Reading notes, today I’ll be explaining the first essential concepts you must know

solfeggioReading notes

One word you probably heard uttered hundreds of times is rhythm.
But what is rhythm exactly?
Rhythm is that aspect of music that deals with the duration of sound through time.

The duration of sound is the first property of sound that we want to depict graphically.
This is the first thing we have to learn to understand how to read and write music.
In today’s lesson, starting from a series of intuitive and common concepts, we will be able to understand how to represent the various sounds and their duration through time.

How can we graphically respresent the silence?

And it won’t end there: music is also made up of silence, the alternating presence of silence and sound.
But since silence has a duration too, we have to understand how it can be graphically depicted.

After today’s lesson you’ll have seen the basic knowledge necessary to begin reading (and writing) notes, among others;

  • What a bar is in music, and its’ beats
  • What notes are and how to distinguish them by their duration
  • What we mean when talking about crotchet, minime and semibreve
  • What rests are and how to graphically depict them on paper

But you’ll especially have taken the first step into learning to read music, which is the first step to being able to play it on piano or any other instrument from the music sheet.

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Learning material of this lesson

3 videos 27 mins
1. What does it mean to keep time and what is a bar? 8m 27s
2. The first graphical symbol to represent sound: a quarter note 8m 07s
3. Other notes of different durations and musical rests 10m 39s
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