Playing an instrument has never been easier, and nowadays, there are a wide range of different courses for each instrument and plenty of sheet music online to help you play any song on any instrument. However, sheet music can be disorienting to look at if you’ve never learned what the different pieces are and what the symbols mean.
This article will define the most basic parts to make your music journey easier to understand. To help guide you, we’ll start by describing the staff.
Staff and Clefs
When we say “staff,” we’re not talking about the tall, usually wooden poles carried by magic users in fantasy books and movies. Instead, we’re describing the strange lines found on every music sheet.
The staff is made up of five horizontal lines and the four spaces that lie between these lines. The staff is also usually separated in many places by a thin vertical line. The space between each vertical line is called a measure and is kind of like a piece of a song. This separation makes learning and playing music easier as you can separate each long staff into smaller pieces and focus on each piece as necessary.
There is also a funky symbol at the beginning of each staff. This symbol is not a note; it’s a clef. While there are a few different clefs, the main two you’ll see are the treble clef and the bass (pronounced “base”) clef. The treble clef is almost ornamental in its design, with many swoops and curves.
You’ll be familiar with the treble clef if you sing or play an instrument that sits in the higher registers, like a violin. The bass clef is much more simple in its design and is used to denote that the following notes are to be played or sung in a lower register. To summarize this simply, a treble clef is used to signify higher notes, while the bass clef is used for lower notes.
Notes and Rests
You now know what the staff and clefs are; we can discuss the different types of notes and rests you’ll see in sheet music. Know that for every note, there is a rest that lasts for that exact amount of time. Rests are usually denoted by lines or what appear to be little squiggles, and the look of the rest tells you how long to not sing or play your instrument.
There are quite a few different types of notes, with each lasting for a different amount of time, but we’ll cover the more common ones here. If you ever see a small oval, then you’re seeing a whole note. Whole notes last for four counts or beats. The half note lasts for only two beats, hence the name. Halved notes look like the whole note grew a tail. Quarter notes follow a similar pattern, lasting for only one beat. They look similar to half notes, but the oval is filled in instead of having a hole in the center.
The final note we’ll cover is the eighth note, which looks similar to the quarter note. The difference between the two is the flag on the tail. These last for half as long as a quarter note. The more flags on the tail, the shorter each note is, and they are sometimes connected with a beam and have no flags as a result.
Improving Your Sheet Music Knowledge
While this all sounds complicated, it’s very simple to understand so long as you take the learning process slowly. You’ll know you’ve found the correct music course or teacher when the above is described in a way that is easy to understand.
We hope these definitions and descriptions helped you understand your sheet music a bit better to make you a better musician.
