Music notation is a magical language. In Part 1 of our study, Your Very Own Rosetta Stone, we learned how to read the notes on the staff and to determine how those notes corresponded to the notes on our guitars. But every note of musical notation actually tells you two specific things. Not only does it tell you the name of the note, it tells you the note’s duration, or rather how long it should be held. This is the timing of the note.

At the beginning of a piece of notation, as we saw, the staff will give us important information regarding the song. The first thing is the clef. For our purposes today, we’re going to concentrate on the treble clef. You remember, from Part 1, that there is the treble clef (or “G clef” because it looks like a stylized “G”) as well as the bass (or “F”) clef. Since our examples will be for the guitar, let’s use the treble.

Immediately after the clef comes the key signature. This, as we learned, tells us what key the song is in by pointing out the number of sharps or flats, or if there are any.

Following both these is the time signature. More often than not, this consists of two numbers sitting on top of each other, like a fraction. It could also be a “C” or also something that looks like the symbol for “cent” in American currency. If you’re playing most music, easily 95% of it will have one of these time signatures:

Rather than write all this out again, I’m going to borrow from one of my “Easy Songs for Beginners” lessons, House of the Rising Sun:

The time signature (along with the key signature) is one of the first things you encounter when you read music, so you might as well learn just what it means at some point, no? The time signature usually consists of two numbers written one on top of the other, almost like a fraction except there is no line (other than the lines of the staff and that doesn’t count). These provide you with two important pieces of information about the song that you are going to play. The top number tells you how many beats are in a measure (and we learned about measures in Before You Accuse Me). The lower number (the “denominator” if you will, the number that sits on the bottom) indicates which note is going to count as “one beat.” The vast majority of music you are likely to encounter will be in 4/4 timing:

Sometimes you will see “4/4″ timing written out as “C.” I have no idea where this “shorthand” notation came from and would be more than happy to entertain suggestions. As well as “C” there is also a “C”with a vertical line slashing it. It looks like the symbol for a penny and, of course, my keyboard does not have one! This is known, appropriately enough, as “cut time,” or

There are also songs, many marches in fact, which are in 2/4 time. And you have undoubtedly heard songs that use 3/4 timing as well. Waltzes are in 3/4:

Probably eighty-five to ninety percent of all songs are written in either of these two time signatures. 6/8 timing is very similar to 3/4 in that it has the same kind of “triplet” feel. It’s easier to count in groups of threes rather than sets of six, isn’t it?

I realize that, at this point, you have no idea as to what a “quarter note” or an “eighth note is. Don’t worry about that for the moment. First, let’s define a measure! “Measure” and “bar” (as in “twelve bar blues”), in case you’re wondering, mean the same thing. In music notation, and in many TABs, a measure is indicated by a single vertical line that crosses the staff at numerous points in a piece of music. Here’s what they look like:

There are two additional types of measure lines. A double line at the end of the song indicates (big surprise here!) the end of the song. Would I lie to you? Another symbol is the “repeat sign” which indicates you are to repeat a section of a song:

If you were playing this example, you’d first play measures one through three. When you came to the repeat sign in measure three, you’d go back to the first repeat sign in measure two and then play measures two and three again. Then you’d finish the song with measure four. In other words, you only repeat what is within the repeat signs. Notice that the double dots show you which way to go! If you ever run across a situation where there is no first repeat sign, you’re expected to go back to the beginning of the song.

Within each measure, you will have the number of beats indicated by the time signature. If there is a change in this value, which, although very rare in most music you will deal with, can happen, a new time signature will appear to let you know. Check out the lesson on Bookends or Blackbird if you’d like to see examples of this.

And while I’m trying to cover every conceivable thing, let’s talk about counting and keeping tempo. You may not believe this, but keeping a steady beat while playing is more important that I can possibly begin to tell you. So when we talk about the number of beats in a measure, it is absolutely vital that you make the beats uniform. Not only within the measure but also throughout the song, unless we run into one of those exceptions we’ve talked about. Practice counting beats aloud if you’ve never done so before. Yes, you’ll sound fairly daft simply saying “one, two, three, four,” over and over again to yourself, but no one said being a musician wasn’t without painful sacrifice. Are you ready to look at our time signatures from the first example and count along a few measures of them?

Still with me? Great! Let’s look at some notes. For the sake of simplicity, let’s work in 4/4 time and use a single note in order to demonstrate differences in timing. In the following example, all of these notes are the B note that corresponds to the open B (second) string. However, they are all different, as you’ll see.

An important thing for me to point out here is that the “stems” of the notes (except, of course, on the whole note, since it has no stem) can go down instead of up. If you look at any piece of music you’ll see this. For the classical guitarist, as well as others, there is a special reason for this, and we’ll get to that in our next chapter.

When you reach the line of eighth notes, notice that there are different ways of writing these out. First we see the notes individually – each note has a stem with a single “flag.” In measure two, I’ve connected the flags of each pair of eighth notes, grouping them into a single beat. Measure three shows the eighth notes grouped in sets of fours. This “grouping” can be done in many ways. I could string all eight together if I wanted to.

Likewise, when you see sixteenth notes and thirty-second notes (not shown here – they look exactly like eighth notes except that they have two and three flags, respectively, on the stem), they can be portrayed individually or in groups. Again, we’ll learn more about these (and triplets) next time.

Okay, just to make your life interesting and to show you there’s nothing at all to this, let’s see some notes in action. And before you get all worried that you can’t handle it, let me add that I’ve selected the first part of Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star (soon to be seen in a (bad pun alert) starring role in an upcoming lesson on arrangements for single guitar!) as our first example and Happy Birthday as our second. By the bye, I’m not throwing in the lyrics, just the count. If you truly need the lyrics, ask the first child you see.

Twinkle, Twinkle, I imagine, gave you no trouble at all. Four quarter notes to a measure is a pretty easy way to start, right? And in measure two, you caught on to the fact that you had two quarter notes (one beat each) and a half note (two beats), which adds up to four beats, right? See how easy this can be?

Easy, that is, until I sprung Happy Birthday on you. I can hear you now – “The first measure only has ONE beat!!!” Well, if you managed to get to the last measure, you probably found it just as confusing to see that it had only two beats. And I know you read the 3/4 time signature correctly, so what gives?

This is what’s called a “pick up” beat. Some songs don’t start on the first beat; that would make things rather dull. This one begins with two eighth notes on the third beat. So, if you were counting things out for yourself, and if you gave yourself a full measure to set the pace, you’d go “one, two, three, one, two, Happy…” and launch into the rest of the song. The rest of the song is an easily figured combination of quarter notes, half notes and eighth notes. It’s nothing you can’t handle. The last measure is only two beats because we’ve used the third beat as our pick up beat. Think of it as all that matter/energy stuff that I didn’t understand in physics. We have to have the three beats somewhere – we’re just splitting them between the opening and the closing of the song.

So what happens when you’re not playing? This is called a “rest.” All rests have symbols which, just like the symbols for notes, indicate different time durations. Here they are:

There’s one final thing I want to bring up to you in this lesson. You’ve no doubt noticed that the things we’ve covered quite a bit of material. But what happens if we want a note of a length other than what we’ve seen, like a note that is three beats long? How about a beat and a half? What about five or six or seven beats?

Notation has an ingenious way of dealing with this. It’s called a dot. Long before it was associated with the word “com,” the dot was an important part of reading music. When you see a dot after a note, you automatically add half of that note’s value to the note. As you see here:

Another way of making a note longer involves the use of a “tie.” This is a slightly curved line, like a parenthesis that is lying on its side. It connects two or more notes and you simple add them together:

Let me leave you with an example that uses many of the things we’ve seen in this lesson.

It’s Silent Night, which I’m certain you’re all familiar with. I’ve just written out the melody lines (even threw in the TAB so you can cheat if you want to!), and I took the liberty of writing in the key of C (no flats, no sharps) so that you can concentrate on learning both the note names and the timing:

Remember that all of this will not be instantly ingrained into your brain. The more you use notation, the quicker you will find you know what the symbols mean. You may not believe this, but spending five minutes a day looking at music will do you wonders. Take any beginner’s book or piano book and practice on the melody lines (the single note section usually at the top of a song) to familiarize yourself with notation. Learn some simple pieces, like Alan Green’s Study In Blue, which just went up onsite a week ago.

There are more things to cover in reading music notation, but what you’ve learned in these two lessons will provide you with most of the information you need to read standard notation. And hopefully the wait for “Part 3″ won’t be anywhere near as long!

As always, please feel free to write in with any questions, comments, concerns or songs (and/or riffs and solos) you’d like to see discussed in future pieces. You can either drop off a note at the Guitar Forums or email me directly at dhodgeguitar@aol.com.

Until next lesson…

Peace

Well, if you haven’t got a clue at all, perhaps we can help you. Guitar Noise welcomes you to the first of our Absolute Beginner articles. It is our hope to get you started playing the guitar as quickly and as painlessly as possible.

First, though, one very important thing to know: the guitar is not some magical device that somehow makes beautiful music while you simply hold it. Like any other musical instrument YOU HAVE TO LEARN HOW TO DO IT!! Fortunately, as with most instruments, getting started is no trouble at all. But getting good should take you the rest of your life.

I don’t want to sound like the stereotypical parent telling his child, “Yes, you can have a pet but it’s your responsibility to feed it, walk it, clean up after it, etc.” But you must understand that learning how to play is very much a negotiation between you and your guitar. And you do have to bring something to the table: a willingness to use your brain, to experiment and to fall flat on your face. You cannot expect the guitar to play itself and you cannot expect to play it without putting in (a lot of) effort.

You will find yourself faced with all sorts of choices and more information than you can possibly use at any given moment. Let me suggest a few old articles of ours that you should read at your leisure and reread once you know a little more about the guitar: A Question of Balance, If I Only Had…, Common Sensei.

Finally, please realize that as great a tool as the Internet can be for education, it is still only one source. Ideally, you should equip yourself with as many means to learn as possible. I’m one of those persons who stresses the use of books, and nothing is more helpful than a human teacher when one begins learning the guitar, even if your “teacher” is the friend next door who’s only been playing a year. You can look at pictures and videos and listen to tapes and read a lot of text, but I cannot begin to compare that to the value of dealing with a person. Even if it’s only to learn how to hold the guitar and to put your fingers on the fretboard.

See Larger Image

The first thing that you have to know about your guitar is what exactly it does. Pluck a single string, any one string. What you are hearing is called a note. This is a single note and every note has a name, designated by a letter of the alphabet (A through G only) and sometimes the notation “#,” which means “sharp” or “b,” which means “flat.” When you see something written out as “F#,” this means “F sharp.” “Bb” would be read as “B flat.” In western music, there are twelve possible names for all the notes. To find them all and to see how they relate to one another, please read my column The Musical Genome Project.

Exactly which note you play depends on what string you struck (not to mention whether or not that string was in tune). And whether or not you are fingering the string on the neck of the guitar. When you put your finger on a fret – which is a space on the fretboard between any two metal strips (which are also called frets, by the way) – you create a new note. The guitar is an instrument that offers you the choice of playing individual notes, one at a time (as in most lead guitar parts) or several notes at once, which are called chords.

But before we can even think about chords, we have to make certain our guitar is in tune. Tuning is assigning each of the guitar’s strings to a particular note. And before we can look at that, we have to agree on what to call our strings. Traditionally we either number the strings from 1 (thinnest or closest to the floor as you are holding the guitar) to 6 (the thickest one). Later, when you learn to read guitar tablature, you will see that the stings are lined up in this way. But we will come back to this in a later Absolute Beginner lesson.

Back to tuning – In what we call “standard tuning,” the strings are tuned to the following notes:

The first string, being the thinnest, will be highest in pitch, while the sixth string will be lowest in pitch. And please don’t start asking about alternate tunings, low tunings or anything like that just yet. You have to focus on one thing at a time and if you can’t get your guitar into standard tuning, then all the other tunings aren’t going to matter.

Fortunately for us, Paul Hackett has written a great article on how to tune your guitar. Not only does it discuss the use of tuners, but it also includes a link to a site where you can get a note to which you can tune your 6th (low E) string.

Now that our guitar is in tune, shall we get down to business? We are going to be playing what are called “first position” or “open chords.” They are called this because they are played close to the nut and utilize a number of open strings. Let’s start with the easiest chord to play, the E minor (usually written as “Em”):

Chart of Em Chord

This is a chord chart. It is a picture or graph that represents where you need to position your fingers on the fretboard to form the chord. The heavy line across the top of the graph is the nut of the guitar.

The vertical lines descending from the nut are the strings. You will see six of them. From left to right, they are the 6th (low E, the thickest one), 5th (A), 4th (D), 3rd (G), 2nd (B) and 1st (high E, the thinnest) strings. This will almost always be the case in any chord chart that you look at. This is why, whether you play left handed or right handed, you can read the same charts. The position of the strings is not going to change relative to your perspective of them.

The horizontal lines that intersect the strings at regular intervals are your frets. When you see a dot on a “string” you are supposed to put your finger on that particular fret and string. Here, in our Em chord, we want to place a finger on the second fret of the A (5th) string and one on the second fret of the D (4th) string. More on this in a moment…

If you see a “0″ above a particular string, then you play that string as an “open” string. This means that you do not have to put a finger on it at all. An “X” means that you do not play the string at all. An open circle (which we will not be seeing today) means that particular note is optional. You can play it or ignore it.

Let’s get back to our Em chord. As I said, we want to place a finger on the second fret of both the A and D strings. The other strings we can play open. This seems easy enough. But which fingers shall we use? And how should we go about placing them on the strings?

I’ll answer the second question first: When we place a finger on the string, we want to place the tip of the finger, the rounded part just below the nail, on it. It’s the same part of the finger you’d use to dial a push-button phone or use an adding machine or write me an email asking me which specific part of the finger to use.

If you look at the fingertips of people who’ve played for a long time, you’ll see that their tips are actually closer to flat than round! Using the tip also causes you to arch your fingers so that they are arcing away from the neck of the guitar. This should keep them out of the way of the open strings so that they (the strings) can ring freely.

You ideally want to place your fingers as close to the metal fret closest to the body of the guitar. But don’t place your fingers on the metal fret – your fingers should be in the space between the metal frets. This space, as I pointed out before, is also called the fret and when someone says your fingers should be on the second fret, they mean the in the space between the first and second metal frets and not on the metal itself.

Okay, which fingers should you use? Believe it or not, this is going to be your choice. Yes, there are standards, and there is also a lot of debate over this. But the truth is that everyone’s fingers are different and what feels comfortable for you may not be so for someone else and vice versa. Choice of fingers will also eventually depend on other ever-changing circumstances: which chord did you come from, which are you going to, are you going to be doing any ornamentation or fills?

For now, though, let’s use our middle finger on the second fret of the A (5th) string and our ring finger on the second fret of the D (4th) string. You will hopefully understand why I chose these particular fingers as we move along. With your fingers all set on their appropriate strings and frets, strum all six strings of your guitar. Voila! You have just played an Em chord.

Now let’s move on to the E major chord. All major chords are represented by a single letter, which might or might not be followed by a flat or sharp symbol. So if you see the symbol “E” or “F,” for instance, you know that it is an E major chord or F major chord. An “Ab” means an “A flat major chord.” Here is a chord chart for E:

Chart of E Chord

Perhaps now you will see why I chose to play the Em with those particular fingers. An E chord is essentially the same: you start with your middle finger on the second fret of the A (5th) string and your ring finger on the second fret of the D (4th) string. To this we are going to add the index finger on the first fret of the G (3rd) string.

Do yourself a favor and play both of these chords one after the other. Listen to the tonal differences between the major and minor chord. This will not mean much to you know, aside from their noticeably different sounds. But as you learn more about the guitar and about chord theory you will be glad you took the time to train your ears in this manner. For more info on this, just to keep in the back of your mind as you learn, read my first column on ear training called Happy New Ear.

Are you all set for another chord? Well, take your fingers as they are positioned for the E chord and shift them up to the next higher string:

Chart of Am Chord

You should have your index finger on the first fret of the B (2nd) string, your ring finger on the second fret of the G (3rd) string and your middle finger on the second fret of the D (4th) string. This is an A minor chord, or Am for short. On this chart you will see an “X” over the sixth string. This means do not play it. Start your strum on the open A string.

Later you will learn that it is indeed okay to use the open E string as well (since the E note is part of an Am chord), but for now I want you to be able to concentrate on not always hitting all six strings. Not all chords can be played on all six and you should get into the habit early of not flailing away on your guitar.

Since the E and Am chords were relatively easy, shall we take on a bit of a challenge?

Chart of A Chord

The A chord causes people no ends of problems because it’s not always easy to get three fingers into one fret! Here is something I wrote in one of our Easy Songs For Beginners:

“Now the A chord is another matter. Some guitarists actually have a lot of trouble with this chord. It looks like it should be easy enough, simply press the second fret of the 2nd, 3rd and 4th strings. But that’s exactly where the problem lies. Most people (and a lot of teachers) will tell you to use this fingering:

Personally, I find this very uncomfortable. By some happy accident, I learned the A chord after the E chord. At the time, I was trying like crazy to make as few changes with my fingers on the fretboard as possible and I managed to come up with this:

I just find it easier to get a better sounding A major chord this way. Not only is it more comfortable for my fingers, but I can switch quickly and easily back and forth between the A, E and D chords (which are the three most common chords when playing songs in the key of A major). I should mention, though, that I know a number of people (mostly guys with big fingers) who can’t get all three fingers on the second fret no matter what combination they try. Sometimes they resort to playing the A chord by barring the second fret (to “barre” means to lay a finger across all the strings of a fret). In this case, you wouldn’t barre the entire fret, just the first four strings. But here you have to make certain NOT to play the first string.

The point of all this is to show you that there are different ways to play chords. Ultimately, you should use whichever fingering gives you the greatest comfort and ability to switch from one to the next. You may often find yourself learning to play the same chord with different fingerings depending upon the context of the chord progression in which it is used.”

It’s worth noting here that my charts are decidedly backwards. This is why it’s always important to look at everything.

The next two chords I want you to initially learn as four string chords, using only the first four strings.

Chart of D Chord and Chart of Bm Chord

Virtually everyone plays the D major chord in the same manner: middle finger on the 1st (high E) string, ring finger on the 2nd (B) string and index finger on the 3rd (G) string. You will find yourself using your pinky a lot when playing the D in order to get a Dsus4. This will come in the future. Also, you will find that the open A string not only can be played, but is essential to working in an alternating bassline. If you can’t wait to find out more about these, check out the lesson on Margaritaville.

For the B minor, use your index finger on the 1st string, middle finger on the second and ring finger on the 3rd. There are a lot of ways of playing this particular chord (and all chords, for that matter); I have chosen this one because I feel it is the simplest voicing.

There are just two more important first position chords. I’ve saved them for last because they will, in all likelihood, require the most attention and practice:

Chart of C Chord and Chart of G Chord

To initially form the C major chord, let’s start out with our Am fingering: your index finger on the first fret of the B (2nd) string, your ring finger on the second fret of the G (3rd) string and your middle finger on the second fret of the D (4th) string. Now take your ring finger off of the G string and place it on the 3rd fret of the A (5th) string.

Remember to keep your fingers arched so that each fingertip touches only its respective string, and that the rest of your fingers are out of the way. Picking each string individually, from the A down to the high E, should produce clear, ringing notes. If you get any “clunks,” then you need to work on having your fingers better positioned on their frets.

Once you have the C, take your ring and middle fingers and place them on the same frets on the next lower strings. Your ring finger will be on the third fret of the low E (6th) string and your middle finger on the second fret of the A (5th) string. Remove your index finger entirely from the fretboard and place your pinky on the third fret of the high E (1st) string. Now you have a G major chord.

Because so many, many, many songs have G to C or C to G chord changes, this is the way most teachers will show you how to play these chords. It is not what I do all the time. Often I will play a G major like this:

Without a formal teacher, this is the fingering I found most comfortable for me. I will often use the first fingering when switching from a G to a C, played with my pinky still on the third fret of the 1st string. This is the same C chord, it is simply a different voicing, which means that I’ve changed the strings on which I play certain notes. Again, this is something that you will pick up on as you learn more about chords.

One last quick note – sometimes, particularly on TAB found on the internet, chord charts will be replaced with something that looks like a serial number. Again, this should be of no surprise since most people do not have the software to make chord charts. These numbers, more often than not, are set in parentheses and read from left to right as chord charts are, complete with “Xs” and “0s.” Any other number is the fret you want to finger for that particular chord. On these “serial number” chord charts, the chords we covered today look like this:

Em – (022000)
E – (022100)
Am – (X02210)
A – (X02220)
D – (XX0232)
Bm – (XX0432)
C – (X32010)
G – (320003)

This should be more than enough to get you going. Yes, there are a lot more chords to learn and also different versions of these particular chords. But knowing these eight first position chords will allow you to play literally thousands of songs. Knowing these chords, as well as being able to switch between them fairly quickly and smoothly, should be any beginners first task. If you are at all familiar with any of the songs on our Easy Songs For Beginners page, then I would recommend that this be your next step in learning.

I hope this lesson helps you in getting started. Our next installment will be on strumming, involving straight strumming (with and wthout a pick) and fingerpicking. The final “Absolute Beginner” articles will be on reading music and reading TAB. Part one of Reading Notation is already online.. And finally, there will also be a “Miscellaneous” article as well to cover general things that shouldn’t take a great deal of time, such as posture and holding the guitar.

And then there will be all the things we missed, not to mention all those that you will one day encounter as you learn more and more about the guitar. “Miscellaneous” will also cover symbols for (and explanations of) muted strings, hammer-ons and various guitar techniques that, again, you will want to know at some point.

As always, please feel free to write in with any questions, comments, concerns or songs (and/or riffs and solos) you’d like to see discussed in future pieces. You can either drop off a note at the Guitar Forums or email me directly at dhodgeguitar@aol.com.

Until next lesson…

Peace

Now, close to two years later, I am desperately scrambling around trying to fill in as many of the gaps in my teachings as possible. This is going to take time and I don’t want to detract from the other fun lessons that are progressing even as we speak. So from time to time I hope to put out a column such as this one. Maybe Paul will even put it on it’s own page! Something with a clever, catchy title, like “Things David Really Should Have Written About Earlier If Only The Poor Sod Had Half A Brain…”

Today I’d like to give you a quick guide to reading music notation. This is something that many of you have asked for. It is also something that any and every serious musician needs. If you’re wondering whether or not you should bother to learn to read music, take the time to read Jamie Andreas’ excellent article Why Should I Learn To Read Music? that we put online last March.

What I’ve put together here for you is not a definitive guide. Rather, it is a basic starter kit, kind of like those phrase books you see tourists carrying around when they are unsure of the language but at least want to give it a try. It certainly is better than arrogantly expecting everyone to speak your language! With today’s column and some practice (sigh. Yes, everything does require practice, does it not?), you will be able to navigate through my lessons at least! You’ll also be taking the first steps in learning what is perhaps the only “universal” written language this planet has.

Setting Up Shop

One of the coolest things about knowing how to read music is that there is a lot that you can know about a song without even giving it more than a passing glance. Like the eternal question, “What key is it in?” But first things first.

Just as in reading any writing language, we have to learn the alphabet as well as the various “punctuation” marks. Fortunately, the alphabet part is very easy, because there are only seven letters. And each letter, as I’m guessing you are aware, is the name of a note:

A B C D E F G

This is the order they go in. Once you reach “G,” we go back to “A” and repeat the whole thing over again. This doesn’t change! As far as sequential order goes (this is in naming the notes in order, obviously not in playing a song) the note “C” will never be immediately followed by anything over than “D” and so on. You don’t have to worry about anyone ever telling you otherwise.

In music notation, notes are designated by symbols, which will typically look like one of the following:

We will come back to these in Part Two. Right now, however, we need to learn something else. How exactly do we know which note is, for instance, a “A” note? And to which “A” note on the guitar does notation note this correspond? Well, in notation, our notes are displayed upon what is called a “staff.” This is a set of five horizontal lines and four spaces between each line. Don’t laugh, the spaces are important. It is where these notes are positioned in the staff, on which line or space they occupy, which determines what note you play. And here’s the beauty of it – the position will always be the same. If you want the note sounded by the open B string, for example, it will always occupy the place on the staff. Once you know where it is you will always know where it is.

But (and there always is a catch, isn’t there?) first you have to know which type of staff you are dealing with. You can identify a staff by a symbol that sits along its far left-hand edge. This is called a clef. And while there are numerous types of clef, only two appear primarily in the music we deal with, the treble clef and the bass clef. Here’s what they look like:

Now if you’re thinking to yourself, “I can see that the treble clef kind of looks like a stylized “G,” but why do they call the bass clef an “F clef?” you’ve almost got it right. This won’t be the most scientific explanation (like mine ever are, right?), but it will definitely work as a memory device. Look closely at the treble clef. Notice in particular the second line from the bottom. You may not pick this up with a passing glance, but the line that makes up the clef itself intersects that second horizontal line from the bottom four times; it crosses it more times than it does any other line in the staff. So guess what note occupies that line?

Yes, it is the G note. This G corresponds to your open G string. It always is and was and will be that note (okay, there is an “unless” and we’ll come to that in a moment). Going back to the bass clef, can you see that the second line from the top is surrounded by those dots? Yes, that is where the F note will be on that staff. This particular F, by the way, corresponds to the first fret on your low E string.

So just how do we read these notes? Well, If we know that G is the second line from the bottom of the treble clef, then we know that the next note, the one that will occupy the space between the second and third lines, will be A, since A immediately follows G. The third line would therefore be the B note and so on. Going in the other direction, and using the same logic, F would occupy the first space from the bottom and E would be the note on the bottom line. Let’s take a look at all the notes in what we’ll call the “main body” of the staff:

Some of you probably might still remember the mnemonic phrases that you were taught in grade school. Reading up from the bottom, the notes which occupy the lines are E,G,B,D,F – “Every Good Boy Deserves Favor.” Or “Fudge,” if you prefer. When you read the notes of the spaces upward from the bottom, you get F, A, C, E, which is easy enough to remember on its own.

And before you put two and two together and start thinking that you have to be able to read both staffs, relax. This music stuff’s been around for ages and no matter what anyone tells you, people have always opted for doing things the easy way whenever possible. It’s not just a modern phenomenon. Guitar music is (again, almost) always written solely in the treble clef. What happens is that lines and spaces get added above and below the staff and you continue to read them as if they were part of the treble clef. Here are the notes above and below the staff.

You can see that the low E will more often than not be the lowest note you’ll encounter in sheet music for the guitar (although, believe it or not, there are songs dated as far back as sixteenth century written specifically for drop D tuning!). When a musical passage starts going way above the E on the twelfth fret of the first string, you will often run into this symbol:

This indicates that the notes should be played one octave higher than the notation. You’ll see this a lot if you’re reading notation of leads.

Oh, and just to throw my two cents in, learning how to read the bass clef isn’t a bad idea…

Accidentals Will Happen

In this lesson, I also want to point out some other things that you will find when you look at a staff of music. At the beginning of each piece of music, the staff will be followed by two important pieces of information – the key signature and the time signature. And just so you know, I moved the time signature waaaay out into the staff so that I could label it easier. Normally, it’s right after the key signature.

Today, let’s look at the key signature, shall we? You may not know this, but sheet music is often much more helpful than TABS in ways that benefit the player who is not concerned with playing things note per note. The key signature is the number of sharps or flats (or the lack thereof) that appear immediately after the clef. This will, much more often than not, tell you what key a song is in. Notice I said sharps or flats, not both. We’ll come back to this in a moment.

Earlier, when I wrote out the seven letters of the musical “alphabet,” you were probably wondering if I’d left something out. Technically speaking, no, because I only intended to write out the letters of notes. That did note mean that I was writing out all the notes. If you’ve read any of my beginner’s theory pieces (Theory Without Tears or The Musical Genome Project) you are well aware that there are more than seven notes. There are actually twelve. Some are designated by just a letter, while others are a letter and a symbol like this – # – or this – b. The “#” means “sharp” or “one half step above the note of the letter. C#, for example, is a half step above C. A “b” is a flat sign, meaning that we have moved a half step down from the note of the letter. Eb is a half step below E. And let’s note here that this does indeed mean that some notes actually share the same name. “Ab” and “G#” are, for our purposes, the same note. Here’s a handy chart:

In musical notation, the symbols for flats and sharps are called accidentals. There is also an accidental for “natural” meaning that the note should be the straight letter value, neither flat nor sharp. I can’t do it on the keyboard, so let me show you what these look like on the staff:

Why on earth would you even need a “natural” symbol? Well, that should become clear momentarily. Suppose you were writing out a song in the key of E, a fairly common key for guitar music. There are four sharps in the E major scale. See for yourself:

E F# G# A B C# D# E

Now remember what I told you about people wanting to do things the easy way. Would you want to have to put a sharp notation every time you wrote one of these four notes? Of course not. What you would do is write out your sharps ahead of time, at the very beginning of the piece. This is like a big billboard saying, “Hey! Whenever you see an F, it’s supposed to be an F#, okay?” This is what the key signature does. So, how do you know what key a song is in? Well, you may not believe this, but there are rules! These rules are dictated by the formation of the major scale. Here’s a run down:

The real beauty of this, as in so much of what we’ve been talking about, is that these symbols are constants. If you see a song with only one flat in it, it is going to be Bb. There are no keys that just have an Eb in them. But suppose you were writing a song in G and you wanted to write out a G7 chord. A G7 chord is composed of G, B, D and F. Not F#. This is where a “natural” accidental will be used. It will momentarily negate the sharp in the key signature. Yes, only momentarily. How long? Well, that’s something we’ll take up in Part Two, which will deal with timing and measures.

What about minor keys, you ask? Well, remember that every minor key is the relative minor of a major key. So if you know what the key signature of the major key is, you will also know what the relative minor is. If, for example, you see that the key signature has two sharps, then you can be almost one hundred percent certain that the song is in either D major or B minor.

Before we go, though, let me leave you a parting gift. Here is the notation (along with the TAB) for the first five frets of each of the guitar’s six strings. You will see how notation takes the lower and higher notes into account as well as see how the guitar gives you several places to play the same note (the open G string, for instance, is the same note as the fifth fret on the D string). For the sake of not driving myself crazy, I have mixed up the flats and sharps. In guitar music you are more likely to run into Bb and Eb than you are A# and D#. Likewise, F#, C#, and G# are much more common than their flatted twins. Here you go:

Do me a favor. Sometime between now and reading the next lesson, take a moment and look at some sheet music. Test yourself by picking out some notes and identifying them. Also test yourself by checking out the key signatures at the beginning of the piece (or seeing whether or not it changes sometime during the song!). Reading music is like reading anything. The more you do it the easier it becomes. You’re never too old or too young to learn a second (third or fourth) language.

Until next time…

Peace