Greetings! I'm Pro saxophonist Jamie Anderson. This is Get Your Sax Together,
bringing you high-quality sax knowledge straight from the pro stage. Now if
you've ever wondered what those weird musical symbols are, you know like the
ones you see on dodgy ties from the 1980s?...
then stay tuned because in this
free lesson for complete beginners of ANY instrument I'm going to teach you
how to read music.
This free sax lesson is part 5 of my series for complete
beginners - you can find the other parts on the card up there - and as usual if
you're enjoying the content please do subscribe down below and "ring the bell"!
Alright, let's learn how to read music!
So I could go on and on about the history
music, you know, cuneiform tablets from Mesopotamia, Byzantium hook and banner
notation, 9th century monastic plainchant notated with neumes, Guido d'Arezzo
and his 11th century four line stave... but I won't bother, because frankly you know
all that stuff anyway right??
Right, got a lot to learn so without further ado I'm
gonna jump behind the screen. Let's go!!
So you're looking at a "stave". This is the
five parallel lines that virtually all music is written on. The notes,
represented by circles, are going to be placed on the lines, and in the spaces, of
the stave with higher notes near the top and lower notes near the bottom. You read
music just like you would a book - one line at a time going left to right. So
before we can put any notes on the stave we need a thing called a "clef" which is a
symbol repeated at the start of every line of music. There are several
different types of clef. You can think of a clef as a kind of code that calibrates
what range of notes the stave is but if you play sax the good news is you only
ever need to deal with a treble clef which looks like this. We use the first
seven letters of the alphabet A to G to give us the main note names. Those seven
notes can be modified with flats or sharps in various ways to give us 12
notes in total but that is for a later lesson. For the meantime,
we're just dealing with the 7 main notes. The note names can be easily remembered
with two simple rhymes - one for the lines and one for the spaces. The rhyme for the
lines, going from the bottom line to the top line, is
Every Good Boy Deserves Football E-G-B-D-F.
That's one of the most popular rhymes but honestly you
could have any rhyme you want. How about - Eleven Greedy Beavers Drink
Fanta? [slurp]
The spaces are even easier. From bottom to top they spell the word
FACE - F-A-C-E.
That means that the notes across the whole stave from bottom to top are E-F-G-A-B-C-D-E and F.
Awesome, so now we know what notes to play let's explore how rhythms are
notated. Each line of music is divided into bars. Each bar is fenced off with
vertical bar lines. The top number of the time signature tells us how many beats
are in each bar. The top number of this time signature is 4 so there are always
four beats in every bar. Ok, quick recap - music is chopped up into equal segments,
called bars, and the time signature, which only appears once, at the start of the
first line, tells you how many beats there are in each bar. Ok, on to the
different note lengths now. I'll give you the American names for note lengths,
which make perfect sense, and the British names, which make no sense!
A note that's hollow is called a "whole note" and lasts for 4 beats. In a 4/4 time signature that
note lasts the whole bar. The UK name for that is a "semi-breve". A note that's
hollow but has a "stem" is called a "half note" and is worth two beats. In a 4/4
time signature that note takes up half the bar. We call that a "minim". A note with
a stem that's filled in is called a "quarter note" and lasts for one beat. In a
bar of 4/4 there are four quarter notes. We call that a "crotchet" and, finally for
now, a filled-in note head with the stem with a twiddly bit on the tail [lol] is
called an "eighth note" and lasts for half a beat. In a bar of 4/4 there are eight
eighth notes. We call that a "quaver". Multiple eighth notes in a row have
stems connected with a "beam". So in summary, a whole note - four beats long,
half note - two beats long, quarter note - one beat, eighth note - half a beat.
Congratulations! Now you know the basics of how to read music - which note to play
and how long it lasts for. Let's see how it unfolds in a real example then. I'm
not sure if my final cut pro skills are gonna stretch to a animated bouncing
Disney Mickey or anything like that but I'll have a go! Right, this is what "mary
had a little lamb" looks like written out in treble clef... [music plays]
So now you know the absolute basics of how to read music, however, there's a lot
more to the equation that we haven't even touched on yet,
like rests, key signatures, dynamics, sixteenth notes, chords, phrasing and
articulation, tempo information and so much more, but that's all for another day.
So I hope you enjoyed this video learning how to read music. As usual, if
you enjoyed the content please subscribe down below. Check out some of my other
videos and I'll see you next time on Get Your Sax Together!