In this lesson we just add a couple of notes on String 3. Here they are:

We are adding the notes “G” (3rd string – open) and “A” (3rd string – 2nd fret). Be sure to use your middle finger to play the “A” note. As you can see, you will now have a total of 8 notes to work with:

• String #1 = 3 notes (E,F,G)
• String #2 = 3 notes (B,C,D)
• String #3 = 2 notes (G, A)

The first question many of my students ask is: Why are there two “G” notes and why do they sound different? Our musical system (there are different kinds of musical systems) provides us with seven natural notes A,B,C,D,E,F, and G. If one were to play these notes on the piano (white keys), the note to the right of G (next natural note pitch higher and also the next white key) would be called “A” again. Except it would be one “octave” higher. We perceive this with our ears. It is also perceived with an oscilloscope. The waves double, and every other wave matches when it peaks and dips.

For an example, let’s listen to the two “G” notes. Place your ring finger on the 3rd fret of the 1st string (the “G” note on the 1st string). Pluck the 3rd string open (the “G” on string 3) and then pluck the 1st string 3rd fret (the “G” on string 1) and listen to them ring together. You should notice that they have a kind of “unity” sound. Pluck your 3rd string open and match it to other strings or notes. When you match it to another “G” note, you will get that unity kind of sound again. At this point in our series, this is all you need to know. We will be dealing with seven notes and their octaves. Later, we will discus the sharps and flats (the black keys on the piano and the notes in between notes on our guitar [ex: fret 2 on string 1]).

But let’s leave that alone for the moment. Time to PLAY! Download both exercises (from the links). Work on ” Notes on String 3″ first, and be able to play the examples with rhythm. Then work on “Notes on Strings 1-3″ next. There are midi links that will play you the two exercise sheets. Between this latest lesson and the first two, you will now have mastered eight notes! Okay, go practice and have some fun!

• Exercise 1 pdf (Right-click and “Save as”)
• Exercise 2 pdf (Right-click and “Save as”)

• Exercise 1 Download midi (Right-click and “Save as”)
• Exercise 2 Download midi (Right-click and “Save as”)

If you have questions or would like an extra work out sheet, email me at: peter@petersimms.com.

Also in this Series

• How To Read and Perform Music on the Guitar – Part 1
• How To Read and Perform Music on the Guitar – Part 2

In part #2 we are going to address String 2 (the B string). Now that you made it through the opening lesson, it should be rather easy to add 3 notes that are on the 2nd String. These notes are B, C, and D. See the chart below:

As you can see above, we have extended the range of the notes. We have our new notes B, C, and D on the 2nd string, and we also have E, F, and G (from the opening lesson) on the 1st string.

Your goals this lesson are:

1. learn how to “play” the notes on the 2nd string – rhythm included.
2. learn how to “play” the notes on the 1st and 2nd string together – rhythm included.

If you can obtain these goals, you’ve doubled your capacity! Now you not only know where 6 notes are on the guitar, but you can “play” them when you see them. Yahoo!

Remember that rhythm is IMPORTANT. You could say it is more important than pitch. If you played the wrong note in the correct rhythmical spot, you made “1” mistake. If you played the correct note in the wrong rhythmical spot, you made “2” mistakes = not playing the correct note in the rhythmical spot where it was supposed to be played, and playing a note where there wasn’t supposed to be a note.

Here are two exercises for you:

• Exercise 1 pdf (Right-click and “Save as”)
• Exercise 2 pdf (Right-click and “Save as”)

The first one is a set of exercises only using the notes B, C, and D. The other one is using the combination of all 6 notes B, C, D, E, F, and G. Below are also midi examples of these various exercises:

• Exercise 1 Download midi (Right-click and “Save as”)
• Exercise 2 Download midi (Right-click and “Save as”)

Now that you made it through the opening lesson. I’m not going to be using TAB anymore. Yikes! It’s very difficult not to look at the TAB when it is just under the notes. Your goal is to learn how to read music. Therefore, TAB will just mess this up… Yes, you can say it now… OH NO!

This lesson should be very attainable for you to accomplish. I’m trying to make it as easy as possible to learn how to read music. If you’re having problems, email me and, based on your level, I can make some suggestions.

I also have additional practice sheets with midi examples available for your studies. Just email me at peter@petersimms.com and I will be more than happy to send them your way.

Have Fun!

Also in this Series

• How To Read and Perform Music on the Guitar – Part 1
• How To Read and Perform Music on the Guitar – Part 3

I tell my students: “the only obstacle is that reading music takes a while to learn.” Therefore, if you want it, you need to be patient and have consistent practicing with it.

The “BIG MYTH” is that it’s difficult to do. However you obtained this idea, it’s wrong! There are many study guides and books that approach reading music in multiple ways. I found that the common problem they have is a proper learning curve in their method. Many of the books start out nice and easy. The student becomes confident, but not long after the first couple of lessons the learning curve inclines at an angle to which the student runs into major problems with the lessons. Most of this is due to the fact the student has not had a chance to get comfortable with the material he or she had just learned.

This year I’m taking an extra effort to help my students overcome the fear of learning to read music, plus find out how interesting and doable it is. I also plan on passing some of this information to you in a series rightly called “how to read music on the guitar” on the Guitar Noise website. I will present a step-by-step approach (lesson at a time) from the very beginning to intermediate linear (playing single notes) “PLAYING”. I like to use the word playing, because I have had many new students tell me they already know how to “read” music. Therefore, I write out a very easy composition for them to perform. Afterwards, they tell me that they “know” how to read music, but they can’t “play” it on their instrument. It’s music, so what’s the use of knowing it if you can’t perform it? Therefore, I teach “how” and then help you to “play” it. It’s a lot more fun that way!

For some of you, this course will be moving too slowly (it is suppose to be slow and easy to accomplish). Tom Serb has put together a two-part series (at the moment) that moves over a lot material rather quickly. I suggest you check it out Standard Notation. And you also have David Hodge’s guide Your very own Rosetta Stone.

I’m looking forward to the responses of the Guitar Noise readers. I hope you enjoy it as much as I like teaching it. When we finish this series, maybe we can forge forward in harmonic playing and theory, using the same learning approach. Let’s first learn how to read and PLAY!

This lesson will cover some music basics and “playing 3 notes” on the 1st string. I will be assuming that you can read TAB already. Therefore, I will have TAB underneath the notes as a guide for you. In order to really understand and use music notation, you will need music that doesn’t have TAB underneath the notes. Having the TAB under the notes is similar to having training wheels for a bicycle. Until the training wheels come off, you’re not quite riding on two wheels. I will be offering music without TAB. Including more practice material will make this article too long. You will just need to email me at peter@petersimms.com and I will be happen to send you some with audio.

Let’s start with the diagram below. I try and teach what you will only need to know for the moment. Therefore, there will be things not explained until later. Glance over the diagram now and then let’s move on to the explanations.

As you can see, there are a few things to learn. The staff is are the 5 lines that we write music on. It looks like TAB, but there are only 5 lines and the lines do not represent the strings. They represent “pitch”. The higher the pitch, the closer the note is to the top of the staff. Thus, the note on the top line of the staff sounds a lot higher than the note on the bottom line of the staff. The Measure is basically a representation of a group of beats. When the drummer of a band counts “1-2-3-4″, he is counting a blank measure. You can hear these groups. When you hear a Waltz (similar to the dance), you are counting in groups of “3″. The top number of the Time Signature tells you how many counts are in a measure. Therefore, a waltz is in 3/4;. We will leave the bottom number alone for now. Notes also represent Rhythm. If the note looks like a Whole Note, when you pluck that note, count to 4 and start counting the moment you pluck the note. (Dotted Half Note = 3, Half Note = 2, Quarter Note = 1).

I tend to teach my students to just count the values of each note. They will add up properly in each measure. Some teachers (most) have you count as the notes fall within the beat of the measure. The choice is yours at the beginning. Eventually it will work out anyway in the end. As for now the Time Signature is the symbol we use to indicate the pitch values of the notes, and this is the symbol we use for the guitar (plus many other instruments.

Now that we have enough information to move on, let’s look at the notes we are going to learn today. (see below).

Try and play these notes before attempting to play the exercises below. Listen to the midi examples and pay attention to the rhythm.

Download midi (Right-click and “Save as”)

• Notes on the 1st String Part 1
• Notes on the 1st String Part 2

Focus on 1 line at a time (4 measures). The audio example plays from the beginning straight to the end. This is your goal. If you have any questions, please email me. I will be more than happy to answer you. You can also request some extra exercises “without TAB” from me. My email: peter@petersimms.com

Until next time … Have Fun! …

Also in this Series

• How To Read and Perform Music on the Guitar – Part 2
• How To Read and Perform Music on the Guitar – Part 3

We’ve used ledger lines for the notes low E through fifth string C… we can also add ledger lines on the other side, above the staff. Just like the lower ledger lines, these will extend the musical alphabet:

We’ll be needing those ledger lines as we move into higher positions – for right now, you just need to know it can be done at either end of the staff.

Standard notation isn’t just about notes, though – it conveys all sorts of other information through special symbols. In the last lesson, I mentioned that the end of a section is often marked with a double bar:

The end of a piece is also marked with a double bar, but the second bar is thicker:

There’s also a sign where an end-of-piece double bar has two dots in front of it – that’s called a repeat sign:

That’s sort of a traffic signal in standard notation – it’s going to send you on a detour to some other place in the music. If that’s the only repeat sign you’ve come across, it means at that point you’ll go back to the very beginning, and play all those measures a second time. The second time you get to the repeat sign, you ignore it and keep going.

Sometimes the composer won’t want you to go all the way back to the beginning. In that case, repeat signs come in pairs, like in this example:

Here you’d play measure 1, then measures 2 and 3… and then repeat measures 2 and 3… and finally play measure 4. It’s a nice, compact way to write music – 6 bars of sound take up only 4 bars on the page.

You’ll also notice the time signature is 2/4. There’s no real limit on the number of beats that can be in one measure – the minimum is just one; some time signatures will call for 15 or more per measure.

Sometimes you’ll see repeat signs with numbers and brackets over them, like this:

This one’s a little different. At the repeat sign, you return to the beginning (since there’s no repeat in the opposite direction)… but the next time through, you skip any measures under the ‘1′ bracket, and go right to the ‘2′ bracket. In this case, you’d play measures 1, 2, 1 again, and then 3. There’s no limit to the number of different endings you can have – I’ve seen music with five different repeat endings, and there are probably pieces written with even more.

There are a few other directional signals you’ll see often in standard notation. The first is D.C.:

In this example, you’ve got a measure, then two measures repeated once, then one more measure with a repeat sign – and the symbol D.C. written above it. The D.C. is an abbreviation for an Italian term, ‘da capo’, which means ‘from the head’. When you see that, you go back to the beginning of the piece.

Many guitarists mispronounce da capo, because it looks so much like capo. The D.C. term is dah-KAH-po; the thing you use to change keys is a KAY-po.

You’ll often see D.C. combined with the term ‘al fine’, which means ‘to the end’. When you see that, there will be the word ‘fine’ (pronounced fee-NAY or fih-NAY-ee, meaning end) somewhere above the staff, usually over a double bar. You’d then go from the instruction ‘D.C. al fine’ to the beginning (D.C.) and play until you reach the double bar marked ‘fine’.

By the way, Italian is the standard language of music. By the end of these lessons, you’ll know a whole bunch of Italian words!

A closely related symbol is D.S., which is an abbreviation for ‘dal segno’ (doll SAYN-yo, from the sign). That’s always combined with this symbol somewhere in the music:

When you see D.S. over a repeat sign, you find the symbol, and play from that point in the music.

You can actually have a double segno sign too – and the instruction for finding that would be D.S.S. – but it’s really rare.

Finally, there’s the coda (KO-duh), which is used pretty often. Coda is Italian for ‘tail’, so it’s a piece of music that will come at the tail end of a song. Somewhere in the music will be a coda symbol,

and somewhere else will be an instruction above a repeat sign – it’ll say “D.C. al coda” or “D.S. al coda”. When you reach that instruction, you’ll go back to the beginning (D.C.) or back to the sign (D.S.), and you’ll play until you reach the coda symbol – at that point, you’ll jump to the coda section, which is written at the end of the music. Most publishers will place a second coda sign over the beginning of the coda section to help you find it quickly, and most will separate it slightly from the main body of the music, or begin the coda on a new line.

Here’s the same music I used for the numbered ending example re-written to use the coda instead:

Like the segno, you can have a second coda – noted with

but like the double segno it’s extremely rare.

Now that you know some of the navigational symbols used, let’s get back to reading!

The letter-named notes leave some gaps in the fretboard. To fill those gaps, we use the symbols # (sharp) and b (flat). If you see a sharp, the note will be played one fret higher, and if you see a flat, the note will be played one fret lower.

The bar line between measures serves as a ‘reset’ button for sharps and flats. So when you see this:

The first measure is E-F-F#-G, played open-1-2-3 on the first string. In the second measure, the notes are E-F-G… because we’ve had a bar line, the F# note has been ‘reset’ to F.

At times, we’ll want to use a note like F#, and then use F without the sharp – which is called F natural – before we get to a bar line. To change a sharp or flat back to a natural before a measure is over, we use a natural sign, which looks like this:

Here’s a measure with F-F#-F#-F, and a second measure with B-Bb-B-Bb:

A couple things about this measure… in the first measure, the third note doesn’t have an accidental. It’s still an F# note, because the sharp for the second note keeps on working until the bar line – unless we use a natural sign, which doesn’t happen until beat four.

Next, the second measure… the B note is the open second string. Bb has to be one fret lower than that, so you’ll need to move to the third string, third fret to play it.

We usually use sharps going up and flats going down… that keeps the music clear by minimizing the number of naturals we might need. Here’s the entire chromatic scale in the first position going up:

And going down:

Accidentals are used often in minor keys, because the harmonic and melodic minor scales use notes ‘outside’ the key. Here’s the C major scale:

The A natural minor scale uses the same notes, but with A as the root:

The other two minor scales alter tones… the harmonic minor raises the seventh note:

And the melodic minor scale raises the sixth and seventh notes going up, but not going down (the natural signs aren’t required because the bar lines cancel the sharps, but I’ve included them as a reminder):

So far we’ve only done one note at a time. That’s fine for noting many solos, but it doesn’t do much for rhythm parts. The solution is to put more than one note head on a stem, like this:

The first beat includes a C note (first fret, second string) and an E note (open first string), so you’d play those two strings together. The next beat has the open B and E strings played together, and the third beat has a five-string open C major chord.

So notes can have one head for a single note, two for a double stop, or three to six for a chord. Beginning readers find it rather hard to navigate chords… but that’s because they try to read one note at a time. You don’t actually have to read each note in a chord – the real trick is to recognize what chords go with each key.

You’ll notice that C major chord doesn’t have any accidentals, so all of the notes must be in C. Working with just basic chords, each major key will have one 7th chord, two major chords, and three minor chords – here are the chords in the key of C major:

Now I’ll show you a trick for instantly (or at least quickly) recognizing the basic chords without accidentals. See how most of those chords have three notes grouped closely together – one in every space or line? Those three notes form a triad – the basis for the chord. When you see that, the lowest note of the three is the root of the triad. So when you see this:

You’re dealing with a C chord type – that’s the lowest note in the set of three. Now, if you know the basic chords in C, you can pretty quickly pick out the triads. The one to be careful of is the G/G7 chords – the top note will tell you the difference:

That means you’ve got most of the basic chords in C down ‘at sight’ – spend a little time working at remembering the Dm chord and you’re all set for this key in open position. I’ll show you more tricks as we get into higher positions and more complicated chords.

The key of A minor is really just as easy – chords in A minor, at least in simple songs, usually use only the G# accidental, and usually only in the E rooted chord. If you’re in Am, and you see a chord with a sharp and an E root, it’s usually E7.:

Chords are often combined with bass notes. The result is music with two voices – one is the melody created by the bass line, the other is the rhythmic accompaniment of the chord strums. To keep things clear, the music is written as two separate lines, typically with stems in opposite directions – when there is a bass note, there’s a rest in the chord strum, like this:

You’re probably wondering why the bass notes wouldn’t simply be written as quarter notes… if they were written that way, they’d only get one beat, so you’d need to dampen them at the second beat in each measure. Here we’re letting the bass notes ring, and if we didn’t use the rest to show it’s two separate lines, you’d end up with five beats worth of notes in each measure.

One last thing for this lesson – key signatures. If you’re going to apply a sharp or a flat to the same note throughout an entire piece of music, and that note will rarely appear without the accidental, it’s easiest to just write it once, in the beginning.

Let’s say you’re working in the key of G. The G major scale is G-A-B-C-D-E-F#-G, so you’ll probably have almost all of the F notes in the piece raised to F#. In the very beginning – after the clef, but before the time signature – you write F# on the top line:

This sharp (or sharps, or flat or flats) is called a key signature. The advantage to using a key signature is that you won’t clutter up the music with a lot of accidentals – instead of writing this:

You’d have this:

Since all the F notes are now F#, some of the chords you’ve learned will be a little different… the main chords in the key of G are:

The really tricky one here is the D major – it’s written identically to the D minor chord in the key of C! With a bit of practice, though, you’ll recognize these odd chords right away, and the triad rule still holds for the open position key of G:

Reading in key signatures takes some practice, because you have to remember to sharp or flat all the indicated notes. We’ll take the keys one at a time, and I’ll put a practice piece at the end of each lesson for you to work on.

Since the holidays are drawing near, have fun with my little arrangement of Jingle Bells:

Also check out… Standard Notation Part 1

Oh yeah – the illustrations are copyright 2002 by NoteBoat Inc. (my publishing company) because I’m basically just cropping artwork that appeared in my theory book… the ones labeled “Exercise #…” are created for this article, and are copyright Tom Serb 2005.

First a few preliminaries for those of you unfamiliar with standard notation…

Standard notation is written on a set of five horizontal lines called the staff:

Guitar music is usually written using a treble clef, which looks like this:

The purpose of a clef is to identify the names of the lines and spaces. Each line or space will represent one letter of the musical alphabet, which is the letters A through G. Using the treble clef, the lines are (from the bottom up): E-G-B-D-F, which you can remember using the mnemonic Every Good Boy Does Fine. The spaces, from the bottom up, spell out the word F-A-C-E. Combining these two, we can write the notes from E through F on the staff:

Standard notation is very visual: the higher a note is on the staff, the higher it will sound.

Notes are symbols that indicate how long a sound lasts. Notes are made up of one or more of three basic parts: a head, a stem, and flags or beams.

The head of a note is a roughly circular shape:

If a note has ONLY a head, the head is always hollow (as shown), and the note is called a whole note.

A stem can be added to a note. When a stem is used, the head can be either hollow or solid:

Notes with stems and hollow heads are called half notes; notes with stems and solid heads are called quarter notes.

Notes with solid heads can have flags:

Notes with one flag are called eighth notes.

We can keep adding flags to a note, getting sixteenth notes, thirty-second notes, and so on:

The shapes of notes tell us how long the sounds last. A half note lasts for half the time of a whole note, a quarter note lasts for half the time of a half note, and so on.

Music isn’t just made up of sounds, though – it’s also made up of the silences between sounds. We need rhythmic symbols to indicate how long to NOT play, and we call these symbols rests.

Each note has a corresponding rest… the ones at the far left are double-whole note/rest, which is pretty rare in notation; at the far right is the 128^th note, which is also rare:

Since the shape of the notes tell us how long they last – at least relative to each other – we can now start worrying about pitch. We can put notes on, immediately above, or immediately below the staff:

But that only gives us notes from D (below the bottom E line) through G (above the top F line). That’s eleven notes… and we can play a lot more than eleven different notes on the guitar.

To handle the ‘extra’ notes, we’ll use temporary extensions of the staff called ledger lines, and keep going higher or lower as needed:

Ledger lines are identified as if the staff just kept going:

We’re almost done with the preliminaries… just a few more things…

We know that a half note is half as long as a whole note, and twice as long as a quarter note – but we need to know what note represents one beat in order to count time. That’s shown by two numbers called a time signature that appears right after the clef. It looks sort of like a fraction, and it can come in a lot of different varieties:

To begin with, we’ll use only these three time signatures:

In each case, the bottom number is 4 – that tells us that a quarter note will get one beat. The top number tells us how many beats will be in each measure.

Measures in music are the space between ‘one’ counts. We set vertical lines called bar lines between measures in music to help us keep our place:

Since the time signature here is 4/4, there are four beats in each measure, and a quarter note represents one beat. There are four sixteenth notes to a quarter note… here the sixteenth note flags are joined together into beams, with each beamed set being one beat. After every fourth set of beamed notes is a vertical bar line, which helps us keep track of the ‘one’ count.

It’s common to use a double bar to indicate the end of a section or piece of music:

One last thing and we’ll start to play… the time signature 4/4 is so common in music that it’s sometimes indicated by the letter C. Musicians refer to this as ‘common time’… it’s not really a letter C, but that’s a music history lesson for another article. If you see C instead of a time signature, count it as 4/4.

Ok, so we’re done with the basic tools – you know the note shapes, the letter names of staff positions, what note gets one beat, and how many beats are in a measure. Time to pick up your guitar!

We’ll start with the first position, and take one string at a time. The notes on the first string, first position are E (open), F (first fret), and G (third fret). These correspond to the top space of the staff, E; the top line of the staff, F, and the note immediately above the top line, G:

Get comfortable with the idea that these notes represent the sounds of the open, first, and third frets of the first string… then play this:

Exercise 1

Make sure you’re getting the count right – the first note takes four beats, the next two notes two beats each, etc. Go slow – this takes time to read ‘at sight’.

Now let’s look at the second string. The open second string is the B note on the middle line of the staff; the first fret is the C note on the second space from the top; and the third fret D is the second line from the top:

Ready to read? Let’s go!

Exercise 2

And now let’s try both strings:

Exercise 3

Now let’s try another time signature… in 3/4 time we have notes that represent two beats or four beats, but we don’t have a note for three beats (one full measure of 3/4 time). The solution is to put a dot after a half note:

Dots after notes mean the original note value is extended by one half – a dotted half note is a half note (two beats in 3/4) plus half the value of the original note (one more beat in 3/4) for a total of three beats.

Ready for a stab at waltz time?

Exercise 4

There’s one other way we can extend note values, by using another rhythmic symbol called the tie. Ties are curved lines that connect two notes of the same pitch (we’ll have other names for curved lines that connect different pitches later on). This is a way we can write a note that lasts for an odd amount of time, like five beats. When you encounter a tie, you play the first note, and hold it for the value of both. In this example, the last note of the third measure is held until the third beat of the last measure:

Exercise 5

If we’d used a whole note to represent this sound – a whole note is also four beats – the third measure would have ended up with six beats… two too many. The solution is to split the note into two parts and connect them with a tie.

Now let’s add the third string. It’s only got two first position notes, the open G (second line from the bottom) and second fret A (second space from the bottom):

And let’s introduce another concept, partial measures… sometimes you’ll see a piece of music that doesn’t start on the ‘one’ count. To save space, publishers will often have an incomplete measure (less than the required number of beats) at the start of a piece or section. It used to be convention that the last measure of a piece like that would also be a partial measure – the first and last measures would add up to one full measure – but lately I’ve been seeing pieces that don’t end in a partial measure, so some publishers are discarding that convention. When you see a partial measure, start from the appropriate count; the next example will start on beat ‘three’.

At any rate, we’ve now got a full octave to play with, so let’s play!

Exercise 6

On to the fourth string; we’ve got three notes: the open string D is the first note below the staff; the second fret E is the bottom line of the staff; and the third fret F is the bottom space of the staff:

Let’s put together everything so far:

Exercise 7

Of course, we can divide beats… in 4/4 time, an eighth note represents one half beat (two notes to the beat). Publishers usually beam notes in beats or sets of beats – two beats in 4/4 time – to keep it easy to read. Count these notes “one-and-two-and-” etc.:

Exercise 8

Now we’ve reached the note below the staff… to go any lower we need to start using ledger lines. All the open position notes on the fifth and sixth strings will need these temporary extensions to the staff.

On the fifth string, we have the open A note (two ledger lines below the staff), the second fret B note (the space below the first ledger line beneath the staff) and the third fret C note (the first ledger line below the staff):

Exercise 9

The sixth string has three more notes in first position: the open E (the note beneath the third ledger line under the staff), the first fret F (on the third ledger line beneath the staff), and the third fret G (under the second ledger line below the staff):

Now we’ll introduce one more rhythmic twist: if we dot a quarter note in 4/4, we get a note that represents one and one-half beats. The next example includes dotted-quarter/eighth pairs, which are counted ONE-and-two-AND-THREE-and-four-AND. Give this a try:

Exercise 10

Well, that completes the strings in first position. There’s still a lot more to discover about standard notation, though… find some music, practice in this position, and in the next article I’ll explore accidentals, double stops, chords, and key signatures; after that, we’ll start moving up the neck to other positions.

Also check out… Standard Notation Part 2

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

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