Lesson 1 - the beginning

I am going to start with showing you the beginning of a sheet music and I will explain some basic things.

Lets go J

This is how the beginning of a simple piece can look.

We start with talking about the term TEMPO, Tempo is the speed in which the piece is written and should be performed. Tempo is usually measured in BMP which stands for: Beat Per Minute. It can be written on a piece like: BMP = 118 or q =118 like seen above, sometimes it will even be written as a musical  term as an example here Allegro which means: fast and is between 118 – 168 BMP.

Often is the Quarter note (q ) taken as measuring point, that means if we have a BMP of 118 and the measuring is in Quarter note then it means that you should be able to play 118 quarter notes in a minute, and there you get the speed.

But we all know that music doesn’t have the same pattern the whole time, how boring wouldn’t that be?

Down on the sheet you can read beats followed by some black lines, these are the even beats though the piece,

They are always even and they would do the “boring same pattern music” but we don’t want that!

So there comes the term RHYTHM in: rhythm is the division of note values though a piece.

The NOTEVALUE is simply the length of a note.

In this sheet we have the quarter note (q ) which has a note value of 1 beat

Then we have also the Half note (h) which has a note value of 2 beats

And in the end we have a Whole note (w ) which has a note value of 4 beats

More from this in Lesson 2

This piece is in 4/4 time signature. The upper number stands for the Beats per BAR, a bar is the division

Of the beats. And the lower number stands for what kind of note value the beats are counted in.

4 stands for the quarter note ( think of math on this one ).

So our piece is in 4 quarter beats per bar, that means we should be able to fit 4 beats in 1 bar

The first bar has 1 quarter note(q ) ( 1 beat ) + another 1 quarter note (q ) (1 beat ) + 1 half note (h) ( 2 beats )

If we now use math and just add them together : 1 + 1 + 2 = 4

There you see our first bar fits perfectly in the time signature

Our second bar only contains 1 Whole note  (w ) which has a note value of 4 beats.

And there it fits again.

I hope Lesson 1 helped you! If you have questions ask me on Olivia.Walter.Musictheory@gmail.com or just leave a comment

Have a great day and see you in the next lesson

/ Olivia J