HOW TO READ MUSIC For Beginners A Simple and Effective Guide to Understanding and Reading Music with Ease Nicolas Carter © 2017 Copyright © 2017 by Nicolas Carter - All Rights Reserved This document is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. It is geared toward providing exact and reliable information in regard to the covered topic. The presentation of the information is without contract or any type of guarantee assurance. This book may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Amazon.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author. INTRODUCTION MUSIC THEORY COMPANION BOOK 1. WESTERN MUSICAL NOTATION 1.1. The Musical Staff and Its Elements 1.2. Title/Subtitle 1.3. Composer 1.4. Arranger 1.5. Instrument(s) 1.6. Staff Lines 1.7. Ledger Lines 1.8. Clef 1.9. Key Signature 1.10. Time Signature 1.11. Tempo 1.12. Bars and Bar Lines Single Bar Lines Double Bar Lines Heavy Double Bar Lines 1.13. Notes 1.14. Rests Beat-length Rests Bar-length Rests “Tacet” 1.15. Repeats 1.16. Codas 1.17. Endings 1.18. Form Introductions Form Letters/Section Titles Tags 1.19. Brackets and Accolades 2. UNDERSTANDING CLEFS 2.1. Standard Pitch and Middle C 2.2. The Role of Clefs and the Most Common Types 2.3. The Treble Clef 2.4. The Bass Clef 2.5. Remembering the Notes 2.6. The Grand Stave 2.7. Octave Transposition 2.8. Other Clefs 2.8.1. Percussion Clef 2.8.2. Tablature 3. TIME FOR SIGNATURES 3.1. Time Signatures 3.2. Key Signatures 3.3. The Circle of Fifths 3.4. Rules and Guidelines to Keep in Mind 3.5. How to Read Key Signatures Quickly 3.6. Key Signatures in Four Most Common Clefs (Reference) 4. SOLFEGE 4.1. Fixed “Do” 4.2. Moveable “Do” 5. HOW TO READ NOTES 5.1. Note Values 5.2. Sharps, Flats and Naturals (Accidentals) 5.3. Reading Single Notes 5.4. Reading Chords 5.4.1. Chord Symbols 5.5. What is a Lead Sheet? 6. HOW TO READ RHYTHM 6.1. Rhythmic Values 6.2. Note Durations 6.2.1. Dotted Notes 6.2.2. Tuplets 6.2.3. Rests 6.2.4. Ties and Slurs 6.3. Beat Counting 6.4. Building Blocks of Rhythm - Make Complex Rhythms Easy to Read 6.5. Tempo 6.6. Clapping the Beat 6.7. Polyrhythm 6.8. Polymeter 7. DYNAMICS AND ARTICULATION 7.1. Dynamics 7.2. Articulation 7.3. Techniques CONCLUSION APPENDIX A – HOW TO PRACTICE APPENDIX B - EXERCISES OTHER BOOKS BY NICOLAS CARTER INTRODUCTION What we call “Common notation” is, compared to the long history of musical sounds, a relative newborn. It was not the first form of musical notation and musical notation was not born as early as the earliest music. However, when you look at a sheet of music, you are looking at more than notes on a page – you are looking at a history. There is a genealogy to every piece of music that has been written down that transcends the specific history that piece’s creation. Each time someone transcribes or composes a piece of music using the western tradition’s common notation practices, they recall the history—from Bach to Schoenberg to Coltrane—that preceded that notation. The history of the music is in part the history of its being written down, and the writing of the thing bears on its content in some important ways. There is no way to understand modern music theory without also understanding modern musical notation, no way to make sense of a piece’s formal structure in any of the standard ways without also making sense of that piece on the page. Common notation is how we speak to one another, it is how we learn music, how we share it, how we analyze and understand it, and, just as importantly, it is how we teach it. It may not be necessary for every practicing musician to read music as a second language, but it is absolutely essential to the professional practice of being a musician that they understand how common notation works, how a piece of written music is constructed, how they can learn about that music by reading it on the page, and how they can write their own music on the page in order to share it. This guide is meant to instruct the uninitiated in the ways and methods of common musical notation. It is specifically a book about common notation (and tablature explanation) – not about chord analysis, Nashville notation, or any other ways of communicating music. The goal of this book is: To help you—the reader who has little or no knowledge of what a piece of sheet music does and says—understand how that sheet works. To get you to experience and practice sightreading (the act of reading and directly performing a piece of music written down on a music sheet using common notation). The final aim is, while perhaps not fluency of the sort that those musicians who have studied common notation for decades posses, at least a sense of understanding that will help you as you move forward as a musician. Music is part raw sensation and part linguistic phenomenon, and like all languages it has rules – formal and otherwise – for communication. The field of musical notation is populated by linguistic objects that conform to these rules, and understanding what those objects are, what they mean, and how they work (what rules they follow) will help you in a number of likely unforeseen ways.