Idiot's Guides - Music Theory Read online

  Notes above the staff.

  Just as you can add lines and spaces above the staff, you can also add lines and spaces below the staff to describe lower notes. For example, the first space below the staff is the first note before E: D. The first line below the staff is the first note before D: C. The following figure shows the first few notes below the standard staff. By the way, the first line below the staff is middle C.

  Notes below the staff.

  NOTE

  The lines you add above or below a staff are called ledger lines.

  Different Clefs

  Up till now, we’ve been looking at a staff that represents the notes just above middle C on the piano keyboard. The notes of this staff are determined by the type of clef that appears at the beginning of the staff—and there are several different types of clefs.

  DEFINITION

  A clef is a graphical symbol placed at the beginning of a staff or piece of music that establishes the pitch of a specific line or space on the staff; thus it determines the pitch of all the other notes on the staff.

  The Treble Clef

  The clef we’ve been working with so far is called the treble clef; it looks like this:

  The treble clef.

  As you’ve already learned, in real-world terms the treble clef is positioned just above middle C. The bottom line of the treble clef staff is an E; the top line is an F.

  The treble clef, like all clefs, fixes the position of a single pitch, from which you can figure out where all the rest of the notes go. In the case of the treble clef, the pitch it fixes is G, which is the second line on the staff. (If you look closely at the treble clef itself, you see that the big round part of the clef circles around the second line of the staff.) For this reason, the treble clef is sometimes called the G clef—and the clef itself looks a little like a capital G.

  If you ever have trouble remembering which note goes with which line or space on a staff, here’s an easy way to remember them. The lines of the treble clef staff are assigned, bottom to top, to the notes E, G, B, D, and F. You can remember the lines by recalling the first letters in the phrase “Every Good Boy Does Fine.” The spaces of the treble clef staff are assigned, bottom to top, to the notes F, A, C, and E. You can remember the spaces by remembering the word “FACE.”

  Most higher-pitched instruments and voices use the treble clef. This includes trumpets, flutes, clarinets, and guitars, as well as singers singing the soprano, alto, and tenor parts.

  The Bass Clef

  When you need to write music below the treble clef, you can use a different clef, called the bass clef. The bass clef is positioned just below middle C, and is sometimes called the F clef. (That’s because the two dots on the clef surround the fourth line, which is F.)

  NOTE

  The word “bass,” as in “bass clef,” is pronounced base—like the bottom of things, not like the fish.

  Here’s what the bass clef looks like, with the notes of a bass clef staff:

  The bass clef.

  Most lower-pitched instruments and voices use the bass clef. This includes trombones, tubas, bass guitars, and singers singing the bass part.

  An easy way to remember the lines of the bass clef is with the phrase “Good Boys Do Fine Always.” (The first letter of each word describes each line of the staff, from bottom to top.) To remember the spaces of the bass clef, remember the first letters in the phrase “All Cows Eat Grass.”

  The Grand Staff

  If you play or write for piano, there’s another staff you need to know. This staff, called the grand staff, links together a treble clef staff and a bass clef staff. (That’s because you play the piano with two hands; each staff roughly corresponds to each hand.)

  The grand staff looks like this:

  The grand staff.

  When you use a grand staff, it’s important to note that the two staffs neatly flow into each other. The A at the top of the bass clef extends above that staff to a B and a C. The C is then linked to the treble clef, goes on up to a D, and then the E on the bottom line of the treble clef.

  The neat thing is that the C—which just happens to be middle C—is halfway between each staff. So when you write a middle C on a grand staff, it might extend down from the treble clef staff or extend up from the bass clef staff, depending on where the surrounding notes are placed.

  Specialty Clefs

  There are a handful of specialty clefs you must learn, although you probably won’t use them much. These clefs are designed for instruments whose ranges don’t fit comfortably within the traditional treble or bass clefs.

  One of the most common specialty clefs is the alto clef, shown here:

  The alto clef.

  The alto clef is used primarily by the viola, which is a slightly bigger version of a violin. The pointer on this clef points at middle C, which is the third line, in the exact middle of the staff.

  The tenor clef looks a lot like the alto clef, except the pointer points at a different line. (It still points to middle C, but middle C is positioned at a different point on the staff.) The tenor clef looks like this, and is sometimes used by bassoons, bass violins, and tenor trombones.

  The tenor clef.

  Although there are several other specialty clefs (including the baritone, subbass, and French violin clefs), you probably won’t run into them too often; they’re not widely used. However, you might run into what is called an octave clef, which looks like a normal treble or bass clef with the number 8 either above or below the clef. When you see this type of clef, you’re supposed to transpose the normal treble clef notes either up (if the 8 is above the clef) or down (if the 8 is below the clef) an octave.

  Octave clefs.

  The Percussion Clef

  There’s one more clef you should know, and it’s really the easiest of them all. This clef is used when you’re writing for drums and other percussion instruments—those that don’t play a fixed pitch. It’s called either the percussion clef or the indefinite pitch clef, and it can be written one of two ways:

  The percussion clef—version one and version two.

  The neat thing about this clef is that the lines and spaces don’t correspond to any specific pitches. Instead, you assign different instruments to different parts of the staff.

  For example, if you’re writing for drum set, you might assign the bass drum to the bottom space, the snare drum to the third space, and two tom-toms to the second and fourth spaces; you can put the ride cymbal on the top line of the staff.

  TIP

  There really aren’t any rules for how to assign instruments to a percussion clef, so you’re pretty much on your own. It’s probably a good idea to consult a few drummers or look at a few percussion parts to get a better idea of how to use the percussion clef.

  Exercises

  Exercise 1-1

  Write the name of each note below the note.

  Exercise 1-2

  Write the name of each note below the note.

  Exercise 1-3

  Write each note on the staff.

  Exercise 1-4

  Write each note on the staff.

  Exercise 1-5

  Draw the indicated clefs on the staff.

  Exercise 1-6

  Write the following notes above the staff.

  Exercise 1-7

  Write the following notes below the staff.

  Exercise 1-8

  Identify the following notes on the piano keyboard.

  The Least You Need to Know

  Music is a succession of tones arranged in a specific pattern; a tone is a sound that is played or sung at a specific pitch.

  There are many different ways to describe a specific pitch. You can describe a pitch by its vibration frequency, by where it lies numerically compared to other pitches, or by using the Do Re Mi (Solfeggio) method.

  Established music notation assigns letters to the seven basic pitches, A through G. The letters repeat as you generate higher pitches.

  Pitches are ass
igned to specific keys on a piano keyboard, and to specific lines and spaces on a musical staff.

  The clef placed at the start of a staff determines which notes appear where on the staff. The most used clef is the treble clef; the bass clef is used for lower-pitched instruments and voices.

  CHAPTER

  2

  Intervals

  In This Chapter

  Changing pitches with sharps and flats

  Understanding half steps and whole steps

  Counting the intervals between notes

  Using major, minor, perfect, diminished, and augmented intervals

  Lesson 2, Track 11

  In the previous chapter you learned all about musical pitches: how they’re named and how they’re presented on a staff. In this chapter we’ll go beyond that by looking at how pitches can be raised and lowered, and how you can describe the differences between pitches in terms of intervals.

  To make things as simple as possible, we’ll discuss these pitches and intervals in terms of the C Major scale—that is, the notes between one C on the piano keyboard and the next C above that. The basic concepts can be applied to any scale, as you’ll see; it’s just that sticking to a single scale makes it all a little easier to grasp. (And, at least on the piano, the C Major scale is the easiest scale to work with—it’s all white keys!)

  Be Sharp—or Be Flat

  As you learned in Chapter 1, the lines and spaces on a music staff correspond exactly to the white keys on a piano. But what about those black keys? Where are they on the staff?

  When we say there are 7 main pitches in a Western musical scale (A through G), that’s a bit of an oversimplification: there actually are 12 possible notes in an octave, with some of them falling between the 7 main pitches.

  Just count the keys between middle C and next C on the piano—including the black keys, but without counting the second C. If you counted correctly, you counted 12 keys, which represent 12 pitches; each pitch/key is the same interval away from the previous pitch/key.

  These black keys are called sharps and flats. Sharps and flats are halfway between the pitches represented by the white keys on a piano; a sharp is above a specific key, and a flat is below a specific key.

  Put another way, a sharp raises the natural note; a flat lowers the note.

  Take the black key above the middle C key, for example. You can refer to this key as C-sharp, because it raises the pitch of C. It also can be called D-flat, because it lowers the next white key up, D. It may be a little confusing, but it’s true—C-sharp is the same note as D-flat. And whenever you have two notes that describe the same pitch—like C-sharp and D-flat—the notes are enharmonic.

  Here are the dual names you can use for a piano’s black keys:

  The black keys on a piano keyboard.

  On a music staff, sharps and flats are designated by special characters placed before the affected note. These characters, called accidentals, look like this:

  A sharp, a flat, and a natural sign.

  That third character is called a natural. When you see a natural sign on a piece of music, it means to return the specific note to its natural state, without any sharps or flats.

  It’s important to know that you can add sharps and flats to any note—even those keys on a piano that don’t have black notes between them. So, for example, if you add a flat to the C note, you lower it to the next note on the keyboard—which happens to be B natural. (This means B natural is the same pitch as C-flat.)

  DEFINITION

  An interval is the space between two pitches. The smallest interval in Western music is a half step; intervals are typically measured in the number of half steps between the two notes. Two notes that sound the same but can be spelled differently are called enharmonic notes. Any modification to a natural note is called an accidental. Sharps and flats are accidentals; the natural sign (used to return a sharped or flatted note to its natural state) is also an accidental.

  Steppin’ Out …

  The smallest interval in Western music is the half step. On the piano keyboard, half steps appear between the white keys B and C and between E and F. In all other cases they appear between a white key and a black key—for example, D to D-sharp, or F-sharp to G.

  NOTE

  In some musical circles, a half step is called a semitone, and a whole step is called a tone. On a guitar, a half step is the distance of a single fret. A whole step is the distance of two frets.

  Two half steps equal one whole step. The interval between F and G is a whole step; the interval between B and C-sharp is also a whole step.

  Now that you know about steps, it’s a little easier to understand how sharps and flats work. When you sharpen a note, you move the pitch up a half step. When you flatten a note, you move the pitch down a half step.

  Take the note C, for example. When you add a flat to C, you take it down a half step. Because the first key (white or black) to the left of C is the white key B, this means C-flat equals B. When you add a sharp to C, you take it up a half step. The first key to the right of C is the black key we call C-sharp. (This black key is also the first key to the left of D, which means C-sharp is the same as D-flat.)

  You can use the step method to describe the intervals between two notes—although once you get more than a few steps away, the counting becomes a tad difficult. When you’re trying to figure out which note is seven half steps above middle C (it’s G, in case you’re counting), it’s time to use another method to describe your intervals.

  TIP

  The half step is the smallest interval in Western music, but music from other parts of the world often contains intervals smaller than a half step. Some Indian music, for example, divides an octave into 22 steps, each about half as large as a Western half step.

  A Matter of Degrees

  A more accepted way of describing intervals is to go back to the seven main notes of a scale and revisit the relative numbering method. You can use the numbers of the scale to denote the basic intervals between notes, and thus apply this numbering to any scale.

  First Things First

  As you learned in the previous chapter, you can use numbers to describe the seven main notes in any scale. The first note is numbered one, the second note is numbered two, and so on. This method of numbering actually describes the seven degrees of a musical scale.

  There also are fancy musical names you can use in place of the numbers, which you might run into in some more formal situations. The following table presents these formal degree names.

  Degrees of the Scale

  Degree

  Name

  First (Root)

  Tonic

  Second

  Supertonic

  Third

  Mediant

  Fourth

  Subdominant

  Fifth

  Dominant

  Sixth

  Submediant

  Seventh

  Leading Note

  Eighth (Octave)

  Tonic

  DEFINITION

  The lowest note of an interval, chord, or scale, is called the root.

  To be honest, you probably won’t use all of these fancy degree names; musicians will know what you’re talking about if you just say first, second, third, and so forth. If you only memorize a few of these formal names, focus on tonic and dominant–the first and the fifth degrees are most important in real-world situations. (All this will become more important when you learn about chord progressions in Chapter 10.)

  There are a few more terms you need to know before we proceed. When two notes of the exact same pitch are played by two different instruments or voices, they’re played in unison. Two identical notes with the same name, played eight degrees apart, form an octave. (The word “octave” comes from the Latin word “octo,” for “eight”—because an octave is eight notes above the beginning note.)

  For example, if you go from middle C to the next C up the keyboard, that’s an octave; F to F is another octave, and
so on.

  These musical degrees come in handy when you’re describing intervals between notes. Instead of counting half steps and whole steps, you can simply describe an interval by using these relative numbers.

  For example, let’s say you want to describe the interval between C and D. If you count C as number one (the first degree), D is number two, and the interval between them is called a second. The interval between C and E (the first and third degrees) is a third; the interval between C and F (the first and fourth degrees) is a fourth, and so on.

  Pretty easy, once you get used to it!

  The following figure shows the basic intervals, starting with a unison and ending with an octave, with C as the root.

  The basic intervals, starting on C.