Staff Paper

You don’t need to know how to read music in order to make music, but learning how to read it can definitely improve you skill and ability as a musician especially if you play in an orchestra or band.  I mean, who wants to memorize minutes to even hours of music when you’ve got the cheat sheet right in front of you?  The very basics to learning how to read music is based upon the staff, or really awkwardly spaced lined paper. The staff (or the stave) is the foundation upon which notes are drawn.  Most commonly you see the staff with five lines and four spaces.  Every line and space in the staff represents a “note” or if you are familiar with a keyboard, every line and space represents a white key. Now to be able to interpret which note goes with what line or space you need a clef.  A clef assigns individual notes to certain lines or spaces.  The most commonly used clefs are Treble and Bass clef.  Or you can think of them as a line with a spiral in the middle and half of a heart someone was too lazy to finish drawing.

Now in music the alphabet only goes to G, but it typically starts on C but encompasses the notes A to G.  To the right you can see where each of the notes are placed on the treble clef. Now because there are only so many lines to put our notes on what happens when we go off of the staff? Well add our own lines, called ledger lines.  Now you may think, ledger lines aren’t so bad, and you’d be right! If you don’t play flute.  But sadly, I play flute and these are just a pain to deal with. Oh we’re going at quarter note=164 (for you nonmusic folks that’s

Normal Versus FLUTE!!

about 4 notes a second) and you want me to read this? Yea not happening.

Now to be able to read the music, you need to know how to interpret the length of notes.  The longest note that there is in modern music is the whole note, or semibreve, which if you are in standard 4/4 that is equivalent to 4 beats. Now a half note, or minim, is equal to two beats, a quarter note, or crotchet, is equal to one and so on.  The chart shows you what each of these notes looks like drawn out and their relationships to each other.

Now when you put those notes on a staff you can interpret the music.  So for example, if I were to put a whole note( looks like a circle) on the first line of the staff in treble clef then you would play an E on your respective instrument for four counts. Now you are on your way to being able to read and interpret music!

Citations:

Picture 1:http://staffpaper.net/download/10-stave-staff-paper/10-stave-staff-paper.gif

Picture 2: http://www.selftaughtguitarlessons.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/TrebleClef.gif

Picture 3:http://www.musicreadingsavant.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/Treble-Clef-Notes-Chart1.jpg

Picture 4: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/09/Ledger_lines.png

Picture 5:http://musixcool.com/members/musixcool/english/theory/rhythms.gif