Introduction:

When you learn a language you learn it at 2 levels. You learn to speak it correctly and then slowly learn the alphabet as well. You start by learning some basic words and sentences and along-with it to write the sentences in correct style.

We shall follow the same approach to learn the language of music, its reading and writing. And as we learn the simplest constructs we shall learn to write it as well. But since the eventual objective of these sets of tutorial is to make you an expert at ‘writing’ music using specialized software, we shall start practising what we learn by writing some simple examples and understanding piece and also listening to it.

What is music composed of?

Though this might seem to be a difficult question to answer, let’s try to give a simple answer based on our experiences. Surely we have all heard songs, we ‘know’ what music is, but let us try to define it in a simple way.

Music is what hear, and what we hear is sounds, different kinds of sounds or different notes at different volumes and importantly over a time interval.

Almost all of would have encountered Sa-re-ga-ma-pa-dha-ni-sa , these are the different notes that form the basis of all music , whether it be Indian or Western music. Just as all of the English language is composed of the 26 alphabets, these notes are the building blocks for music. In the western notation these notes are referred by the English alphabets A,B,C,D,E,F,G.

So its time to listen to these 8 notes.

scale.mid

Click on the media clip and listen in your favourite media player. Follow the eight notes as they are played with the figure above.

You’ll notice that a note can be placed either on any of the lines or in the spaces between the lines. The note name changes as we move it over the ladder (stave lines). The note changes by one unit as it moves from a line to a space or from a space to a line.

So, to determine the note name, you’d need to see what is the location of the note with respect to the stave-lines.

The lines (there are 5 of them) where different notes are placed are called ‘Stave Lines’. It is like a ladder with steps and what gives a note its name is dependent upon where the note is placed on this ladder. You’ll notice that we started with the C note at one step below the base of the ladder and made our way to the middle of it. Also notice that the first and last notes are both C, and the note after G is A.

Thus we realize that there are in total only 7 notes and the eight note that occurs after the seventh has the same name as the first. Notes with the same name but with 7 notes separating them are said to be an octave apart.

In this figure we see two notes with the same name but at different steps on the ladder. In the beginning are 2 C notes separated by an octave followed by 2 D notes and so on. They are really 2 separate notes that sound similar but not exactly the same.

There are a few more symbols we have already seen.

This is called a treble clef.

and this is a meter or rhythm signature. We shall understand more about this in a later section.

There is an easy way to remember the notes that occur in the stave lines

The notes occurring within the spaces are ‘F’,’A’,’C’ and ‘E’, easily remembered by the English word ‘face’.

The notes E,G,B,D,F which occur on the lines can be remembered as Every Good Book Deserves Finishing

Although the stave lines have only 5 steps it is possible to use notes that lie below or above these 5 lines. Upon doing so, an additional line or more may appear below or above the stave lines, for example the notes that occur below D are :

and similarly it is possible to write notes above the stave lines

Exercise 1

Underneath each of these notes write its letter name: