Each time you go up one line to the next space, or one space to the next line, you are going forward to the next letter (or backwards, if you're going down).

Here are some cheats to make it easier to remember note names.

All line notes (starting from the bottom, of course) use the phrase "Every Good Boy Does Fine". Each beginning letter of each word represents the musical note name. For space notes, you can spell the word "FACE" starting from the bottom and going up, using the note names of each space note.

That's it! (Really?!) Well, for today anyway. We learned how to identify pitches, or how high or low of a note you should play. What we will touch on next time is how to read rhythm; how long to short to play a note. You need to know how to read both pitch and rhythm in order to successfully read music!

Now comes the hard part: Practicing. I'm going to link you to an amazing website where you can play a game to practice learning your note names:

https://www.musictheory.net/exercises/note

After you think you're pretty good at identifying the notes, you're ready for the next lesson in the series. If you see a symbol show up on the practice exercise that looks like a hashtag or a lowercase b, don't worry about it for now. Just match the symbol with the correct pitch. Sometimes the note may go above or below the five lines and spaces. Those are called "ledger lines". Just keep counting up or down your lines and spaces, and you'll get the correct note. :)

See you next time!