Music Theory 101: Notes on the Treble and Bass Clef

I know I'm a couple days late on this blog post. Tuesday I was traveling back from California from the Grammys! Anyways I want to dedicate this blog to those who are struggling and are interested in reading music. There are many layers to sight reading, such as notes, intervals, chords, and patterns of all three, but we'll start with the first one. Since we're now familiar with the grand staff, lets get into navigating through it:

What you see above is a grand staff (two staffs connected by a bar line and a brace). On the top staff you see the famous music icon called the "Treble Clef", which indicates, at least for the most part, that the the notes on its staff are for the right hand to play. On the bottom staff, you see the "Bass Clef", which will consist of notes for the left hand to play. Now very rarely, you'll see the treble clef on the bottom staff, which I'll explain later what that indicates. For now, we'll keep it simple:

~Treble Clef is for the right hand

~Bass Clef is for the left hand

The next image you will need to study is as follows:

These are the basic notes on the piano. Not all of them, but most of them. The two "C"s you see in between the staffs (the one on the left on the treble clef and the one on the right on the bass clef) are both the same "C", called "Middle C", referring to the same "C" on the piano (the "C" closest to the middle of the piano). On the treble clef, the notes are referring to the corresponding ascending keys above middle C, and the notes on the bass clef refer to the corresponding descending keys below middle C. Now, there are two ways to learn and memorize these notes. You can do the long way where you can count your way up or down to navigate, or you can do the famous method of memorizing sentences for the lines and spaces of each clef. Refer to the images below:

For example, the notes on the spaces for the treble clef spell out the word "FACE", as shown on the top left of the image above. So if you see a note on the third space from the bottom, all you have to do is count "F"... "A"... "C", and it's "C". Same thing with the lines, shown on the top right. If there is a note on the fourth line from the bottom, count "Every Good Boy Does"... it's "D". Same rules apply for the bass clef.

Once you practice finding your notes on each clef over time, you'll find yourself navigating through the notes without having to use the sentences. One good program to use for this is www.musictheory.net. Go to the "Exercises" tab and click on "Note Identification". You will then see the exercise, and on the top right you'll see a funny looking icon next to the "i" icon, where you can customize your exercises to work with whatever notes you want. It's a pretty user-friendly site, along with it's sister mobile app called "Tenuto", that you can buy in the app store and use offline.

I hope this helped get you started with learning how to read music! Be sure to check out some of my tabs above that talk more about who I am, my youtube videos/tutorials/piano covers, and the private Skype lessons I offer!

Music Theory 101: All About Those "Black Keys" On Piano

This week's post will talk about the black keys on the piano, or more formally, "accidentals". Technically, that term doesn't refer as specifically to those keys as they do to these icons...

But because the black keys are identified by the two icons above, they do fall under the term "accidentals" when it comes to the piano.

With an interval, or how far one note is from another note, each interval is measured by what are called "half steps" and "whole steps". For example, from C to that black note to the right of it is a "half step". If you go another half step, you'll run into D. From C to D is a "whole step", because it took you two half steps to get from C to D.

Wait.... What does this have to do with the black keys??? Each black key is named based on the white key that is a half step to the left and the white key that is a half step to the right. Since the black key is a half step higher (to the right) the white key on the left, it will be referred to as a "sharp" (the "hashtag" looking thing in the image above). And, since that black key is a half step lower (or to the left) of the white key on the right, it's called a "flat" (see image above). In essence, since each black key has a white key on each side, it has two names, and can be referred to as either one. The black key 1/2 step above C is called "C sharp" (C#), but since it's also 1/2 step lower than D, it's also called "D flat" (D♭). All the other black keys are named accordingly, as shown below:

Now here's where it gets a little more confusing: there are "accidentals" on the piano that aren't necessarily black keys (well, technically, every key can be an "accidental", but that's a whole nother post). For example, B is also "C flat", because B is a half step lower than C (notice there's no black key between them), and C can also be "B sharp", since it's a half step higher than B. Same concept with E/"F Flat" and F/"E sharp".

Before I finish this post, there's another accidental you should know about called the "natural":

The natural is used if a particular note has been "sharped" or "flatted" in sheet music and the composer wants you to play the original, or natural, note rather than the "sharp" or "flat". For example, say you see a "C sharp" in one measure. If you see another C in that measure after the C sharp that does not have a sharp next to it, you still play it as a sharp until the next measure kicks in, then everything goes back to normal. But say the composer wants you to play that next C as a regular C instead of C sharp. He'll put a natural next to it.

I hope this shed some light on how accidentals work. Be sure to check out some of my tabs above that talk more about who I am, my youtube videos/tutorials/piano covers, and the private Skype lessons I offer!

"Time Signatures and Rhythm" (Video)

I hope everyone had a great holiday! I happened to look over my blog post schedule and realized that I had, for a while, completely abandoned the biweekly plan I put together without noticing it. So I had to reconfigure my entire plan to accommodate a weekly posting schedule. Anyway, in light of my previous post that shows how time signatures and rhythms look, I followed up with this post which includes a video demonstrating time signatures/rhythm and how they sound. Be sure to check out some of my tabs above that talk more about who I am, my youtube videos/tutorials/piano covers, and the private Skype lessons I offer! Enjoy.

The Breakdown on Rhythm and Time Signatures

I just glimpsed over my past blogs and realized I failed to go over the basic structure of sheet music before preparing this blog about rhythm (which is important to know because it will make the rhythm part make sense). So let's do that reeeeeaaallly quickly:

This guy...

is called a staff. Just the five lines and four spaces in between them. These are the lines and spaces on which you will find the notes placed in sheet music. When you see two staffs connected together that look like this...

it's called a Grad Staff. In piano, the grand staff consists of two staffs that represent notes played by each hand (notes placed the top staff are played by the right hand, and notes on the bottom staff are for the left hand). That funny-shaped thing on the left of the top staff is called a treble clef, and the one on the bottom staff is called the bass clef.

Now that that's out of the way, let's get to the meat of this blog post: Rhythm. For the sake of this post, drill this rhythmic sequence in your head as you read along:

1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4...etc

Each of these numbers represent a "beat", or a "pulse". The staff gets broken down into these evenly-distributed rhythms in groups called "bars", or "measures". Each bar, in the case of 1, 2, 3, 4, starts with beat "1" and ends on beat "4", then the next bar begins with beat "1" and goes to beat "4", etc etc, These are what bars/measures look like:

You see the treble clef, then those 4/4 numbers (which I'll explain later), then some notes, then you come to a vertical line called a "bar line". From the 4/4 to that bar line completes one bar. Then from that bar line to the next bar line completes another bar. By the time you get from one bar line to the next, 4 beats have gone by.

Now, you see a sequence of three different types of notes in the image above. Each of those notes have a value of a certain number of beats:

The "quarter note", seen above, is one beat long, literally, one "quarter" of a 4/4 bar (don't worry about what the 4/4 means just yet). So it would take four quarter notes to complete one 4/4 bar...

A "half note" is two beats long (you would just hold the key down for two beats), literally, half of a 4/4 bar. So, it would take two half notes to complete one 4/4 bar...

The "whole note" is four beats long. Did you notice at the end of the sequence above, the whole note is by itself? Because it's four beats long, it takes up the entire bar.

So, to put the idea of rhythm and notes together, however you mix up quarter/half/whole notes in one bar, the sum of beats that the notes add up to must equal to the length of the bar. In the case of a 4/4 bar, they would have to equal to exactly four beats.

Soooo what's up with this 4/4 situation anyway? The two numbers on top of each other at the beginning of the staff (which when made up of a group of bars is now called a "system") represent what's called a "time signature". Basically, a time signature of a piece tells you how long the bars themselves are. The top number tells you how many "beats" are in the bars. For example, if you see a 4 at the top, it means that each bar is four "beats" long. If it says 3, then the bars are now only three "beats" long (you would see up to three quarter notes in that bar, or a half note and a quarter note, or something like that... but never a whole note, since a whole note won't fit in a 3-beat bar). The bottom number is a little weird, but the best way to explain it is that the bottom number represents the "value" of each beat. For example, if you see 4/4, it means that the bar is "four quarter notes long", or if you see 4/2 that means the bar is "four half notes long (2 = half). You won't see the bottom number change from 4 too often so don't worry so much about it right now. We'll worry about the bottom number once we start talking about "compound meters".

I hope this post helped shine some light on how rhythm works. Be sure to check out some of my tabs above that talk more about who I am, my youtube videos/tutorials/piano covers, and the private Skype lessons I offer! Enjoy.

(Piano Cover) Fall Out Boy's "My Songs Know What You Did In The Dark"

I realize I'm a week and a day behind schedule with these posts, and I apologize since I was away. Anyways, here's my version of Fall Out Boys' "My Songs Know What You Did In The Dark". Enjoy, and don't forget to subscribe to my channel to stay updated. Also check out my tabs above to learn more about who I am, private Skype piano lessons, etc :-)