Music Theory Comprehensive: Part 1 - How To Read Music

1. 1 intro: way. I think a e c D e f g Let's go through the white notes first and how they work and how the intervals sharp. If you see a note that says, uh, a sharp, you know that find that note on a keyboard you have to find. And what are we going to hear when I hit? Play on this and tell it to play these four notes. What are we gonna makes the rhythm longer? So this was two beats. So we chop that and 1/2 we think on three. All right. Hello, everyone. Welcome, Teoh this first in a longer series of comprehensive music theory courses. So what we're gonna be doing in this whole Siri's is we're going to be working through my college level curriculum on music theory. Now, don't let that freak you out. That doesn't mean we're gonna jump right in on the hard stuff the way we always start. This is a review and making sure everyone's on the same page about reading music and understanding all the symbols that we're looking at when we look at a traditional notation score, which is what we're kind of seeing here on the screen. This is a program called News Score. It's a free program. I'll talk to you a little bit more about that. Once we get into the course, I'll be using this program to kind of outline and helpless. Walk through some, uh, concepts of how all of this stuff works, So I want you to get this program. But before you do, jump into the course and let me tell you a couple things about it and some of the options you have. So, um, but it's a great little free program that we're going to use as a teaching tool to help us learn how to read music. Basically. So in this first section, this first course of the long sequence, what we're gonna be focusing on is how what do all these little dots mean? So we're gonna walk through how to read music, how to read notes, how to read rhythms. And if you've tried this before, if you've tried to learn before, then try again using my method here it's hard. It's hard to learn how to read this stuff. It's a whole new language. It really is. So what? I hope that you could do is dive in with me here and learn how to do this. Take another shot at it and make sure we get all on the same page so that you're up to speed while we dive into the more serious music theory stuff. Now my approach to music theory is learning what notes work together so that we can create music on our own right? So you might be a songwriter who wants to know what are some more options I have? You know, how can I incorporate more diversity into my songs? Makes something sound cool. That's what music theory tells us. Another thing that music theory tells us is you might be listening to a song that you like , And you might think what that person do to make it sound the way it sounded and we can we can look at that song. We can analyze it. I know what he did. He did this kind of, you know, music theory trick. And then we can use that trick in our own songs, right? That's totally okay. Uh, that's how we learn how to do stuff. So that's what we're gonna be doing. But in this first class, we're gonna be focusing on how to read music. Okay, so let's dive in. Let's get started. Let me show you this program that we're gonna use and then we'll be up and running, talking about notes and rhythms and dynamics and symbols and what all of these things mean and how we can use them. So please join me on the inside off way. 2. 2 MyApproachToTheory: All right. So let's get started by first just talking about, um Ah, few words about my approach to music theory and how I think about music theory. Um, there's one kind of big rule that I kind of live by when it comes to music theory, and that is that your ear trumps the theory. Tell me, Explain that, Um, I teach music theory from the perspective of the composer, the songwriter, the producer. That's the kind of theory that I get into. Um, I don't teach the kind of music theory where we analyze things just to see how detailed weaken get. What I'm most concerned with is figuring out why something sounds the way it sounds so that we can use that technique. Ah, in our own music. Now, if you're not a songwriter, um, that's fine, because what you're gonna be able to dio by the end of all of this is listen to something and know how to play it better. Maybe you're a performer and you want to play better. Maybe you're just someone who just wants to understand music better, uh, for any number of reasons. But the way I approach music theory, is as a composer, as a songwriter, and I do it so that I can take the general concept, the idea, and apply it to my own music. So and it's not like stealing, right, Um because it might be that in a particular song, we here Ah, these songwriters used these three chords in a row, and it generated a kind of a feel a sound. And we're like, Man, I really love that sound that feel that he made with that. How can I replicate that? Well, what we can do is we can analyze it. We can find out what three chords they used, and then we can use those records. We can use variations of those records. And the second big goal to music theory is that maybe we skip that whole process altogether because we're gonna learn that when we use a certain combination of notes, it generates this certain feel right, So we're just gonna be able to skip that process and just say, Well, I know that when I put these notes together and then I follow them by these other notes, it generates this field. So in a way, we could say that the other goal is to understand what music generates, what feeling so that we can put that together to generate our own music, right to write our own music because that's what we want to be able to do. We want to be able to quickly think I know that if I'm on this court and I go to that court , it's gonna feel happy. I know if I'm on this court and I go to that court, it's gonna feel sad or any number of much more complex emotions and happy and sad, because music is capable of generating a lot of very complex emotions. So those are kind of my big two goals in the way that I approach music theory. If you've written something and you think it sounds cool or you've created something here like that sounds great. And then later you find out that it doesn't make a lot of sense of music theory. Ah, there are two things wrong with with With that Ah, one is that Who cares whether it makes sense in the rules of music theory, you're using music theory wrong. Ah, if it doesn't make sense in the rules of music theory. Who cares if it sounds cool? It sounds cool. If it sounds the way you want it to sound, then that's just great. Um, so that's the first thing that's wrong with that. The second thing that's wrong with that is that you're assuming you're limited. Understanding of music theory means that it doesn't make sense when, actually, if you got into some of the super advanced music theory, I'm sure you would find a way to make it make sense. Music theory goes, you know, it starts at the basics where we're going to start, and it goes to, like, really complicated stuff. So and we'll get into some of that really complicated stuff by the end of this whole sequence of classes, Um, but because you know a little bit about music theory or not you, but I shouldn't put this in terms of you, because often people have taken a couple of music theory classes. Ah, they assume that what they've done doesn't make sense in the rules of music theory. Eso they want to change it, Um, and that doesn't work very well, either, because music theory is so big and it encapsulates so much stuff that you could be, um, just not knowing of how to make sense of what you've written in music theory. This is a long winded way of saying Let your ear be the guy to let your ear butor guide. And when you learn something in music theory, um, make sure you understand how it sounds, because that's the most important thing. Um, we need Teoh. Remember always that music theory is really just a way for us to distill things down and make sense of why they sound the way they sound when we have something we don't like. The way it sounds, we we can pick it apart using music theory and weaken. Say, Ah, that sounds dumb because it's this this in this. That's why we don't like the way that sounds. And then we know and we could know not to do that. If we don't want it sound dumb or if you're writing something and you're like, Ah, I'm writing a piece of music and I intentionally wanted to sound dumb I could do Bob Loblaw because I know that's a dumb sound. Um, that's kind of a silly example, right? I often tell students my composition students that if you write 100% by the rules of music theory, then you will create something that sounds perfectly fine and boring. If you break no rules, everything will sound just fine and boring. So you have to break the rules to make something interesting. So keep that all in mind. Um, just remember, your year is the winner whenever it comes to analyzing something. Um, and that's how I approach music theory. I do approach it from a composition, um, songwriter perspective. Um, because that's what I am. That's how I learned it. Ah, and I think it's ah, good way to teach it. So with that in mind, let's press on. Ah, next thing I want to do is talk about the tools that we're going to need. Ah, before this class 3. 3 ToolsYouNeed: Okay, let's talk about the tools. You will need to be successful. That learning music theory. Ah, they're pretty simple there. Not a lot. Um, and they can both be free to you. Um, the main thing I want you to have is some staff paper, staff. Paper is, um ah. You know, there's lots of one kind of staff paper, and I could get really nerdy and tell you about what I prefer in staff paper and, ah, the different types of staff, paper and all these different things. All staff paper is is some paper with the five lines on it. Right. That's called the staff. Ah, and we're gonna get into how to use that shortly. But it's handy to have some of this, and I prefer to have some printed out. Um, and some actual paper. And a good pencil is how I like to work. But, um, I'm a little bit old school when it comes to that. So you don't need to. Um the cool thing, though, is that you confine different kinds of staff paper all over the internet, and you can just print it out. Um, although there is something to be said for some really nice actual physical paper eso when it's printed on really good paper. The best staff paper I found, um, eyes, actually at ah story in Paris called the flu to pain. Um, so if you're ever there, pick up some some of their locally made staff paper, it's just feels beautiful. It's just really great paper. Anyway, I promised I wasn't going to nerd out on different kinds of south favor. Um, I am going to give you a pdf in the next little blurb here, there's gonna be a downloadable pdf with some staff paper. Um, so download that print out a handful of sheets if you want. If you want to use staff paper, um, get yourself a nice pencil or pen and ah, you'll have some paper ready to go. So when I explain some stuff, you can draw it up. Um, now you don't have to use staff paper. You can use software to do that, and that is thing number two for tools. I would recommend using software anyway, even if you're going to use paper, because the thing about paper is that you can't hit play and here it back here. What you've written down, um, on paper, um, software you can. So there's a couple different programs that you can use to do this. There are kind of three on the market right now. Ah, there's one called Sebelius. Sebelius is a good program. Ah, lot of people like it. Um, the problem with Sebelius, though, is that ah, long story short. It was bought by Avid, the company that owns pro tools, and they've ceased development of it. So it's not a smart investment to buy. It's a bit expensive, and I wouldn't recommend buying it because of that. Ah, the next program. That's kind of the big dog right now. Now that Sebelius is gone is a program called Finale. It's made by a company called Make Music. That one. It's It's also a bit expensive. I'm not sure how much it is right now. It's probably around 300 bucks, maybe 400 bucks. It's a good program. It's a very robust program. But, um, people have a love hate relationship with it. It can be really hard to learn. Um, and a lot of people find it really frustrating. Uh, and I don't want to dive into just saying use this program that's hard to learn. And have you get frustrated on your theory projects by having to deal with a frustrating program. So, um, there is 1/3 option that I want us to use. This is a program called Muse Score. I'm gonna talk about this more in the next video. But muse score is a, um a program that will do everything we want. And it's free, and you scores a free, open source program. Um, now what we're talking about here is the general word for these three. These three programmes are these air called notation editors. Uhm they're kind of like a text editor would be like Microsoft Word or anything like that. These air notation editors. They let us work with musical notation. Um, m mu score, to be completely honest, is not as good as finale or Sibelius. Um, but I've been really impressed with how this program is coming around. And since it's free, I've decided to teach this whole class using you score so that you can Ah, because I know you can get it right, because it's free. I'm not gonna ask you to Ah by anything else I've seen. Some of my students have come in tow lessons using you score, and they've had beautifully put together scores. So I know that it's capable of a lot. Um, it's come a long way, so I think it's a really good program. So download this program called Muse Score. You can get it at a music score dot org's. That's M u S E S C o R e doubt orig the one that I'm using I'm gonna be using in this classism you score 2.0 point two So, music or to basically. So if you want to follow along, that's what I'll be using. Ah, if there's a new version of Muse course, and when you're watching this, that's probably just fine. Um, so the main tools this review staff paper if you like, I prefer to have some printed staff paper. It's handy in the next video. There's gonna be a little or not video, but in the next segment you can download a, uh ah, pdf of some staff paper you could just print out have on hand for when you want to just jot things down using staff, paper um, and a notation editor program Finale works. Sebelius Sebelius works and Muse score works. I'm gonna be using you score in this class. But this isn't gonna be a class on how to use music or that's not what we're doing here. We're doing a music theory class. So any of those three either of those three programs will work just fine. Um, we're gonna be talking about music theory, not about how to use this program, but, um, in the next video, I'll show you real quick them super basics of how it works. 4. 5 MuseScore: Okay, so this is Mu score. I have just a new empty document open. And what we can do with this is I can click on no rhythms up here. And if I use any terminology, that doesn't make sense. Dorie, we're gonna cover all of this in this class. But you can click on one of these. Let's say we want an eighth note, and then I can click on this little button means I want to enter notes, and then I just move the mouse on the staff where I want it, and I make notes. Let's change rhythms and go, Teoh, Go away. That Okay, so now I've made some notes, right? And I can hear it. Oops. Gotta go back here. Press play. Nice. Beautiful, right. So I can add notes. All you have to do is click on a rhythm and then make sure little note selector is clicked and you've got Ah, some notes added, I could make cords by doing the same thing by just layering things on top of each other. Like that. Oops. If I click a different rhythm over top of the same note, it changes that note. You can't do that. That's a notation. So I have to click the same kind of note, the same kind of rhythm if I want to make ah court. So that's really all you'll need to know. Um, in terms of how this program works in order to get through just about all of this class, um, you can zoom in here. Ah, we can look at it a little bit differently. We can change a bunch of stuff, all of that. I'll explain when we get there. I'm thinking about making a whole separate course just on how to use this music or program I'd probably make. It is a big free course that would go along with this class. And maybe I'll do that. Maybe that exists already. Ah, if it does, look around. Ah, this website, see if you can find that class. Um, because I think it would be really useful to a lot of people that are taking this class as like an extra tool. So check that out. But in the meantime, Ah, that's really all you need to do. So you just go to music or dot org's download this program, install it. Ah, and then you should have this all set up. Now, when we're working in class, I'm going to kind of be zoomed in something like this, and I'll be adding notes, you know, like like that, um, And automatically makes rests. Thes. Other squiggly lines are arrests. Talk about those soon. Um, so this is how we will be looking at stuff throughout the class so you can see the staff, the five lines and the dots. Um, that's primarily what we're talking about is lines and dots in this class. Um, that's what music notated music is all about. His lines and dots. Okay, so that's me to score. Cool. So download it, get it? You'll be really happy that you have. It's a great tool. I'm so excited that it's free. Um, for if no other reason than at any point, we can always just click, you know and hit play kind of goofy about you. Get a point. We can hear what we've written. It's great. Okay, let's move on to our first big section. Off we go. 5. 6 TheElementsoftheScore: All right, let's get started. So what I have here is I have pulled up. Just ah, piece of music is kind of a random piece of music. I don't know this person or this piece of music. Um, I was actually just on. I was just looking for something to pull up in Muse score. I was Ah, no, I guess I closed it. But I was on Ah, the new score website. And they have, like, a You can share files there. So, um, this is these are pieces of music that, you know, people have written and posted, So I downloaded this one. Ah, I listen to it. It's nice. Nice little piano piece. Um, and I just want to use it to show a couple things. The first thing that we're going to focus on is pitch. But before we do that, I just want us to get a feel for what we're looking at When we look at a piece of music, there's a lot of information here. Um, really What this is is sheet music in this way is a script. In a way, what we're doing when we write sheet music is we're telling the performer what to do, right? And we're telling them in a lot of different ways what to do. It's actually very accurate. Um, we're being like hyper specific about what we want them to dio. We're telling them what notes to play. That's the first thing we're gonna look at. That's where these dots are. That's what tell us what note to play. But then these bars at the top, these tell us the speed at which to play those notes. So the rhythm, how fast or how slow each note gets played. That's what the top tells us. The bottom dot tells us what note to play. This symbol here tells us how allowed to play it. This long symbol here tells us kind of what style to play it in. This is telling us to play it, um, as though it were one kind of thought this dude added it. Do do do dah like instead of data to tattoo, um so more strung together like, ah, we that the word is slurred, you know, we want to slur together, and you can kind of imagine what that would sound like. This symbol here tells us we want an accent on. It s so this one note gets an extra loud Ah, moment. And here this is telling us different speed things to dio. This symbol here is telling us to get louder over time this symbol here selling us to get quieter over time. So there's a lot of different information contained in a score. So the first thing we need to do is learn how to read this stuff, and the way I want to do that is to focus on each element separately. So we're gonna focus on the pitch first. That's the dots. What are the dots telling us? And how do we determine those dots? Because when it comes to music theory, the dots are the most obvious thing that we need. His music theory is really about understanding the dots. What dots work best together. That's really what music theory is all about and in what context. But the rhythm is also very important. And the dynamics in our general how to read what's on this page is all very important. So we're going to start here looking at the notes, Um, and what we can tell about the notes So let's dive into that. So first thing we're gonna do is talk about, um what we call these things. What? How we name each note? Um, yeah. So let's do that in Lex Video, and I'll leave you on this video. We can't just stare at this music and not hear it, right? So, um, let's hear it now. You can follow along. You'll see in music or when I hit play, you'll see a little, um, like play head thing moving across and where it is, shows you what it's playing, so you can kind of see what it's doing. So look at it and, ah, see if you can determine some things about what's happening here we go. 6. 7 PitchNames: Okay, let's talk about the names of the pitches. So we're gonna scroll way back. So we just looked at a fairly complex piece of music, and now we're gonna look at something really, uh, fairly simple. So we have seven different pitch names, and we'll get more into that later. What that means. But what you need to know now is we name the pitches after the 1st 7 letters of the alphabet so we can start on a be see de That's the 1st 4 and just ignore these stems for now. I'll explain that later. These air called stems, but we're just focusing on the dots. E f g a b c d e f g. Those are the seven notes that we news. Okay, so you might be thinking there are a lot more than seven notes possible because this is not the lowest note you can imagine, right. And this is not the highest note you can imagine. We go way down and way higher and way lower, right. But the pitches the pitch names repeat, that's how it works. So if I keep going up, which Aiken dio so I can go off the staff. So this group of five lines this five line thing, this thing, this is called the staff. This group of five lines, we call it the staff. So if I go off the staff, you know I can do this. I can play way above the staff, and I can play way below the staff, actually. So if I keep going up, this one is going to be called. This was G, Remember? So this one is gonna be called What? You're wrong. Whatever you said is probably wrong. This is gonna be called a um, So this note and this note are both called a which is weird, right? That is weird. And we'll get more into why we do that in a minute. But right now, I just want to get us on the pitch names. Okay. Um, so how can you remember the pitch names? I remember when I learned to do this. I had a really hard time when I was younger and I was trying to learn, memorize the names of the notes. It was hard. So here's a couple things you can do that will help you memorize them. Let's just go back it's gonna delete all of these. This is a symbol that means there's no note there. We call that arrest. We'll talk more about that in a minute. But, um, here's a couple of things you can remember. So let's go down even lower. Let's go all the way down to this. A. This is an A. So let's add a bunch of notes. Oops. Okay, now I have a through another A a B C D E f g a And when we put notes on we keep going, let's keep going. Actually, So this wasn't a so this has to be Ah, be at least keep going. C D E f g. Hey. So now we're a We've got three A's on the screen here. Now, this is an A This is an A and this is in a So how can we remember the names of the notes? There are a couple different tricks people have learned to do. Um, notice that when we add notes, let's look particularly when we're on the staff, right? What we do is we alternate between having a note on the line here and a note in between a lot right So on the line in between the line on the line in between the lines on the line, in between the legs, right? So what sometimes people like to do is try to memorize a little pneumonic device for the lines and for the spaces. So let's do that. Let me show you. Oh, yeah, I can just scroll over here. That's great. So if we just look at the spaces and if you just remember the names of the notes on the spaces, then you can figure out the note in between. Because if we know this is an F and this is an A, and then you see that note, you can just use the alphabet and think, What? Well, it's a little different. In that case, let's use this as an example. If this is an A and this is a C and you see this note, you know that it's the note that it's the letter that's in between A and C, right, So this must be, ah, be because you can count a B seat. So what's a good way to remember all of this space is the easy way to do it. Is this Actually, you don't even need to come up with a little pneumonic device because this spells a word says f. This is a This is see. And this is e that spells the word face. Um, so that is a handy way to remember the spaces. F a ce are the spaces on the staff. Um, so file that one away face. Ah, you could do the same thing with remembering the lines. There's one more This one doesn't spell anything good. E g b d and F Ah, you can't really make a word out of that. But the different little phrases that I've heard people use our every good boy deserves fudge. Every good boy deserves fudge or every good boy does. Fine. Um, I heard a weird one the other day. One of my students had something about an elephant. Like elephants get better. I'm just making this up. As I go along, elephants get better. Ah, doughnuts. Faster. I don't know. You can make up your own. You're probably more likely to remember it if you make up your own. So those are two good ways of remembering the notes. Now another thing. I want you to do is think about the notes being in a circle. This is a handy kind of way to remember that the notes cycle around because the trick here is that you have to remember that the note that comes after G is not a church. It's a right because it ends at G in it circles around. So if we draw the circle and then like a clock face kind of and then we put all the letters in there you can kind of see how, as we go up it goes C d E f g A B c, you know, and it cycles around that way. That's a way to think about it so that you remember that we're always kind of turning this circle and moving up. So after G comes a Okay, so you're gonna want to remember these. I recommend memorizing this f a ce remembering e g b d f um, with every good boy deserves fudge or whatever you want to do and just learning to count up the scale. Well, I remember when I was learning this and I had a hard time really learning Teoh read well at first read notes. While at first one of things I did is for some reason I memorized. I think I memorized e So he is right here. So this is an E. So I just knew, like the bottom line was e no matter what, the bottom line was e. So if I wanted to find out what this note waas, all I had to do is go down to an E and then go f g a B C. That's a C. I want to find out that note. I went all the way down to any one when f g a B C D e. That's another eat. That's a tedious way to do it, but eventually it clicks. So I memorized everything. But it's gonna take time to learn how to read this stuff. Don't expect to read fast. That's not a goal. That's not something you need to be able to do for music theory. But we do have to know where these notes are. So that's how they work. Okay, up next, let's talk about why we cycle those notes around. Why a comes after G right? Why don't we just count up to H. I. J k l M N o p. There's a pretty good reason it has to do with something called active. So let's and pitch classes. So let's talk about that in the next video. 7. 8 PitchClasses: Okay. First, let's talk about this term pitch class. This is kind of a weird term. Um, but it helps us to understand how pitches work together. And this is really your first kind of big music theory concept. So what it means is we have two different terms here. We have pitch, and then we have pitch class. But we did in the last video is look at the different pitches, right? The different pitches are, um you know, the different notes that we use here. These are all individual pitches. But if I do this, this is a single pitch class. These three notes belong to one pitch class. The reason is they're all a. This is a pitch we would call a We'll call this one a, and we call this one a so these belong to a the pitch class of a. So no matter how low of notes you're playing or how high of notes you're playing, um, there are only seven pitch classes. There's a Class A and the pitch class A includes all possible notes that we would call a There's a pitch Class G, which includes all possible notes that we would call G. Right and so on. Um, these are individual pitches, and this is a single pitch class. So why do we care about pitch classes? That's kind of, um, a weird concept, but it helps us differentiate between pitches. Um, that have the same name. So what if I did? Let's just do another example here. Um, okay. How many different pitches do I see in this in these four notes? How many different pitches do I have? I have four different pitches. I m, f, b E and F. How many different pitch classes do I have? Three. Because I have f B and E. I already have f that those belong to the same pitch class, so they only eso the different pitch classes. There are only three, um, because F and F are the same pitch. Class B is a separate pitch class. I only have one B, but it's it's own pitch class in this case, and E is the same for only three pitch classes there. Um, let's do one more to see if that makes sense. Let's dio Okay, so I have eight notes now getting a little more complicated. So how many different pitches. Do I have 12345678? I have eight different pitches. Every one of these dots is going to be its own pitch. So when I say how many pitches do we have? But you can just count the doubts. There's nothing more tricky to it than that. How many different pitch classes do I have? So we have a That's one. We haven't f. That's too. We have another A. So that doesn't That's not a new one, because they're both a. So we still only have two. We have another A. So we still only have two. Now we have a G. We haven't had a G yet, so that's three. So our pitch classes so far R A f N G. These are repeats of the same pitch class. We have another F, so we still only have three. We have another A. So that's not a new one. And we have another F. So that's not anyone, so we only have three different pitch classes here, but we have eight pitches, so the pitch class is anything that is that gets the same name now. Hopefully, this will make a little bit more sense when we get into the next video, or we're gonna talk about this thing called octaves. So let's jump over to that and talk about octaves. 8. 9 Octaves: Okay, octaves. Let me explain what octaves are, and then we'll jump back and talk about how they relate to pitch classes and pitches. So let's just first analyze the word active right. We know probably a little bit about what this means. Octave comes from the root of the word. Active comes from the same thing, the same reason we call an octopus and octopus and an Octagon and Octagon and in octet and octet, which is that it's something based around the number eight, right? So I've already said we only have seven unique pitch names. So why do we have something based around the number eight makes perfect sense. If you think about it, let's use A as our example. So let's count up eight. Right? A B C D. That's four e f g. That seven. We go upon more eight. That means it's the same pitch class. Write something that's eight notes away. So if we go to from this first note and we say this is our first note and we count up eight pitches, we get the same pitch class, and that is an active. So these notes are related by something called inactive. So why do we care about octaves? Octaves, air? Very important. Um, octaves have a very similar sound. Let's do this again. So here are four different A's, and they are A's in different octaves. This is a high active. This is a low octave. This is somewhere in the middle of inactive. So we have high act. We have the space in between is called inactive. Okay. And the relationship of this note to this note is inactive. Whether it's going down or it's going up. Uh, it's we still call it inactive. We don't really differentiate between whether it's a higher octave or lower active in this sense. Um, so the reason that we lump these together and the reason that they get the same name, the reason that they're all called these are all called in A is because they have a very distinct similarity in the way that they sound. They sound really similar. Um, these are in in one way playing this note and then this note and then this note is kind of like playing the same note three times because they're very similar in the way that they sound. If we were to analyze these. Unlike a frequency, uh, thing like, if we looked at the actual frequencies that were coming out, they would be related by a 1 to 2 relation ratio, which, let's not get into ratios. Forget I said that, Um, that gets too weird. Let me just say that these notes always sound good together, right? Let's do them all the same time, right? It it sounds good. It's not gonna be dissonant, right? That's a sound that is always going to sound good. So if you're writing something and you think, How can I make this more interesting at an active, you know, add the same note, but an octave higher or an octave lower, and it's going to sound really interesting. - Uh , let's take, for example, some melody. Okay, Mary had a little lamb. Now let's add an octave lower. So now we have Mary had a little lamb appear and Mary had a little lamb down here. And that's gonna sound just fine, because those are octaves right. I haven't really added any meaty, crunchy, dissonant notes. These will octopus will always sound good together. Um, let's just hear that right? So it's pretty easy So how that relates to pitch classes, right? We know that. Let's look back here. So we have seven different notes and then the active, right? So what we're looking at here is seven notes. Ah, and our Sorry, What we're looking at here is eight different pitches, seven different pitch classes, right? Because this is the same pitch class. Um, but and well, actually, let's do it here to this is maybe a little easier toe make my point. This is all this. All these four notes are all the same pitch class, right? Because we're always but they're separated by inactive. So they're not exactly the same note because they're inactive. Different. But they're the same pitch class with an active innit? Separated by an octave. As we move on. Keep in mind this Ah, lot of what we're gonna be doing in music theory is looking at different intervals. Right? And an interval is a space between two notes. So from let's say this no to that note, that is an interval. And that means something to us when we work with different pitches. The space between two notes is where things get really interesting. That's where we start really picking apart? Why do those two notes sound good together, or why do they not? And it has to do with a thing called the interval the space in between those two notes. So our first interval that we've learned and we've already learned it is the interval of an octave. This is from F two F. And we know that the interval of adoptive pretty much always sounds good. It has a character where those two notes, no matter what two pitches you use Oh, are what? No matter what pit class you use, whether it's an after G and A and B, if you add an active on it, it's gonna sound good. That's just how octaves work. They sound good together, quick. So that's how auctions work. Um, now, before we go on to the next thing, I want to give you a little practice. I will practice sheet. So in the next little blip in this class, you will have the opportunity to do a little practice. You can do these however you want, you can do him. You can not do. Um, it's totally up to you. But, uh, I'm gonna do these throughout this class. This is, you know, just like learning anything. Um, this takes practice to really understand this stuff. So, um, if if you already know the basics of how to read music, then you know, skip over this one and get to the more meaty stuff. If some of the ah stuff I've covered in this first chunk is difficult Ah, which is totally fine because it is difficult. Then try to dio the practice exercises that will be included in the next chunk. And when you get stumped, jump back and watch these videos again, and then make sure you understand it before you move on. That's the way to really learn this stuff. Now, in the practice worksheet example that I give you in the next video, I will also include the answers. So try not to look at the answers until you have a good guess. Until you think you got it. Do you think you got it? Then look at the answer. And if you got it awesome, if you didn't get it, then go back and review these videos and keep going. Um, you can watch these videos as many times as you want. There's no harm in that. It's actually encouraged. Okay, So up next, our first little practice sheet and then we'll move on to talk about how all of this relates to this thing. What you've seen before, it looks like a piano keyboard. Off we go. 9. 11 TheKeyboardLayout: okay, up next. Let's talk about the piano keyboard. Now we use the piano keyboard in theory, because it's probably the most just kind of ubiquitous instruments around we end. The other reason we like it is that we can see all the notes. You know, if we were using something like a clarinet, um, to talk about music theory, you can't see the notes on a clarinet. You know, you have to put in combinations of fingers to get each note, but on a piano keyboard, we can see you know this note and then this note and this note so it works out quite well for music theory. So in any music theory, of course, you're always focusing on the piano keyboard kind of as the template to see the notes. So, uh, here in music, or you can actually pull up a piano keyboard If you go to where that view piano keyboard or you can just press P Ah, and that pulls up this right and it's cool because I can play it right. Um and it's neat. Um, okay, Two years on piano keyboard. So what we're gonna do in this section is we're going to talk about how this thing works, right? And then the next section, we're gonna talk about how this thing relates to this stuff, right? Where did these come together? On the piano keyboard. We have two different kinds of keys. We have white keys, those air, these ones. They are the color white. And we have Blackie's thes one hoops these ones, right? So what? Keys and black keys. Now they all produce notes, right? But they work a little differently by in terms of what we call them. Um, they get different names, and it can be a little confusing. So let's go through the white notes first and how they work and how the intervals work on a keyboard. And then we'll look at the Black Keys, So let's jump into the white keys on the keyboard. 10. 12 TheWhiteKeys: Okay, The white keys on the keyboard. Here's what we have. So we know now that note names go from a up through G, right? And then they start over again. So this is where they are, so we can see that the piano goes on and on and on for a long time. Uh, so I'll walk you through how to find this in a second, but here is an A And then I'm just gonna count up just to show you the A through G thing. And then I'll walk you through how to figure this out. But this is a B C D E f g, and then a again. So these air both a right and then B C d e f g again. So this is an A. So the way when you're looking at a keyboard, the way you can kind of ground yourself is to look at the pattern of black keys because these exist in this pattern of two and then a pattern of three in a pattern of two and a pattern of three. We're gonna talk about how to read the black use in just a minute. But for now, Let's use the black. He's just as a way of knowing where we are on the White Keys. For example, whenever you see the pattern of two black keys, you can go just to the left, and that's gonna be a seat. Now remember, See is a very good grounding spot for all things when it comes to music theory, we like to know where C is. We like to start on sea, and, um and why not? A, uh it'll make more sense later when we start talking about keys. But see is kind of our the It's the easiest one to understand when it comes to keys. So we talk about see a lot, and that's why see is labeled here. And there's another reason that C is labeled here, which I'll talk about in just seconds. So two black, he's just to the left. That's a C. I can go all the way up here to black. He's just to the left. That's a C. That's a much higher sea, but it's still a C. So to black he's left that to see two black he's left. That's a C two black. He's left. That's a C So here's all my sees and this is actually one, too. But you can't see the Black Keys because it ends. But, um, so that's a good grounding spot if we want to find a the way I was just using a look for the row of three black keys, and it's in between the top tube. That's a so that's a that's a that a. That's a That's a that's now we're not gonna focus a bunch time on how to play the piano, but we do need to know how to read the piano and know what notes are aware, right? So if you confined, see, you can pretty much do everything you need, because then if you need to find an E, you can go see d e right. There's an e we need to find, I don't know, pick any letter. If we need to find ah, be we can go C D E f G A B. There's a B. We can also think the other way, and we can say if this is a C and you can do the alphabet backwards. You know that right before C is speak so we can find a be going down the other way. So this is a B eso, in other words be Is the group of three right on top, just to the right of the group of three black notes is always gonna be a B. So you can kind of do these tricks Whatever works for your brain to you kind of remember where they are, What most people do is they find, see and they memorized that spot of just to the left of these two black keys is see always and then you get used to counting until you just start to memorize where the notes are. After a while, you'll start to say like Okay, after is here be is here a A and G and you can kind of know your way around after you do this for a while, but it takes practice just like anything. So for now, get comfortable to see and know that we count up the alphabet to a We're sorry to G, and then it starts over at a B and C again. Okay, So get comfortable findings finding where that C is, and you'll be much happier. I want to point out one more quick thing here. Why this one is labeled. It gets a little special. Attention. Um, this is what we call middle seat. We'll talk more about this later, but just so that you know why it's here. Um, sometimes it's hard to know exactly what Octave were in right. We could be really high really low or whatever. So we use this notation of middle C to basically me in the middle of the keyboard, right? Um, we kind just use it as a grounding spot. And there's a spot in the staff where that note is. It's right down here. It's right at the bottom of the staff and I'll show you that shortly. But this one is labelled C just to show us that it's middle C. Right, Cool. So let's move on And let's talk about the Black Keys 11. 13 TheBlackKeys: Okay, so let's talk about the black use. These could be a little odd, the way these air set up. Now, remember, I didn't set these up. Ah, this is just the way this has been done for centuries and centuries. Um, so this is what we call the Black Keys. And this is the system we used to identify. The black Keys. It's kind of strange. Um, I'm just gonna warn you, but after some practice, you get used to it pretty fast. Okay, so let's focus in right here. We know this is seat, right, And we know this is deep. Okay? So d comes right after seat, right? If you count up the alphabet, ABC deep right, there's nothing in between. There's no letter in between. So we have a noted between, right? So what do we call this thing? There's got to be something that we call that. So here's the answer. We call this a C. Sharp, and we used this symbol, um, the number sign or the hashtag symbol? Um, kind of modern. I think we would call it, um, but in music terms, we call that sharp. We call that simple Sharp. So sharp gets attached to a note when it's a little bit higher. So think of sharp as meaning a little bit higher. So in this case, this note, we would call it C sharp, because what we're calling it is see a little bit higher than C. So c sharp. Sharp means just a hair higher, then see? All right, now, here's where things get confusing. Well, actually, hold off on that for a second. Let's lock in this sharp idea. So what would we call this note? Okay, it is D a little bit higher, so we would call it D sharp. Okay, what about this one? Our Sorry. What about this one? This is Well, what is this note? This is C d e f. So this is an f. So this note is gonna be f sharp. This note is gonna be g sharp because that's g. And it's a little bit higher. Is a is a sharp, So a little bit higher. What happens right here. What if we went B? This is a B. So what if we went be a little bit higher? There's no such thing. There's no such thing as a B sharp because be a little bit higher is see So we don't use B Sharps. Now, I'm gonna put one little thing in here that when you get into really advanced music theory , you do encounter a b sharp, so just file that away, but you probably will never see it. Um, maybe if you get in a really advanced music theory But for the purposes of us, A b Sharp does not exist. Same thing right here. What? Notice this. Let's go down and active. Here's an E. These are both these be a little bit higher turns into F There's nothing in between. So there's no such thing as e sharp. So e sharp and be sharp do not exist. OK, so we know how Sharp's work right now. Here's the somewhat confusing part. We have another symbol. We have this symbol Um that means flat. Okay, flat means a little bit lower. So sharp means a little bit higher and flat means a little bit lower, right? Easy enough. However, what that means is, if we go back to this note, we know that we can call this a C sharp because it's see a little bit higher, but we can also call it a D flat. So all black notes could have two names. All black notes do have two names. I'm sorry. All black notes have two names. We can call this note C sharp or we can call it D flat. And when it comes to the piano, you're gonna put your finger on the exact same spot. If the note says to play a C sharp or it says the play a D flat, it's that it's the same thing. So all black notes have two possible names. Let's let's look at a couple other flats about this one. We can call this one e flat or D sharp. That's D a little bit higher, sharp or e a little bit lower flat about this one. We can call this one f sharp because it's a little bit higher or we can call it G flat G a little bit lower, right? So that's how the sharps and flats work. Um, let's go to see. Can we have a C flat? No, we can't. For the same reason we don't have a B sharp, there's nothing in between. There's nothing here. There's not a Blackie here, so there's no Seishi. See flat and there's no be sharp. And again here. There's no f flat or e sharp. This is F so F flat would be a black note here, and there isn't one. So that's how sharps and flats work Now. Collectively, we call those symbols accidental. They're called accidental. So a flat and a sharp is called an accidental. So when there is an accidental on a note, that means that there is either a flat or a sharp on it. That's that's the term we use for both of those two symbols. Okay, so that's how we read the Black Keys. Now, why is there to names? Why would they do that to us? Um, there's a good reason for it, and it has to do with keys. So if you're in a certain key, you might want to use flats. And if you're in another key, you might want to use Sharps. It depends on how the key is set up, and we're gonna talk a lot more about that later. In fact, that's gonna be the majority of what we talk about when we talk about music theory is how notes relate to keys and when you would want to use flats and sharps. So for now, just remember that these can have two names and you'll see how this works a little better when we start connecting the piano keyboard to the notation on the screen, so just hold on to that for just a minute. 12. 14 HalfStepsandWholeSteps: Okay. One other concepts that we need to understand when we're looking at the piano keyboard is the idea of half steps and whole steps. And I don't think we talked about this when we talked about our first interval. We talked about octaves already. So we've talked about actives, um, as an interval, you know, an interval is a space in between two notes. So we need to talk about another one here now, When I said sharp when we talked about Sharps a second ago So let's go back here. See Sharp. I used the word or the phrase a sharp means the note a little bit higher. Okay, so let's define what a little bit means A little bit means specifically something called ah , half step. No half step is the smallest amount of space. You can move between two notes. That's what it is. So Ah, let's pick a random No. Here. Okay. Right here. Here's an f. Okay, this is enough. If I wanted to go up Ah, half step from F, it would put me here. Half step is the smallest amount of space. Aiken, go. Um, if I want to go down 1/2 step, it would be here. Okay, the alternative is a whole step. Ah, whole step is to half steps. Okay, So if I wanted to go up the whole step from F, I would end up on G because this is 1/2 step, and then this is 1/2 step, so this is a whole step. Okay, So this term, whole steps and half steps becomes really important as we start to build cords and, uh, work with the material. So keep in mind Ah, half step is just the smallest possible thing you can do. Um, typically, it's between a note and the sharp of that note. That is 1/2 step. There's 1/2 step, but in some cases, it's not like e and ah, half step higher than E is F because there's nothing in between so that between these two notes are 1/2 step. Okay, If I went ah, whole step above e, I would go to f sharp, right, because this is 1/2 step and this is 1/2 step. So here to here is ah, whole step. So a whole step is just a amount of space in between two notes. Ah, as is 1/2 step. But in this case, ah, whole step is to half steps. Okay, so that is really important to understand how that works because it's gonna be a very basic building block. Okay, let's ah, jump to another video in the next video. We'll do a quick little review of the things we've covered in this section, and then I'll give you a little worksheet to practice on. 13. 15 SectionReview: Okay. Quick review. Okay, here's what we covered. Um, that I want to be sure we hit home. First of all, the distance between any to enter any two notes is called an interval. Right? We've learned, uh, three intervals. Now we know the interval of an active. That is the note. See to the next note see above it. Another interval we've learned is the interval of 1/2 step. That is. Oh, no. Any note up to its next closest note or down to its next closest note? Okay, so the close of the smallest possible interval we have in music is 1/2 step. Um, the 3rd 1 we've learned is a whole step. That is to half steps. So that is from here. In this case, this is a C up to d is gonna be a whole step from D up Teoh e is gonna be a whole step because there's one in between and from e up to f Sharp is going to be a whole step because there has to be a note in between. That's 1/2 step. That's 1/2 step. So this is a whole step. Got another concept. We've learned is flats and sharps. Remember that flat means a little bit lower, but now that we've defined what little bit means, let's call it what it is, which is 1/2 step lower. If something is a flat, it's always 1/2 step lower. We've learned Sharps and remember, Sharp is what I called originally a little bit higher. But now that we know what little bit means, let's call it 1/2 step higher. So to get to a sharp if you see a note that says, Ah, a sharp, you know that to find that note on a keyboard, you have to find a the white note A and then you're gonna go up Ah, half step, which is going to be a black note, a sharp. So those are our main topics that we've learned in this section. I'm gonna give you a little worksheet and this next one s so that you can practice naming these notes and finding them on a keyboard. Okay, so if you don't have a keyboard to practice on, um, if you're using, you score like I am. You can always queue up. You know, their little keyboard and play it otherwise. I mean, I have a little midi keyboard here. Um, you can get one of these really cheap midi keyboards. Um, that you can plug in eso I have this, um, cheap little mini keyboard here, and I haven't plugged in with USB to my computer, and it's just playing through muse score. So music or makes it sound like a piano. Uh, which is handy to have. You don't need one, but if you have one, it can be really useful. Um, but this onscreen keyboard will work just fine. Okay. So, uh, please try out this little worksheet and then, um, get some practice on it. We watch these lectures if you didn't quite get anything, Um, and then we'll move on to reading pitches on the music staff in the next chunk. 14. 17 StaffOverview: okay up next. We need to talk about the staff. So this is how we know Take music. Um, it's on this system of five lines that we call a staff. Now the staff shows us a lot of different things, and it's laid out in a way that will show us higher notes and lower notes, rhythms, pitches, volume, everything. Everything gets included in their everything we need to know to play a piece of music. You can think of this notation system as essentially a very specific list of instructions hidden in this kind of weird language of symbols. That's exactly what what this kind of notation is is it gives the performer someone who is reading this music, all kinds of different instructions on what to do. Right now, what I'm seeing on this staff is it's telling me a whole bunch of nothing. Actually, it's telling me a lot of things. It's telling me the range that were in. That's what this symbol is telling me. It's telling me how to count the rhythms, which is what this symbol is telling me, and we'll go over these symbols in just a minute, and it's telling me to do nothing For each one of these groups of time. This little bar here means rest. It means just be quiet. So this is telling me to do nothing in a very specific way. But let's put some stuff on the staff. So I'm gonna grab a note here and let's go to this bar right here. So each of these little blocks is called a bar where you see these vertical lines. Um, these are called a bar. So let's just go right here so I can put a note on a space in between. We've kind of looked at this already, but a little reviews. Okay, I can put it on a line and I can go a pie if I start going up really high. We get these extra things called ledger lines right, and they go up really high. They go down really low to. This is for the low notes, right? So things could be online's or spaces or lines or spaces above the staff and on the ledger lines is what those air called now. The thing to remember some obvious stuff about the staff as we go up. That's a higher pitch as we go down. That's a lower pitch. Now. You might be thinking, once we go really low or really high up here, those notes get hard to read a little bit. So we have some tricks for that, and it has to do with this symbol right here. Get off of this note symbol. This symbol, this is the curly thing here tells us what range were in, and it's very important. Little symbol. So, uh, let's jump to a new video and let's talk about clefts. That's what this is called, and let's go over cliffs in a new video. 15. 18 clefs: Okay. Now, I told you that this symbol here means the general range that were in and what that means is this is called a clef is what this symbol means. The clef is always the first thing we see at the beginning of a staff line. This particular one is called a trouble clef. Now that's trouble, as in T r e b l e and trouble means like the upper mid range if we look at our keyboard. So let's bring our keyboard back in. Here is your keyboard. Trouble in general means kind of the upper mid range stuff, so that means kind of around here, this area of notes now, it's not like a hard and fast rule that you can only use these notes when you're on trouble class. Because, remember, you can go above the staff and below the staff with those ledger lines. But this tells us how to read these notes, and this is this. Give me a little frustrating at first, but the clef changes. What notes or what? So, for example, that's add a note that's had a few notes. Here's G A, B, C de, uh, E. Okay, let's just do those notes. For now, this symbol, the trouble clef, is also sometimes called a G clef. Um, because it kind of looks like a fancy cursive G. I guess you could say the letter G. But more importantly, the little swirl that happens here happens around the pitch G. So this line right here is G. That's the kind of easy way to remember it. The circle right here happens around G. So this is a G. But let's change the class. So if I go to let's see in Muse score, I have to go to think how it's there we go. So I have to see this palette here, and I hear I have cliffs. Look, there's all these different clefts, so let's do the second most common, which is bass clef. So if I change this to bass clef, look at that. Now, all those notes got pushed way up high. So what this is showing me is that this range means that were in a much lower register were actually down here on the piano keyboard. So that's what we're seeing on these notes right here. Um and therefore the notes that we entered before are now way super high, right? Because it's showing them in base class, so they have to be way up high. What if we looked at the same notes in Basically so remember, this was G A B C D e. Right? What is it now? Well, bass clef is also sometimes called f clef. I guess you could say it. I don't know. Somehow it looks like an F. But more importantly, these two dots hang out right around F. So if you remember, this was D before right here. But now this is an F. So if we count backwards, this is an E. This is a D. This is a C. And this is a B so B C D E f g. So the clef changes. What note is what? Completely. So if you're scratching your head right now, uh, don't worry. So here's what we're gonna do. And here's the most people do. To be honest, we stick with one clef or two cliffs, all instrumentalists. People that play an instrument learned to read music on a clef most of the time trouble clef or bass clef. Some of them use a couple of these other clefts. This is called alto clef. Um, this is used for percussion stuff that doesn't have any pitch to it. Um, these are kind of just variations of trouble clef. So there are kind of three different symbols, and then we can move him around. But most stuff happens on a trouble clef like we just saw or a bass clef. Now, some stuff, some music happens on both. Let's do this. Let's make a new file here and let's look at a grand staff Now. A grand staff is what a piano player uses, right? If you've ever looked at piano music, you've seen this kind of a set up before. So here we have a trouble clef and a bass clef, right? And we need this for piano because a piano encompasses both. Right, Um, so this is the low stuff, and this is the high stuff. Now, if we wanted to really accurately see this, what we could Dio is let's put some notes that connect between them. Let's make like a bunch of the white notes, right, cause we know what those are now. Let's go from C. So I mean based class. So This is a C D E f g a be See Now I'm going to jump up to the next Chlef de B F G B C. Okay, so here's see through C. Right. So what we're seeing here is this not right here? This is a C. And coincidentally, this note lines up with middle C on our keyboard. So when we called Middle C earlier, Um, this one is kind of the middle. It looks like there's a lot of space here, right? But there's not. It's actually only one note, because this is the next note higher than it. Right. So it can be confusing. It can look odd because, uh, there's this big amount of space here, but this is see? And this is D. This is the next note. If we look at our keyboard here, this note is right here. This note, his d is right here. So we're just jumping between clefts there. Right? We're going from bass clef up to trouble class. Let me try putting, uh, this bar. I'm gonna put the exact same notes. Watch this. Okay. Look at this. Now, what we're seeing now here is these are the exact same note. This is a G, and it's right here. This is a G, but in trouble class, and it's right here. So it's really low on the staff in trouble class and reasonably high on this staff in base club. This is an A and it's right here and this is the exact same. A. That's right here. Here's B, and it's right here. There's also be right there. And then here's that. See, it's one ledger line up on bass clef and one ledger line down on trouble. Cliff. So this is a D. So in basic laugh, that city, that's an E that's an F and that's a g U. Let's scroll back there. Okay, so now this is a D. And this is a D. It's right there. It's the exact same note just in two different classes. What I'm showing showing you here s so I hope that makes sense. This is this cleft issue is a little tricky to wrap your head around when you play piano. When you look at piano stuff, we often have to look at trouble and bass clef at the same time, and it takes some getting used to, but But you do get used to it. Once we start getting into analyzing cords and things like that, you'll need to understand how trouble in bass clef work in terms of just being able to figure out what notes are on on the screen around the page. So work on that. We'll have a little exercise for you to test out your trouble Chlef in basic life. But, um, do you remember this? Um, the key to bass clef for me is always that f you know, those two dots around the F So that is an F right boom right there. That line is an F, and then you can count your way up from their G A B, see etcetera, so we'll work on that. 16. 19 TrebleClefRefresher: So now that I just gave you all that info about class, let me just, ah, do a quick refresher of trouble, cleft. Because even though I said we're gonna need to know bass clef for a little while yet we're just gonna be working on trouble cloth. So don't worry too much about bass clef trouble. Cliff will get us everything we need for a little while. We'll do a review of bass clef when it comes up again. But remember that in trouble class, the keys to remember are the lines which you can use whatever pneumonic device you like. Every good boy deserves fudge or every good boy does fine or, you know, make up your own and then the spaces F a c e spells face. So remember those, um, don't forget about our ledger lines can go up essentially, they can't go up forever, Um, and and down forever. In this case, it's not gonna let me go down forever because I have a bass clef down there. So sooner or later it's gonna make me bounce down to that bass clef. Okay, so let's go back to putting some notes. Let's start putting some notes together on the staff and seeing if we can name him focusing on the idea of half steps and whole steps that we looked at. Ah, couple videos ago. And I want to point out one more thing before we do that. And that is these notes that I'm putting on here. So what we have here is this is a note, right? And it's got a note head. That's this blue thing that I'm on right now, and it's got a stem. That's this, right. We're gonna talk more about these stems in a minute. But the stem basically tells us the rhythm to play, and the note head tells us what notice. And sometimes the note had tells us a little bit about the rhythm, too. But we're going to talk more about rhythm shortly. I think, actually, we'll start talking about how rhythm works. So with that, let's go on and start looking at how our whole steps and half steps play out when they're on the staff 17. 20 NamingNotesandIntervals: Okay, so let's put some pitches on the staff here. So here we go. So let's start with our good old friend seat. Okay? So I'm just gonna walk through a couple of these just to kind of get our head in the game, So C is right here, right? This particular c is right here. What if I want a whole step above sea? Right? We know that that looks like this. And it would have to be a d. Right? So that goes right there. Cool. So C to D. That's a whole step. What if I want see and 1/2 step above sea that gets us to a C sharp. Right. So I have to go up and grab the sharp symbol. Oops, I have to, I think in Muse score. You have to make the note first and then attach a sharp to it. So that gives us a C sharp. Now it's worth noting here how you say these things. So we say, See, we say D. And even though the sharp symbol comes before the note, we always say the sharp after the note. So we would call this a C sharp not a sharp. See? It's weird. That's just the way it's stuff that's goofy. Um, okay, so here we have a pull step here, right? And we have 1/2 step here between D and C sharp. That's 1/2 step. Let's keep going. Let's go from a C sharp. Let's do. Ah, whole step down. So here's C sharp. Ah, whole stepped down would be to half steps. Right, So that's a B. Let's make a B. That's gonna be right there. Okay. What about Ah, whole step. Let's do 1/2 step down on. Let's do a flat this time. Let's do a B flat. Oops. So we gotta make myself a B. Put a flat on it, right? What if I did this? I'm just gonna blow your mind here. Thank you. Hang with me. Okay. What are we going to hear when I hit? Play on this and tell it to play these four notes. What are we gonna here? We're here B flat, a sharp B flat, a sharp Yes and no. That is technically what we're gonna here. But we're going to hear the same pitch over and over because let's find B flat. Here's be so there's B flat. Let's find a sharp. There's a so here's a sharp. We're gonna hear that note four times when we hit play. Let's do it. Let's get rid of this one just so we don't get confused. E the right. It's the same note four times. So that's a good little experiment to do just to kind of remind us off where we are on the score. Let's go. A whole stepped down from a sharp. How about that? That's gonna be down to a G. And it's going to be a G sharp, actually, because here is a sharp whole stepped down is gonna be g sharp. Will step down from that is gonna be f sharp, right? Who will step down from f sharp? It's gonna be eat. So I think you get the point. Um, just no sharps and flats. Now I didn't talk about you know, these particular symbols. They're weird symbols, but I do want to point out if you're just like writing this down the sharp symbol, the easiest way to make it on a computer if you're not in a notation program is obviously with the the pound sign and the pound sign in italics. To be specific. This flat sign is weird. It requires a unique font to make you have to have a special font, but in a pinch you can use a lower case B as in Boy Teoh, make that symbol. Okay, let's move on and let's talk about a little bit more about this middle C business and the names of our registers for just a minute. 18. 21 OctaveNames: Okay, One last thing. Um, on this middle C business before we move on. Now we call this, actually see four. Um, and we put this number on it. The number four. So middle C and C four mean the same thing. The reason that sometimes we use middle C and sometimes we used before is that we're not always looking at a piano. In which case that C is in the middle. Technically, right, because something you might be looking at another instrument and there's no middle to it. So sometimes we use the number four. And what that means is that if this is C four inactive down, we would call C three, see to and C one, and we can go the other way to C four c five c six c seven and even see eight. See how high those get? Whoa! Crazy high. Um, I'm gonna show this graphic up on the screen here. That kind of shows you how we we label these, and this is just a naming convention we use. We won't need to deal with this a ton, but I want you to know that when you come across this Ah, letter, a note name and then a number. The number is referring to the octave. You may see this on occasion in different things. So, um, keep an eye out for that. It's just a way to tell us what register were in specifically when we're not looking at a staff when we're just looking at note names. Um, because when we're on a staff, we know what register brim because of the cleft tells us. But when we're not looking at a staff were just talking about notes sometimes will say like , Oh, yes, C three C four c five Ah, in order to you get us in the right register. That's just the thing you might hear that I wanted to point out as it comes up. Okay, um, that's it for this section. I think what I'm gonna do here is give you some practice material and another worksheet. Um, I know this is a lot to wrap our head around. The next thing we're gonna do is we're gonna start talking about rhythms which are really fun. We've already seen a little bit about how that works with this with the dot and then the line coming off the dot Um, but I hope you don't feel frustrated. This stuff is hard to learn. This is learning a new language. It really is learning a new language. It's learning to read and write a new language, so it takes some getting used to sew, and it takes a lot of practice. So I'm gonna give you another worksheet that you could practice on. But one of the best ways that you can practice this stuff is just get your hands on some music, some sheet music, whether you know what it is or not, doesn't even matter just a bunch of dots on on the staff and just start going through it and naming the notes. Just say that's an A That's a B that's enough sharp, you know, that's Ah E flat. Whatever. Um, just go through and start naming the notes. That's how I learned how to do this. I remember very specifically I would get Ah ah, book of piano music and I didn't play piano. I was guitar player. I didn't know how toe read music, hardly at all, but I really wanted to learn. So whenever my family would go on road trips. I would take this book of piano music and I would just sit in the car and right in the note names for everything I could dio and it took me forever. But after I got through this entire book of, like, all of Beethoven's piano works or something like that, I was pretty good at knowing what notes were where so it just takes a lot of practice of knowing how to do it. So please do the work seat, Please practice on your own. And, um, continue on with the course because we're really gonna be having fun here soon, I promise. So off we go to another worksheet, and then we're gonna talk about rhythms. 19. 23 BeatAndBeatDivisions: Okay, let's talk about organizing time in music and how we do it. So by time, what we basically mean here is rhythm. Time is the notes. We play one after the other. Now we've looked at how the score on the musical staff shows us what notes to play. But there's a lot of other things the score shows us. It also tells us when to play each note and how allowed to play each note. Basically. So we're gonna talk about how loud to Plage note near the end of this class. But for this next couple sections, we're gonna talk about how the staff shows us rhythm. Ah, in time. So I use this term organizing time in music. This is an old term. This is actually organized. Time is actually really interesting term. If you look it up, it's actually the name of a journal about music now, but there was a composer named I Believe Edgar Alvarez coined this term when someone said, How do you define music? And he said, It's It's, Ah, sound organized in time, which is actually a very interesting and poignant ah, way to describe music, right? It's different pitches happen, but they are organized in time, and that's what makes it music is the organization of them. You can agree or disagree with that, but it is relevant to our about to talk about in this section. These next couple videos that we're going to talk about is how time and rhythm feels in music and how to kind of understand the feel and flow of time. And then in the next section, we're gonna look at the next kind of big unit. We're gonna look at how we actually deal with that on the staff. So in this section, it's more about the feel of it, which is really important to understand. There are a couple things that we need to wrap our head around with this before we look at how to actually notated how to write it down and how to read it once it's written down. So our first concept is gonna be the meter of apiece. So the meter it C. This is something that it's it's easy to talk about, but it's just really hard to, uh, explain, because it's such a feel thing. But I'm gonna try. Uh, that's my job. So the meter is basically the pulse of a piece of music. Right? Um, we have simple meters and we have compound meters now. Simple meters are meters. Ah, where Think about dance music, right? Ah, there's a pulse and it's always going. It's constant. We can really feel it. Think about the pulse as where you would tap your foot. You're just listening to music and you're just gonna naturally tap your foot. If that is constant, right, it's just 1234 like that. Ah, then it's a simple meter, right? It's a compound meter. It's gonna be a little different. It might not be, Ah, even all the way through. It might be like 12312312 am I have this weird little jump in it. We'll look at some of that later compound. Meter can also be something that maybe it is constant, but it has more than this. Straight up. 1234 feel to it. Maybe it's got an odd number associated with it, like maybe instead of hearing things in groups of four. You hear things in groups of three or ah, seven or nine or you know some odd number or five? No, I skipped five the first time around. We're Ah good way. This is This is Ah, really silly little trick. But ah, good way to tell the difference between simple and compound meter. This is what somebody told me a long time ago. And, uh, even though, obviously I know you know how to figure out the meter where you know quite well I'm pretty good at this stuff. But this little trick that is still find useful, especially when I'm writing. So think about this. Listen to a piece of music and don't think about tapping your foot to it. Think about bobbing your head. Just like nod your head in time with the music. Right now. If your head this is this is silly, but it's gonna work. Trust me. If your head wants to go forward and backwards, um then it's probably in simple meter. If your head wants to go side to side, it's probably in compound meter. I know that so dumb, but ah, it works. It's just kind of how our body naturally feels about this music. If you're like bobbing your head side to side, you might ah, feel the be feeling the music in a compound meter. It's weird. Um, but if you go forward and back, you might be feeling the music and a simple meter. So let's look at some examples, Um, in the next, for the next minute or so, I'm gonna play some examples, and I'm gonna put some stuff on the screen that shows you how I would feel it. Basically the pulse. I just want us to feel the pulse. I don't just worry about counting and numbers and all this stuff. We'll talk about that in a minute. But for now, let's just feel the pulse. So a couple that are simple and a couple that our compound there's a chance and down a dream for way. 20. 24 DupleVsTriple: Okay, let's talk about Do poll and triple meter. Now, when we talk about, do pull in trouble. This is like, simple and compound. But what we're talking about now is how beats are groups together. So we're not gonna go into quite yet on how to read this staff. But I'm gonna use it just to illustrate something. Let's look at one bar. You see these lines here, these air called bar lines, and inside one of these is one bar, and this is kind of how we group stuff together in music. So let's add some notes. Okay, so I can add four of these kinds of notes into one bar. So that means were in some kind of a do pull Niedere here. It's an even number, right? So let me do this. Let me just do Let's change this note. Let's just put Accord on every other one just so we can hear every other hoops. And now let's hear that. And I think what you'll find here is you can do that head nodding thing. Ah, forward and backwards, right? You're gonna hear 12345678 Right, So let's just hear this? Cool. I I lost my downbeat here. All right, let's hear that over time. Uh, right So you can tap your foot to that. You tap your foot on every one of these notes, and you would feel this do pull meter. Think do pull means to. So in groups of two, we can feel that. And the whole bar is a group of four. So it's two groups of two, right? That's just fine. Now let's change it. Let's make it a triple tight meter. So do poll is to Tripolis three. Right. So Or, To do that, I need to make one little change here. We're gonna talk about this more in a second, but I'm gonna change this to ah, 34 pattern. I'm gonna talk about these. This is called a time signature, and it kind of tells us what's happening Now if we want this to be correct, I need to get rid of this stuff. I think I can just whoops do that and that. And now things are gonna be in groups of three hoops. Okay, so let's hear this. So here your head might be going side to side, right? 123123123 So we would count this in that way. This 123123123 So now things air in a group or a pattern of three. So that's a triple meter. So do kilometer Means things line up in groups of two or four or six. Triple meter means things line up in groups of 36 or nine or 12. Um, something like that. So that's a different team, Dougal and Triple Meter. It's It's pretty similar to simple and compound meter. There is technically a difference between those, but let's not get hung up on that. Let's just say for now that, uh, simple meter is the same as do pull meter and trip and compound Meter is the same. This triple murder. Um, just for the sake of argument, if we're really being a purist, there is a difference between those, But let's just stick with that now. Also, notice that when we're in triple meter three beats, each one of these is the beat or the pulse, right? Each one of these here, so three of them in triple meter makes up one bar of stuff that's like a group, right? And in Do pull meter. Four of those make up one bar of stuff. Um, now it could be different. It could be we could have the piece set up so that we could be in triple meter and six of these make one bar of stuff. Um, but for now, let's keep it simple. Let's say three of these one bar of stuff. We'll talk more about that, and we'll make it more complicated later later. But just remember, three beats or three pulses makes up one bar when we're in a triple meter. 21. 25 TempoDownbeatsAndUpbeats: okay. I want throw three terms at you in this video tempo down beats and up beats. Let's start with tempo. Tempo is the speed we're going. Tempo is really another word for speed. Now what we do with tempo there's a couple different ways we can talk about tempo. We can talk about a beats per minute and in a score you'll see that and it looks something like this. You'll see that at the top of the score, that means quarter note equals and then the number and the number tells us how many beats per minute. If you have a Metro. No, that's like a little box that just goes click, click, click, click, click. It will tell us the beats per minute eso the higher the number, the faster we're going. So a tempo of 60 beats per minute is kind of slow. A tempo of 120 beats per minute is kind of fast. The other way we show tempo is sometimes with these Ah, funny Italian words, Brian, and throw some of those up on the screen right here and kind of what they mean. So you'll see this in the score sometimes things like gravity. Gravity is it means really slow Largo being slow, large ghetto means not quite as slow. These are very subjective terms. Allegro means fast. Presto means faster, Presti. See, Moe means quite fast. These are all just terms that we've we've used in their hard to use because their relative right, it just means fast. It doesn't tell us exactly what tempo to go, but in older music, especially, you'll see these terms used. Um, you know, Beethoven didn't write quarter note equals 120 you know, because maybe he didn't have a Metrodome. I think Metrodome at Metro knows, probably existed back then for him, but, uh, he wanted to give some control and not be as specific to the conductor. So hey wrote, you know, allegro to me and, like, you know, take it kind of fast. So in modern music, people tend to write the beats per minute that they want. Um, but in older music, you'll see these words, and they just mean different kinds of tempo. So that's tempo. It's just the speed that we're going. Let's talk about down beats and up beats. So here I have on the screen. Uh, I'm showing you some down beats here. Let me do another measures worth here. Okay, so the extra note here is on the downbeat. When we're in a ducal meter, the downbeat is quite easy to get. It's basically going to be this start of a group. So what we're gonna hear here is doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo. And the upper note is, if you're bobbing your head or even tapping your foot, the upper note is probably gonna be where you tap your foot. That's called the downbeat. It's the thing that feels like, uh, imagine a clock ticking, right? Tic tac, tic tac, tic tac, tic tac. Um, the tick is the downbeat. It's where we want things to fall as the strong element of the beat. Right? So let's just hear this and try to think about that. Try to think about these notes being the strong element of the beat. So when I'm nodding my head, it's what my head comes forward. And then on these ones by head comes back. That's called the off beat, the offbeat or the upbeat. The same thing is, uh, where I go back so the upbeat. If you're tapping your foot, it's gonna be when your foot is up, right and then your foot goes down. Up, down, up, down, up. So down beats up beats or off beats. Kind of the same. Same word, upbeat or off beat in triple meter. That's a little harder to get because our down beats get a little more skewed. So here we are in triple meter. Let's make this a little more clear for us. Here we have one down B and then to off beats. It's kind of weird that way. That's one of the things that makes triple meter. Ah, little harder. Here's one way to think about it. Uh, you don't want to dance to triple meter. At least Not the way we dance now You wanna you wanna Walzer? You wanna do like old worldly kind of dance in triple meter But you don't want to like, you know, club style dance The triple meter. So here, let's listen to this. This is down. Be offbeat, offbeat down Be offbeat, offbeat. So to me, if I nod my head to this where my head falls is I go all the way to the right on this first beat and then on these two off beats, I swing my head to the left. This is where lands on the left. And then I hear these two while my head is swinging back to the right and, um, it lands on the right and it starts swinging back. So left, right, left, right. And that's why I feel this, like head side to side thing makes sense. So hopefully that makes made sense with a little bit of double and triple meter and talking about groups, down beats and off beats or up beats, however you want to whatever lingo you want to use. So I'm gonna give you another worksheet here to look over this Practice this a little bit practice just identifying Do pull and triple meter. Um, and the next we're gonna talk about how we know Tate rhythms and what these dots were looking at. Tell us in terms of rhythm in a little more detail on the musical score. So we'll do that after the worksheet 22. 27 BasicRyhtmicElements: Okay, let's talk about how we know Tate rhythms. So, uh, remember again the word No, Tate, what I'm saying here is this is really how we write down and read. Rhythms are symbols for rhythms consist of kind of three elements and kind of only two elements in a way. So let me show you some. So all of these symbols up here, all of these things are different rhythms. Okay, so we just put some notes down here, make a bunch of seas, Okay, Here's to seize its Do this. Let's dio that, then. I just want, like, a good assortment of things here, so I can kind of explain how they work. Let's do that and then see something a little faster. Okay, This is good shows this kind of everything I need to see. So those three elements, we have a flag, a beam in a dot. OK, so this is a flag. This is a beam. This is another beam. And this is a dot right now, it looks like a dot So here's what those mean. Um, each one of those has a different rhythmic value. Now, the reason that I said there are kind of these three elements and in a way, only to. And that is because the flag and the beam can mean the same thing. For example, let me go over here to a new bar here, going to make one of these and it has a flag, right? If I make two of these in a row, those flags kind of reach out in shake hands and turn into a beam. Okay, so they still mean the same thing. It's just that when there are two of them in a row, we beam them together. When there's just one we learned with those three in a row and four in a row, we being them. But when there's just one like this, it's just a flag. So flags and beams tend to mean the same thing. So, uh, dots when there's a dot on a note, it means it gets a little longer duration than it normally would if it didn't have the dot . So this gets some amount of time. This gets a little more amount of time because there's a dot on it, okay, and then the more beams it has. So this has one beam this has two beams, right? The more being that has the faster it goes. Here's something with three beams. So here's three beams. Right, So that's gonna go really fast. So the more beans that has, the faster it goes. Now, let me look at, uh let's look at it. I have a couple of little graphics here. Um, let's look at this one. So is a global graphic I found just online. It's not very high rez, but I think you can see what's happening here. Um okay, So let's say this is the pulse of our piece of music. OK, so our pulses want. Uh uh uh uh OK, that's the pulse were in a Duplo meter. Eso we hear this? 12341234 kind of pulse. Okay, so for every four of those pulses, we could have this whole note. Ah, whole note looks like this. It's got nothing on it. It's empty. It's not filled in the note head the way those ones are. So these air filled in this one is is not filled in the inside of it. Has no flag or beam or not. This is called a whole note, it takes up four beats. So four of those pulses eyes gonna be one whole note. So now remember this as you go forward, we're going to start talking about fractions a little bit. So whole whole note. W h o l e. It is the whole bar. In this case, it's the whole bar. Um, we go back to my aged. Um, if we want to cut that in half, we end up with what are called half notes. We get two of those per bar. Okay, So 2/2 notes can fit in one bar or another way to say that is ah, whole note is the same amount of time as to half notes on yet another way to say that is each half note gets two beats. So let's look at that here. Here's 1/2 note it's got here, so I'm only going to be able to put two of these in this bar. If I try to put 1/3 1 it's not gonna let me do it, See, because two of those fit in a bar, right? If I try to put one over here, it's not gonna let me do it. because it says you have a rhythmic value taking up the entire bar. You can't add ah, half note into this bar because this one whole note takes up the whole bar because each bar here gets four beats, we'll talk about that more in just a second. But for now, just remember each one of these bars, which is a grouping of stuff. Oops. Between these two vertical lines right now, it gets four beats, okay? And ah, whole note equals four beats. So we could only have one of those in a bar these equal to beats So we can put two of those in a bar if we look at the next thing. Ah, quarter note equals one beat. So we can have four those in a bar now. Another way to think of that is that when it comes to that pulse you're feeling in any song , you probably are feeling 1/4 note. It's one of those gets were one beat. So we can dio You can put four of these in a bar. Okay, so let's mix and match those just a little bit. Let's hear what it sounds like. So if I did Ah, half note and then 2/4 notes. What does that rhythm sound like? Well, if this is our beat, let me do something you can hear. I'm gonna clap. I'm gonna clap the beat. The may the main pulse, which, coincidentally, is also going to be 1/4 note. So this is my quarter note, okay? And I'm gonna very sadly sing. Not sadly, because it's a sad rhythm, but sadly, because I am a sad singer, uh, saying this one bar that we're looking at here. Here we go. Um um um, that was it. Right, Because we have have 1/4 quarter, right? Let me just do this one far over and over. So have quarter quarter. Ah, quarter, quarter, quarter, quarter. So you see how that works. This gets two pulses. This first note, because it's 1/2 note. This gets one pulse. Okay, um, let's do another one. Let's do 1/4 note and then 1/2 note and then 1/4. Okay, so just looking at this one bar, so this far is going to be I'm gonna say court for quarterbacks, I need to say is something with one syllable who say court and whole for half. So court court for 1/4 note and half for half note. Here's my beat court, uh, of court. Right, So this one's gonna be court. Have court. Let me do it a couple times in a row. Just loop that one bar so you can see how it works. Court, have court, court, half court, court, court, court, uh, port. So you can hear me holding this note on beat three. Which happens here. Right? Let's look at Dylan's. We can go down even farther. We can keep splitting these notes, which is basically what we do is we go down. So we split our we took our whole note. We split it in half. We got half notes, split that in half. We get quarter notes. What happens when we split 1/4 note and 1/2? We get eighth notes. That's where we start to get the beam and the flag. If one that's just by itself. So each one of these get 1/2 of a beat. Okay, so those look like this says Oops. These are half note hurt. So let's look at how that just that measure sounds. How this is gonna sound is there's going to be one of them for every beat, plus one of them in between each beat. So if this is my tempo, it's going to be that. Got that, got that? Got that? So every time I clap, there's one there. And then in between the collapse, there's one there, too, because the beat is here, Here, here and here. We just had quarter notes here. That's where they would be. But we have eight notes, so there could be one in between. Right, Susan, combinations of, ah, quarter notes and eighth notes. Quarter note. Eighth note, quarter note, quarter. How about that? Let's look at just that bar. This is gonna be ah, Got that. Uh uh uh. That, uh uh, uh, That God, uh, that, uh, that so this gets a whole beat. This is an eighth note. So this is the downbeat. This is the beat. And and this is Ah, the eighth note in between. So we have two of them. So it's that that, uh, duck now, at this point, it would be important to introduce counting because when we do these kinds of things, what we ought to be doing is counting, and how we count is we count one. We count 1234 for the beats. And then we've got funny little syllables. We say for things that happened in between, so we would count here. We would count one here we would say to, because this is the second beat. Then here we would say the word and and then three four. So we would count this as 12 and 3412 and 3412 and 34 etcetera. This one has changed since I last did it cause I accidentally hit this note. But let's check it out. How we would count. This one is one and two and three and four, one and two and three and four, right? There's No. Four end. That would be right here, and it doesn't happen because that's quarter note. So from here on out, let's try counting instead. But let's look at a couple more divisions of the beat. We have one more that's common, and then 32nd notes get kind of uncommon, but if we split the aches note, we get 16th notes. They get 1/4 of a beat, so they have two beams. So here are some 16th notes case of these. The syllables we use for these just kind of the Norman creature is one. And then this is gonna be too, because where there's four of these for every beat. Now, this is gonna be one e and, uh so e and, uh, is how we say that this is just the way people been doing this for centuries. They say end. Uh uh, It's kind of goofy, but it works. One of the reasons that it works is that Ah, over here. This in this case, this is gonna be too, because this is beat to two and three, right? If you overlay that right here because this is beat to too, and and then beat three would be right here. So the and we would still say and accept. We have ah e in it. Uh, surrounding it. So one e and, uh, two e. And, uh, okay, let's combine some other stuff in here. So let's do this. Combined three different rhythms get now. One thing that's important is that when you're making these rhythms, it all has to add up to four beats for us. Um, because we're in this 44 time. We're going to talk more about that in a minute. But for now, just remember, there's only four beats in a measure, so these four notes add up to one beat. These four notes add upto one beats. That's two beats these 2/8 notes add upto one beat. So that's three. And this 1/4 no adds upto one beats. That's four. So this all equals out to four beats way that's gonna sound. I'm gonna count it and clap. So here is my beat. So down just a little bit. Okay, here we go. One e and A to E and a three and four money and A to E and a three and four one e end to E and a three and four one e End A to E and a three and four. So what I'm doing here is one e and, uh, two e and, uh, three. And before, remember what I said that the more beams they have, the faster they go, and that's how rhythms work. Now we could divide 16th notes into 32nd notes. We need eight of those to make one beat. Make 1/4 note, Right? Um, that's really fast. And you can go farther. Okay, So those are the basic elements of music now. We haven't talked about dots yet. Let's break to a new video and talk about dots there. 23. 28 Dots: Okay. So in addition to breaking each note in half by rhythmic values, so we have a whole note than 1/2. Note that 1/4 note. So each time we break it in half, we also have this dot thing, and the dot gets us a little complicated. Let's look at 1/4 note. No, let's look at 1/2 note. Okay, so here's 1/2 note. Oops, it's not 1/2 note. That's 1/2 dome. Okay, so here we have 1/2 note. I know what the half note means is how Maney beats two beats where 1/2 note always gets two beats and a whole note gets four beats, right? So what if we wanted a rhythm that was three beats long? Here's how we would make a rhythm. That's three beats long. We would add a doctor to ah, whole note. This is a little confusing. So what a dot means on any rhythm, what it means is, you take that rhythm, the number of beats in that rhythm, you divide it in half. So in this case that would be this gets to beats. So if we divide that in half, that's one beat. Okay, then you add that number onto the original value of the beat. So in other words, a dot always makes it longer. A dot makes the rhythm longer. So this was two beats. So we chop that and 1/2. We think it's one beat. We add that to it, and now it becomes three beats. So this equals three beats, right? I know that's confusing. Let me try another one here. Let's do 1/4 note. Okay, so I have 1/4 note. Quarter rockets. How many beats one? Be right. If I have a dotted quarter. Note. How many beats is that? It is 1.5 because it gets because we chop and 1/2 and we get an ace note. We get 1/2 a beat, and then we add that to the quarter note. So basically, this dot means add to that rhythm, half of it again, so it always gets longer. Let's dio one more we can We can add a dot to anything. So let's say in a snow, Okay, this is gonna get a little tricky. Now, an eighth note with a dot is what? Um, so Nathan gets how many beats gets 1/2 a beat. Okay, so 1/2 of a beat chopped in half is 1/16 note. Okay, so we add 1/16 note to an eighth note. How many beats is that? It's 3/4 of a beat. I know. It's weird. The easier way to think about this one. To think of it as 3/16 notes is what this is. Because this was to 16th notes so in a cenote could be described as to 16th notes. So plus a dot means now. 3/16 notes. It's weird. That's how doubt to work there. They're tricky there. They're hard to get used to. Um, this one. Don't try not to get confused by that one. Remember these two? So a dotted half note is going to be three beats. A dotted quarter note is gonna be a beat and 1/2. Right. So the dot always makes the rhythm longer, is what you need to remember 24. 29 Rests: Okay, let's talk about rests. Rests are these little symbols have been popping up, and I've been kind of ignoring for the last couple of lessons because they didn't quite one , uh, add them to the pile of things right just yet, but I think now is a good time. So this little squiggle here is called Arrest. This little goofy shape is called Arrest. These blocks here are called rests. These blocks are called Rests, a lot of different kinds of rests. Now what arrest does is it's a rhythmic amount that has no pitch. There is a symbol for every rhythm that we've talked about so far, So whole notes. Half notes. Quarter notes. Eighth notes. 16th notes, 32nd notes. They all have a correlating symbol that means do nothing for that amount of time breast. Just be quiet for that amount of time. Um, so this squiggle here, let's start with that one. That is 1/4 note. Rest and we know it's 1/4 note. Rest because check this out. Remember, it has to equal four beats. So this note is how Maney beats its three. Remember, because it's 1/2 note, which gets two beats plus a dot, which gets an additional beat. So this is three beats. So in order for this measure to be complete, we need 1/4 rest in there, right? Because not only can we put a maximum of four beats in a measure, but we actually have toe have four beats of stuff in a measure. We can't leave any beats off every measure a za long as we're in 44 time This symbol over here, which is coming up in the next video. We'll talk about those. As long as we're as long as that says four. Then there has to be four beats in that measure. There cannot be empty space. So here we have four beats. Let's look at let me just do really quick here. What if I did that? Okay. What we're saying here is we have 1/4 note that we're gonna play, and then we're gonna rest for 1/4 note, and then you have quarter note we're gonna play, and then we're gonna rest for 1/4. No. So if I wanted Teoh, count that along with the pulse. Here's how I do it. Here's my pulse. So this is basically the quarter note, remember? Here is I'm gonna do I'm gonna go one three. That's it, Right, Cause to this is beat to and it's arrest. So I'm not gonna say anything. This is before, so I'll do that a couple times. One, 31 three, one, three. Right. Let's get a lot more complicated with an eighth rest. So this right here is an eighth rest, and this this block is 1/2 rest. So let's look at this measure right here, okay? Because somehow this has to equal four whole beats, right? Four beats. So this note is how many beats? It's 1/4 note with a dot, So that means it is a beat and 1/2. Right, So a beat plus 1/8 note. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna add another eighth note to make that a total of two beats, right, cause this isn't beat and 1/2 and this is 1/2 a beat. So that's two beats, and then we're gonna put 1/2 rest in there to show another two beats arrest that gives us a total of four beats, right? Ah, whole rest. Is these things that are just filling up these empty measures because ah, measure just can't be empty. So these programs, I'll fill them with whole rests. Whole rest in half rest look really similar. It's just kind of where they're perched, right, So half rest purchase right on the middle line the line. That would be a B the pitch, be it purchase right there. The whole rest purchase above the line, right. It sits on top of it on this one sits below. Think of this one is sitting in This one is hanging so the whole rest hangs as they say Whole rest is hanging from the line The half rest is sitting on the line 1/16 note rest and the faster rhythms are all variations of the eighth note rest. So if I look at 1/16 note, rest out. There we go. So here is 1/16 note Rest. It's just like an eighth note. Rest with an extra little comma thing coming off of it. Right. This has to chose me as 1/16 note. Rest my 32nd. Don't rest is gonna have three of those, right? So this measure is kind of goofy knocks I have all these rest bunched up together. Right? Um, what I could do is I could consolidate these two into 1/8 note and then so I'd have an eighth note here, and then I could consolidate these all three of these now into 1/4 note. Right, cause this is an eighth note together, and then this is an eighth note. So that all equals 1/4 note then And then I could take. So then I'd have 1/4 note rest, and then I could take that quarter. No. And that quarter note. Consolidate them into 1/2 note. Rest. Let me get right back to where we are. Let's do one more of them. Let's do kind of a weird one with 1/8 rests. Let's go like this. So here's how I'm gonna count this one bar here. So I have one that's gonna be the and check so one to three. And this is before, so I don't have a beat four, but I haven't. And of four. So I'm gonna count. Starting right here should be three. And and right, because there's no beat for so with tempo. 123 and and one, 23 and and one to free and and one Teoh three. And and one thing that's tricky about these kind of rhythms is that you don't easily see that this note is right up against this note. Right? If you're going to repeat this bar over and over, um, which Let me show you what that looks like. I'm gonna duplicate that bar. Okay, so here's the same bar twice. So these notes are right next to each other, because that's three and and then before and then And one right, So these are right close to each other. We don't beam them together, even though it's 2/8 notes side by side. We don't actually being them together, because in this case, because there's a bar line in between bar lines separates all us. We leave those as having flags. So that's how rests work. Remember that there is a symbol for every rhythmic value. Um, that is arrest version of it. And also remember that there has to be the whole measure. Haas, to be full, further rhythm to make sense. Ah, we can't just have numbers that are rhythms that don't add up to four in our case. No, I've been talking about this. Everything has to be in groups of four. And that's not always true. That's true for us because of this symbol right here. So let's move on to talking about time signatures, which is what we have right here. Um, and look at a case where maybe things don't add up before they add up to a different number . 25. 30 TimeSignatures: Okay, let's talk about time signatures, also known as meter signatures. So when you see this written down, you might see it referred to as a meter signature or a time signature. That is this symbol here. Now, the symbol is always gonna be the same and that it's always gonna be two numbers, a number stacked on top of another number. Now, what this is telling us is two different things, right? Each number tells us something different. The top number always tells us how many beats in a measure. So we've been talking about every measure. Needs to get four beats, right? That's what constitutes a measure is four beats of stuff. So that is what's telling us this number of here, right? Um, I can change it. Let's do this. Okay, now we're in the meter of 34 Now, each bar needs to have three beats worth of stuff, right? So if I make quarter notes, I can now only put three in a measure, right? It's not gonna let me put any more in there. Now, you know, I So I have three beats per measure now because I am in 34 time. I was in 44 time. I could put four. If I was in 54 time, I could have 512345 So that top number tells us how many beats in a measure. Right? The bottom number? The little trickier. The bottom number tells us how we define the beat. It tells us what is the beat. So So what we're saying up here is there are five beats in a measure, right? That's easy enough down here were saying, What kind of note is a beat? And in this case, it's a four. That means quarter note. So 5/4 notes is what makes up a measure. 5/4 notes over here. 3/4 notes make up a beat about this one. 2/4 notes make up a measure. A second ago, I just said 5/4 make up a beat. That was wrong. Make up a measure is what I'm saying here. So to in this case, 24 2/4 notes make up one beat. OK, now, let's get a little weirder here. 38 Let me clean some of this stuff up. Okay, 38 What is that telling us? That means 3/8 Notes. Make up one beat. So if I go to eighth notes here, try to put some in this bar. I can put three of them in a bar, and that's it. So in this meter signature or this time signature, we can make 3/8 notes in one bar Right now, Most of the time, your bottom number here is gonna be a four or an eight. Um, you can have meter signatures that are different that don't have a foreign aid, but it's pretty rare. It's quite where so and I would venture to say, most of the time you're actually going to be having a four in the bottom. Um, but eight is coming to Let's try this. One 98 9/8 notes per bar says when we get into those compound meters and triple meters and this, you're gonna feel 123123123 kind of like swaying your head side to side. This is a side to side kind of meter, so you have to count this a little differently because there's no in between beat. There's no one and two and right, because what you typically do here when you count these things is this would be one, too, so you can't won t. Todd to Tita. Three. Tita Toe one. Tito to Tito three. Tita 40 etcetera. But there will be No. Four Tita and this one you got one, Tito to Tito. Three. Tito one. Teoh to Tito three. Tita. So that's what kind of feel like it's, ah three based pattern because you have three groups of 3/8 notes. Think it's weird. Don't worry about that one too much. Let's go back to a little more normal one, 64 So 6/4 notes. So let's see what we've got here by accident, the way it just converted it. So this is 1/4 notes. That's 2/8 notes, right? That's one. That's another one. That's too. That's another one. That's three. That's another one. That's four. And then we have ah, half of a beat. And then ah, half rest out here. So those to make one beat that's five. And then 1/4 note That makes six. That's 64 So the thing to remember about time signatures The top number tells us how many beats in the measure. The bottom number tells us what is the beat. So when you see 64 all you have to do is think 6/4 notes per measure. You see 68 you think 6/8 notes per measure. Cool. So those air time signatures 26. 31 Ties: Okay. Last thing on the basics of reading rhythms is we have to talk about tied notes. Um, now what that means is a. Well, the easiest use of a tide note is a note like this. Let's say we want we're in 44 time and we want to note that lasts six beats. Six whole beats, right? That's a long time. But that's OK. I can't do that right, because I can only put four beats in a measure so six beats would be. Here's four beats and here's two beats. That's six beats, but that's not I don't have ah, rhythm. That shows me six beats. What I have is a rhythm that shows me four beats and then two beats. So I'm actually gonna play four. Beats them to bees. If I want this to sound like one long note that lasts for six beats, I need some kind of trick that tells me to connect these two notes and continue this note into that note and carry it over the bar line. Right, And we have such a trick. It's called a tide note. When you see this, what it means is that you play this note and you hold it all the way for the full duration of this. No, you do not replay the note here. You only play these notes once. So this is gonna last for six whole beats, six beats. And again, the most important thing about tied notes is that you do not play this note again. You just continues sustaining that note. Take all the way through this one. Let's try it on a smaller division of the beat. Um, What if we did had those together? Okay, what do we got here? Now we have the downbeat here, Beat one. We're not gonna play because it's carried over from the previous beat. We're gonna play the end of one, which is this. Ah, we're not going to hear be too, because we're going to carry it over. So this these 2/8 notes here, we're gonna hear 1/4 note, but we would do this if we didn't want to use 1/4 note for some reason. And we wanted to instead put 2/8 notes tied together. There are good reasons why you might want to do that in cases. So I'm gonna play these two whole bars here. Okay, here's my tempo. Okay, here we go. Ah, and and three. Right. So one goes all the way from here to here, and then we hear and and then two is still being hand held, and then we hear, and because we didn't hear b three or B two here, But we hear the and again and then we hear beat three. So that's what tied notes do They basically lock rhythms together to extend them out to be longer. So you take any two rhythms time together and you have one long rhythm is what you do. Okay. This has been a lot to handle in this lesson. I know it's a lot of stuff Teoh latch onto its a lot to learn. Remember, it's just like any language that you might learn. You gotta practice, um, re watch these videos over and over as many times as you can. I'm going to be another worksheet to practice on in the next little chunk here. Um, so please dive into that and re watch as you need to as you want to, and then we'll be moving on. All right? Now, if we go 27. 32 Langagues: Okay, One last thing I want to talk about about these rhythms that I almost forgot, but I think is important because I've learned from doing these classes for a while. Now that, you know, we have I have students from all over the world. Um, and there is some confusion sometimes about what we call these rhythms. So I have this chart up here that I just found. This is a great little chart that tells me exactly what I wanted to talk to you about. Um, Whole notes, half notes, quarter note, eighth note. Now, I've been using obviously these American terms because I am American. Um, whole note. Half no quarter note. Eighth note. Now there's what we call. I mean, like everything. There are different words for in different languages, right for these things, However, these can be particularly confusing because, um, there there is this semi breathe Cratchit and Cueva er thing that happens in English. Most music terms the American and the English have the same terms, but not with these things. Ah, the Americans are, I think, are the only ones that use this whole half quarter eighth system. So I wanted to point that out for you. In case you are, um, in somewhere outside of the United States near. Like, I've never heard these terms before. All quarter. Note. Eighth note. I want you to not be going around talking to your friends about quarter No, an eighth note. When they're expecting you to be talking about crotch, it's and quivers. So I guess I'm not going to go through all the different languages. But please look this up. Make sure that you're using the appropriate term for your local language in English. We get to Crockett, quiver. And then I think 1/16 note is a semi quiver. And a 32nd note, I believe, is a semi Demi quiver. See these air? Very funny terms. Funny sounding terms to me. Um, but I'm sure eighth notes and 16th note are very funny sounding terms to Ah, any English fellas? Um okay. And then another thing I wanted to point out that's not on. This is that the names of notes also have a very language specific thing. And this one is even more kind of American centric. The way I've been explaining things. So I really want to make sure we're all insane patriot when I make notes. I've been calling these notes by their letter name. C D E F. That's keep going, G a be See. We'll go above the staff there. That's just fine. And those are in fact, what the names of the notes are. Um, in the American system, If you're not in the United States, you might have different terms for these and in fact, in different languages. Almost all of them go by a different system entirely, and the system that they go by is not using letters. They use these kind of short little one syllable words called selfish. We use selfish also, but we use it for a slightly different purpose. So if you are outside of the us, the names of the notes are dough. Is this one Ray me far, So la ti and dough, so does window at the beginning. So C is dough. Um, we'll probably talk about soul fetch more later, but, um, I just want that to be clear. I am going to stick to using the letter names just because if I try to use so fetish, I'll probably screw it up because That's just not the language. I know. Um, so again, just to clarify in the US, we use letter names in some other places. They use last letter names in many other countries, yet they use soul fetch. So door Amy Fassel at Edo. I'm not aware off top my head of any other system. I think a lot of European languages use either selfish or localized variations of selfish. I'm not sure how. I really have no idea how many of the Asian languages call name the notes. I should learn that. But I don't. Okay, so just a quick note about your local things I would ask around if you're confused about terms and you're outside of the U. S. If you're in the US, the terms that I use are correct for outside of the U. S. Find out what your ah ask a friend what's what do we call this? This symbol here. And if they say, if they say far and it's ah, quiver or whatever it was, um then then you know. But to me, that is an F. And it is 1/4 go call 28. 34 Dynamics&Repeats: Okay, so let's talk about putting this all together. Now. What I want to do in this section is just give you. I want to walk through a couple of pieces and we're just gonna look at the pieces of music and walk through what we're seeing. Okay? And then I want Teoh give you some tools to practice. So here is this first piece. I think we looked at this at the very start of the class. Let's just hear it again. So I'm in. Muse, score. This is one of this just Thea publicly available ones that somebody wrote. Probably this person and posted eso Let's have a listen. We're gonna hit play, and then here we go. Okay. There are a number of symbols in here that we haven't seen yet, so I want to talk about those primarily up till now, we've talked about notes and rhythms, but let's talk about a couple other things that we see in here. First of all, um, are the most obvious thing you may have noticed is that when we started playing this music , it started here and it went to here and then jumped back, right. This is why he was two little dots right here. These two dots and this nice, thick double line, right? That is called a repeat. And what that means is it means repeat back to basically the opposite of this symbol, which is right there. All right, we have the thick double line and in the two dots, facing the other way. So these two things kind of encapsulate this piece of music. So what that means is play from here to here and then jump back to here. Okay, That's a repeat symbol. We just call it a repeat. Now, there's a slightly more complicated and repeat on this because we see this one and two. What that means is that we're going to start the peace. So here's a very beginning, right. We start here, we play all the way to here. We hit this repeat right Then we jump back, and then we play all the way to here. And instead of playing this bar on the second time, we played this bar and then we keep going, right, So this means first ending second ending. So we play from beginning to to here, and then we'll play the first ending. Then we go back when we played a here, Skip this bar, play the second ending, and then we continue on through the rest of the peace that to repeat with two different endings. Right? We also see here this r a l l And we see that a couple times actually, throughout this piece, that's short for rollin Tando, which is a fancy way, actually Go back over here. They give us the whole word. Uhm means the same thing. Rollin Tando kind of means like, uh, even slow down basically, even slow down leading into the original tempo Kind of. It's like a dramatic slowdown. Um, which is and then we have that here. Ah, tempo is the way we pronounce that Ah, tempo means the tempo of the beginning The tempo where you were before the rollin Tendo So that's the speed on the speed Here is a dodgy Oh, so nice and slow So we have here we have a rollin time Don't bring a slow down And then jump back to here To the Addazio The original tempo Here we have a role in Tando on those last couple beats. We're going to slow down and then back to the original tempo. Right here we have a dynamic marking now. I don't think we've talked about dynamic markings yet. That means volume. That means how loud we should play this. So there are you. See if I can pull those up here. Here we go. Here's a list of common dynamic markings. Pay attention to these 1st 2 lines. This is quiet. It's getting louder as we go to the right. Louder yet and loudest. Thes air kind of specialized one ones. These 1st 2 lines, or what we're really pay attention to, so p means piano key means quiet. Two peas, beans. Really quiet. Three Peens means means really, really, really quiet. MP means mezzo piano. Mezzo means kind of write a means immune. Zia Kinda so quiet. You're kind of quiet, a little louder is and quiet. Mezzo forte. So F means Forte, which means loud mezzo forte. It means kind of loud, so this mezzo business here is a little confusing. It could be backwards. Mezzo piano is louder than piano, but mezzo Forte is quieter than forte. That's just weird. It's weird. That's why I like to use the word Kind of so quiet, kind of quiet, kind of loud and then loud. This is the way it works. So Forte is loud to efs. Fortissimo is the way we pronounce that means really loud. Three efs 40 cc mo Uh means really, really loud means a lot as you can play. So we're marked here at mezzo piano, so, you know, kind of quiet. Not really quiet, but kind of quiet down here. We have a mezzo forte. So they want you to get louder at all of these terms. These dynamic terms for volume. You can think of them as kind of relative. So we start off, you know, kind of quiet, and then we get louder. That's kind of the easiest way to think about it here. If you go down here, we get to a foretaste. We get louder yet. Do we get any louder? Mezzo forte. So we get a little quieter then up to Forte Louder again. And that goes all the way to the end. So we end kind of loud Other symbols Do we have another well in Tando tempo But so piano rollin tano is gay. Another repeat. So let's look at this. Repeat. So remember, this is going to mean go back to the one. That's kind of encapsulating it. So we have to go backwards in our piece and it takes us to hear right. It does not mean go all the way back to the beginning. There's gonna be another one. So again we have a first ending, and then a repeat down to here, and then we're gonna go back the second time. We're gonna skip the first ending. And then we played the second ending and we continue forward, right? And then we get to you the tempo again. Forte Another rollin Tando on the end. Couple more. Ah, Things we've seen in here about this thing. See that there's a couple of them. Here's one that's backwards of that. Here's another one. Another backwards one that is a crescendo. This particular one is a crescendo. Crescendo means get louder. So we're at Mezzo Forte here. So what? This thing we sometimes call this a hairpin kind of looks like a hairpin. What this is telling us to do is gradually, over the course of this one bar, get louder up to 40 right? So play louder and louder and louder until you get to Forte of this one. Down here is the opposite. We call this a day crescendo Day crescendo means get quieter. So here were at Forte because the forte hangs around until we get another dynamic marking. And it's going to say get quieter and quieter and quieter over these measures. Now, we technically should have a dynamic marking here to tell us how quiet we're getting. But they left it off. That's okay. So down here we have another one. We have a day crescendo down to mezzo piano crescendo up to Forte, right? That's it does mean now. We also have kind of smaller versions of that in these little things around here, you see these all over the place. These are accented notes. They mean just play those a little louder than all the other notes around it. Right? That's all those mean, So I just kind of put a little extra emphasis on those notes. Um, the last symbol that I see that we haven't really talked about is a slur. That's these long, beautiful lines here. Here's a shorter one is in between one it kind of connected notes together. And what that means is we call that a slur on what that means is we We play those notes, we kind of try to string those notes together as if they were not individual notes like here. We might not want this to be dot but instead we wanted to be dot at, uh, right, um, we want those to kind of be played expressively smooshed together without that doesn't mean playing faster or slower. It just means make them feel like one phrase rather than individual notes. So it's an expressive marking is what we call that. It means I outlines the expressiveness of the line. We use them to show lines like here. The composer wants this to sound like one line from this G up to this e. And it goes up and down throughout it. But what they want you to hear is this that out, out, out, out, out at, uh, that, uh, as one kind of phrase, it's very hard to interpret these, but are to explain, you know how to interpret them. But it means they're slurred together and strung together as one thing. Okay, so a lot of new symbols in this in this piece, so review those I know that was a lot to take in, but let's check out another one and see what we find in in that. 29. 35 AccidentalBehavior: Okay. I have another piece here. Elegy for cello and piano. It's just another one that I found on the Meuse score website. As people have made and posted and allow you to use for things with this one, I want to point out, um, special behaviors of accidental now, accidentally, if you remember, Are these things appear? Sharps and flats, right? Those are accidental. Now there are two things that we have not talked about yet regarding those that I think are quite important. We zoom in here, let's look at right Here is a good example. We haven't looked at that little symbol yet. That symbol means natural. So that means, uh, without a sharp or flat on it. Now, why would we need that symbol? Right? Cause doesn't having nothing on the note. I mean that as well. So this is the pitch, See? Ah, it's a C because we're in bass clef here, so we have to keep that in mind. When we look at this, we're in base class because the cello part So that is a C. So if we had nothing here that would be a C without anything on it, we would call that a C natural. Um but we put this natural sign on it here. Why doesn't that seem redundant? The answer is yes, it is redundant. This is called in this case. This is called a courtesy accidental. That means is just before it we had a C sharp right. And so to avoid confusion, we put a natural on it just so we can remind the performer a were on a c sharp. Now we're honesty natural. It's a courtesy. Accidental. So you see those Sometimes now when a natural is on something, that doesn't mean it's always a courtesy. Sometimes you have to have naturals, right? Let's look at an example right here. Could be a good example. Now, here's the trick. The reason we might need natural sometimes is because accidental Zell's hold through for an entire measure. That's the rule. So what that means is so this is trouble, cleft. Now we're looking at the top with the piano part, so this is a D sharp, right? What note is this? This is also a D sharp, because once you put an accidental on a note that accidental stays on that note for the rest of the measure. Right? So this bar line here is the end of the measures, So that kind of wipes out the accidental right? So this is a D sharp, even though it doesn't have the symbol on it. It had that symbol somewhere else in the measure. So that symbol stays on it. Okay, this is really tricky. Teoh get used to You have to just remember when you play a d sharp in this case, any other D's that happened after that are going to be sharp, no matter what octave there in. That's the tricky part. So, um, what about right here? Here's the same situation we had before. We have a c sharp and then there's a bar line and then we have a c right? There's no accidental on here. Sharp, flat or natural. So what? No, it actually is that Well, there was a bar line in between. So it's natural. This is a scene natural. We could have put the natural symbol on it as a courtesy, but we don't have to, um, in this case, it would have been good to put it on there in the same way that they put it on a peer to exact same situation. Um, but the composer chose not to this time, and that's fine. They don't have to. Um, the performer in this case is more likely to play a wrong note because they don't have that accidental in this case. But, you know, it's a choice. If it's a good performer, they're not gonna play it wrong. Ah, let's see a case where we might have a natural. Okay, let's look right here. Here is another case where we have these d sharps. All of these are sharp. These are all d sharps until here. And then we need to use the symbol again. We need to say this is a d Sharp, because this bar line kind of erased the sharp from our memory. So now we put a sharp on it again. And now all of these air de sharps as well, because the sharp holds through all the way. What if up here, we didn't want we wanted? Let's say we wanted this one to be a d natural, you would have to put a natural on it like that. That means natural. In fact, let's do that a slightly different way. Let's put it on this note just to prove a point. Okay, so we have d sharp here. This note also sharp because a sharp came before it. It's gonna be sharp. This note d natural because it has a natural on it. That symbol shuts off that sharp. So now all future D's in this bar are going to be natural. Unless they have a sharp on it. This one goes back to D Sharp. Let's put a natural on that. So now we don't really need that natural symbol there. And, um, you score. I don't know how to get rid of it. Libya. So this is the natural, because this symbol, this natural symbol, has shut off the sharp. And so this is a D natural. That means this woman is also d natural, right? If this one was gonna be d sharp, it needs to have a sharp owning the sharp symbol on it. Same thing. So here we're back to d sharp and all of these are going to be de sharps go. So it's a little confusing to get the natural and the sharp. Let's look down here. Here's a D natural right at the start of the bar line. There have been no de sharps prior to it. So why did they put a natural right there? Very good reason. The reason they put a natural right there is they don't have Teoh again. This is a courtesy. Accidental. Ah, they didn't have to put a natural on that. But for most of this p piece, you've been playing d sharps. So if you were playing this on the piano, this part, you might be inclined to play a d sharp. Right? So what they're saying here is no, really I mean, d natural. Um, I'm not. I didn't forget to leave an accidental here. That's what that means There until those air courtesy. Accidental but not always is a natural a courtesy. Accidental. In the case of here, it is not a courtesy. This is required if you want any natural there. Good. Let's see what other ah symbols are in this. I see one symbol we haven't talked about yet. Here's one where they just wrote Crescendo. Now we talked about crescendos in the last video being the hairpin thing that gets bigger. Sometimes you can just write crescendo if you want. Here's a simple I was looking for. This is called A for Mata. It basically means pause. Stop here. Hold on to that chord or note or whatever. Hold on, take a breath and then move on when you're ready. It's called a for Mata. It's a dramatic pause. Basically, Let's hear this piece since we've been staring at it. 30. 36 Form: okay, Have a nice little piece by Mozart here. There are a few things in here that I want to point out that we haven't seen yet. We've got a new rhythm that we haven't seen. You've got a new symbol in this little tick here, and we've got a new kind of a new repeat thing that we haven't seen before. Let's start with the repeat thing. This is a little interesting of a piece. It's just four lines, but it's quite long. So one of the advantages of using these repeat systems is that, uh, the pieces much longer than it looks. But it really I mean, in the old days, the reason we did this because the same paper, uh, when we were writing this all out by hand before we had computers, we didn't have to write it out as much, and we didn't waste is much paper. That's still a good reason to do it. So let's walk through how this piece works. Now we're in 34 right? So that means we need 3/4 notes to make up one measure, just like right here. 123 But what about this? This is to eighth notes. Right to eighth notes equals 1/4 note, and it's it's own little bar right there. How can that be? That's because this is called a pickup measure. It means that it's kind of happening before the peace even starts. This is going to kind of feel like the downbeat, even though it doesn't have to, but in this case, it is. So it's gonna go. Dot, dot, dot Uh huh. Uh huh. Dad at, uh uh, uh uh uh. So this gets its own little one beat. Maybe you might see these being two beats. Um, if it was three beats, it wouldn't be a pickup measure at all, because it would be a full measure. Now, we can tell also that it's a pickup measure, because if we jump to the end of the phrase, we have to have a bar that makes up for it. Right? So this is only two beats. This is one beat. So this plus this equals a full bar. And this is gonna be important because what's gonna happen is we're gonna start the piece right here. We're gonna play till the end of this line. Then here's a repeat symbol, right? We're gonna go back to the beginning. And if we're going to do that, we need this to be a full bar. So this plus this is going to be a full bar when we repeat. Okay, so those are called pickup measures. We also sometimes, if you want a fancy term for that, you can call it an Anna Crucis. Kind of a fun word. Um, but just the kind of plain old pedestrian word for it is a pickup measure. So that being said now we have a bunch of those all over the place. We have one here in there, right? We have one. At the beginning of basically every phrase, we have this pick up my bar of one beat and then a to beat phrase that the er to beat bar at the end of the phrase. So that happens on every line here. Now, um, let's look at the repeats. There's an interesting repeat phenomenon here that we haven't looked at. And that's that we have a repeat, and it jumps back to no repeat, right. See how? Here we have the repeats sandwich together, and that means this goes back to here. But why isn't there one here if there's one here, right? Don't we need one there? The answer is we don't. If we have a repeat and no other repeat on the other end of it, it means go back to the beginning. Think about if there was this symbol, this repeat symbol right here in front of the time signature. It look a little awkward, so we just leave it off the repeat symbol, You go back till you find another repeat symbol. Basically, if you don't find one, you go back to the beginning. So in this case, the repeat goes all the way back to the beginning. So if we were gonna play this, we will go. We would start here. We play to you. Here, let me go back to here. Then we played it here. Now that first and second ending thing we saw in the previous peace. We don't have that here. So we would play the full thing all the way to here. And then we move on to there. We play this all the way to here them. And then there's a repeat. So we jump back to here when we play that all the way through to hear. Now we see this little symbol here. Fine. We actually pronounce that Feen A. I believe it's Italian. Um, Feeney, let's just hold on to that for a second. File that away. We don't need it right now, but when we're playing this, we would take note of where that word happens, because we're gonna need it in a minute. So we just played this line for the second time. We get to the end, and then we go on to the third Life. You play from here to here, see another repeat. It would take us back to here, and then we go through again to here. Then we go down to the next line from here all the way to here, and then her repeat. I mean, go back and then we get all the way to hear. Now, this is not the end of the piece. I mean, it's the end of the written music, but it's not the end of the piece because we have this symbol here. Now this symbol and this symbol work together. D c all fina. Ah, sometimes we'll just see d. C written here, but D c Alfie nee, What that means is go back to the beginning and play until the word Feeney. Basically, um, actually, literally, That's what it means. D c l Phoenix. Go back to the beginning and play until the the were you see the word Phoenix. So when we see that and we're here, we play this the second time we're gonna jump all the way back up to the beginning. We're gonna start it here. We're gonna play Teoh here now when you dio a d c Alfie in a typically although you don't have Teoh all the time. But typically you skip the repeats when you're doing a d. C. So we would get to hear the first time you would skip that repeat because we're in the d. C. We would go to here here, and then we would not repeat. This is the end of the piece. Complicated, isn't it? Sometimes these pieces with all these repeats and DCs and things like that, they can really be ah, road map of complicated road map of how to get around. Um, so it's just one element of music. It's It's away. We you know we save paper. We saved time. Um, it's a way to make a nice long piece out of just four simple lines and and you get used to it before we hear this piece and we see all that. There's one other symbol I want to point out, and that's this little thing here. It's kind of like a little comma just hanging out right there all over the place. This is a piece for solo flute. This is solo flute. So what do flutists have to do that piano players and string players don't have to do, although they have to do it, but it doesn't interrupt their performing. That is brief. This is a breath mark. This means cut this note. Ah, hair short and take a breath if you have to. Now the computer, obviously when we play it back, doesn't need to take breaths. So the computer is not going to do anything special here, but for a human playing this, they need to take breaths. So this is the composer saying, if you need a breath, this is where I would prefer you take them rather than interrupting the phrase at another point. Basically the computer is gonna ignore that we sometimes right in breath marks like that for wind instruments, brass instruments, singers, things that needed Teoh, stop and breathe. Pianists can breathe without stopping because they don't need their lungs to play their instruments. Percussion, Same thing, guitar. We don't right breath marks in. We just breathe when we need to for those instruments. Okay, so let's listen to this and pay special attention to the form. Now. The forum, I don't think is a term I've used before, but what that means is the order of everything that I just went through. So we go from here, and then we repeat and then we go from here and we repeat than the FINA in the d. C L Fiona and how all that works. Collectively, we call that form. Let's keep an eye on that while we listen to this 31. 38 PlacesToFindScoresOnline: All right, so now we've gotten to the point where I think, you know, um well, we've gone over everything that you need to know in order to read the basics of a score. There's a couple more things, and we'll encounter those as we approach them in the future. Ah, theory classes that I'm gonna be making. So remember, this class is designed to be a whole sequence of classes. Very comprehensive. Not just a short little um, you know how to read music class. This is part of a bigger picture here. So, um, what I want you to do now is practice. This is very important. So So we've gone over everything so rewatch as much as you need to understand the symbols. Next, I'm going to give you some tools to practice with. So take some time, go through these. You'll be doing these very slow, um, as you get started. And that's perfectly OK. It's better to practice slow and correctly, then fast and incorrectly. So go nice and slow. Big sure that you're right. Um, when you do these so the first tool I want to give you for practicing is a place where you can find a whole bunch of scores. Now I'm going to give you that the end of this class, and shortly I'm going to give you just a whole bunch of pdf's that you can download. Um, probably 10 or so exactly sure yet, but probably about 10 that you can download. Just cheat music that you can use and practice with. But if you want to find anything on your own, I thought this would be a good moment to point you to one particular website. This is a website called I am slp dot org's that I am s l p dot org's I don't know. That stands for I was just trying to figure that out. Um, it's probably I was looking at his page. I don't really see it anywhere, but it's probably Internet music Score library project place. Anyway, this place has a ton like a ridiculous amount of scores. Now, fair warning. The copyright on the scores that it's posting on this website may or may not be Ah. Well, let me put it this way. Um, this This might be breaking some copyright laws. This website, I'm not sure. I'm not sure where they get their stuff. What license agreements. They have to upload it and allow you to download it. I don't know. So use this website at your own peril. Um, but if I go here to composers, you know there's tons. Let's see. Let's dio I don't know be Oh, Bach and Beethoven. That was great. So let's look at some Bach, shall we? So there are a lot of box. The most famous one is Johann Sebastian. There he is. Okay, lets see how Maney Bach works. We've got 714. Ah, it's a lot. Eso Let's look at something. Flute. Sonata in E flat, Major. Okay, now we have recordings. Sheet music, complete score. Let's take a look. Weaken, Download this. There's just in insane amount of music here. So if you're looking for something just to play through to practice with just to read the notes to yourself, um, go to this website, grab some P d efs and just read through him. You know, uh, we're gonna talk about that in the next video. About tips for how I would go about practicing reading these things. Ah, so let's jump over to that now. So moving on. Just remember this website. I am slp dot org's. There's an insane amount of AH music scores that you can download as pdf's from that website. 32. 39 TipsForPracticingNotesAndRhythms: Okay, let's talk about how you can practice these things. No, really, there's two things that take practice that I think you should really focus up. One is reading notes. That's probably the hardest one to get comfortable doing. And the other one is reading rhythms, which is Ah, I shouldn't have said in reading notes. Is the hardest one to do. Reading getting used to reading rhythms could be quite difficult as well. So let's talk about reading rhythms first. A great way to do this is to use muse, score and just clap or count the rhythms. Ignore the pitches. No, we're just gonna practice rhythms here. So ignore the notes and just say, Okay, how does this line go? Think about it. So we're gonna go eso it's er clap. I'll just do this top line for us. The, uh, that Ah, the, uh that, uh uh uh the, uh ah ah ah, that. Ah. So I just saying it on a die. That's fine. That's perfectly useful. Um, so I sang through all this. I could count it so it would be 1 to 34 is here 1 to 3 for ah 123 for one to a three. Right? So counting is also useful. So I think what I'm basically saying here is I think it's valuable to separate pitches from rhythms while you're learning this stuff. Um, focus on one or the other for a practice session, so spend, you know, half hour. Um, just looking at music. Whatever you can get your hands on. You know, look at here's another line down here. Just count your way through it. Try to sing it, try to clap it and you know, when you sing it, don't I? Singing is a weird term like you could probably hear there that I'm like The world's were singer but I was singing it and I was kind of following the shape of the notes. I wasn't worrying about pitches, but like here, when it jumped up by my voice kind of went up, you know, it doesn't really matter. Um, so you don't even have to do that at all. So just sing the rhythms and count the rhythms, spend a lot of time just go through any music and do it so just jumped at any random spots of anything. Say Okay, Here's one. Let's go through it and then you can use Muse score to play it back and verify that you did it right. So do it a couple times say OK. Yep, I got it. Listen to music or make sure that it's playing it right and, um, correct. Figure out what went wrong if it's not playing it the way you say it. So, um, you score can be or really any notation program, but in this case, you score can be really helpful for for training us on how to read those rhythms. All right, because you score is gonna play it back correctly. It's good at rhythms me scores. Got a rhythm? Okay, now let's talk about pitches. You can essentially do the same thing with pitches. Pick a spot. Be sure you watch the clef. Remember, that's important. So this is a little piece for cello and piano, and cello is written. That means cello. Cello is written in bass clef, so just keep things simple. Let's focus. Let's look at trouble Cuff. For now. Uh, I would if I was you. Take my advice here. Unless you're trying Teoh, learn an instrument that is most often written in bass clef. Just stick to trouble club for now. Don't worry about bass clef master Trouble clef and then go back and work on base class if you if you really want to. Um but if you know trouble, glass Ah, there are some tricks to learning based class that make a little bit easier. So once you have trouble cleft mastered, you can kind of figure out based class quickly, so I would focus on trouble. Okay, so I'm gonna get some sheet music. I'm just gonna say OK, c e c e c e f c e f etcetera. I'm just gonna name the notes as I go, right? Remember what I said before? Slow and steady is better than fast and sloppy. So if you get to, you know, let's say you get to hear you don't know what that notice. That's okay. Say OK, I don't know what that note is, but I know this one is an E. For example, what do we know? That means this must be an effort above it. But above that must be a G and therefore this must be in a cool A. Therefore, this note must also be in a so a This one is down one from that. So that's probably a G right? This is a D sharp. Remember, we pronounce the note than the accidental so D sharp. This is also a d sharp. Don't forget about that rule, So just go through and saying one by one. Now, what I see a lot of people do when they're learning to read notes is right the names of the notes in on their music So they might print out the page and then just go through and right in the note names by everything. You what? I mean, just, like pencil him in just right. You know, BBB no d natural g sharp and just write them in here. I'm actually not a big fan of that, but if that works for you, do it. Um, if you think that's gonna get you to the place where you can just look at these notes and know that that's a GI that's in a no, that's a e whatever. Then, by all means, do it. You know how you learn better than I do. But for me, when I wrote notes in that only taught me really to how to write notes in really well. What was more useful to me was to figure it out for every single note and just be able to say it and know that I'm right. It takes some practice, but as I go through, if I write it in, then I just rely on writing an in. And I see a lot of people get really good at writing the notes in. But that doesn't really help you a lot when it comes to really reading music. So if you think writing notes in is gonna help you, then by all means do it. But be aware that that you could be just training yourself to write notes and really well, sometimes the harder way to do it, which is just to look at it and say it and then figure it out every single time. Sometimes, for people like me, that's the better way to get the most comfortable with reading notes. So just be aware of that, Um, and again, you know how you learn better than anyone else. So practice the way you need to practice. Cool. So please do that. Please practice this stuff. This is this is hard stuff. And as we get into the next class, we're gonna need to know basically how notes work. Because we're gonna start putting together notes and combinations to make chords and scales and songs and all kinds of good stuff. Cool. So moving on, I am going Teoh give you a whole bunch of pdf's in the next Ah, lesson things you can practice with. So these air just ones that I thought would be good for you to use. And but don't forget. If you want to find more, go to that. I am slp place. Go to your local music store. You buy stuff. Um, anything you can get your hands on for notes. Find it, use it, read through it, clap out the rhythms, say the names of the notes. Everything helps that way. All right, off we go on, do Cem. About a whole bunch of pdf files. 33. 41 thanksbye: Okay, that was it. We are done with the first part of this big, big music theory classes. Remember, this is designed to be a comprehensive music theory class. I'm gonna go through everything that I go through in my college classes to teach you music theory. Ah, at essentially a college level starting from the day you enter. So and that's what we've achieved in this class. We've gone through how to read notes and go over all the aspects of the musical score coming up next in the future classes on this, we're going to get into combining notes and learning what notes work together to make good sounds. Right. So writing music is all about combining notes together in ways that we find enjoyable or for whatever purpose that we do putting notes together to make music. So when the next classes, that's what we're gonna be focusing on. This class was kind of a warm up on getting us all up to speed. So please join me in the future. Classes were going Teoh really beginning into how to use all this stuff to write music, to work with our instruments, to design sounds that we want to be hearing and also, and very importantly, how to figure out what other people did to get that sound that we love. That's another element of music theory. Is that you hear something you say? Oh, that was a cool song. What did he do or what did she dio to get that sound? You know? How did how did she do that on? You can listen to the song. You can analyze it and you can take that technique and use it yourself. So please join me in the future classes. This'll music theory, comprehensive class. 34. SkillshareFinalLectureV2: Hey, everyone want to learn more about what I'm up to? You can sign up for my email list here, and if you do that, I'll let you know about when new courses are released and when I make additions or changes to courses you're already enrolled in. Also check out on this site. I post a lot of stuff there and I check into it every day. So please come hang out with me and one of those two places or both, and we'll see you there.