Lesson 5: Notes and Rhythm part I

Reading sheet music is like reading a foreign language. There are rules and patterns that must be followed for the music to sound pleasing to the ear and so the musician can interpret the music correctly in order to perform it.

Before we get to the music, we must first know how to write it correctly, understand the notes, and know how to organize it.

To learn about how to correctly label a note, head to: http://nomusicbflat.blogspot.com/2012/09/what-is-c4.html

To learn about clefs, head to:

http://nomusicbflat.blogspot.com/2012/12/lesson-2-staffs-clefs-and-lines-oh-my.html

To learn about the major scale and whole and half steps, head to:

http://nomusicbflat.blogspot.com/2013/01/lesson-3-major-and-minor-scale.html

To learn about key signatures, head to:
http://nomusicbflat.blogspot.com/2013/01/lesson-4-key-signatures.html

Now we will learn about the notes themselves. There are many different kinds of notes, and each note has a different length of time it is sounding. These are the notes commonly seen in simple meter(time).

A whole note is the base for all other notes. It looks like this:

A half note is just that, half of a whole note. It looks like this:

Notice how a half note looks like a whole note, but with a stem. (all stems can go either up or down, depending on it's position on the staff and in relation to other nearby notes, but we'll get to that in a later lesson.)

A quarter note is the most commonly seen note in music and is worth 1/4 of a whole note. . It is also the most commonly used base note for time signatures.( see lesson 6) It looks like this:

See how a quarter note is like a half note, but with the center filled in.

An eighth note is an 1/8 of a whole note. ( starting to see a pattern here????) It looks like this:

It's just like a quarter note, but with a little flag on the end of the stem.


Finally, the sixteenth note. What portion of a whole note do you think it is worth??? If you answered 1/16 of a whole note, you must be a genius? or you probably caught on to the pattern of the note names. The people who named these notes must have been pretty straightforward in their descriptions. A sixteenth note looks like this:

It looks just like a quarter note, but unlike the eighth note, it has two flags on it's stem, showing it's half of an eighth note.

There are notes smaller than a sixteenth note, and theoretically there are an infinite number of notes, however no note has existed outside of theoretical land smaller than the sixty-fourth note.

These notes with flags may looks weird, even if you have seen music before. Do these look more familiar?

eighth notes



Sixteenth notes

 These are just like the other eighth and sixteenth notes, except there are several of them beamed together. Notice how the eighth notes, which have one flag, have one beam connecting them together; sixteenth notes have two flags and are connected together with two beams.

As you can see, all of these notes can fit into one whole note.

This diagram is called a note tree. It shows the relationship between each of these notes, and how many of a given type of note it would take to equal a whole note.

These are the most common notes found in simple meter. This concludes the lesson for today.