HelloWorldGuitar

Music is a collection sounds moving through time. So how are we translate something we hear with our ears to something we see with our eyes? The most basic way to write music is to use notes. Notes have both PITCH, (how high or low the note sounds), and DURATION( how long we hear it the note).

Pitch

Pitch is best described as the height of a note. A 22-fret guitar can play 46 different pitches. To simplify, western music composers decided,

“let’s break down music into Batches of 12 Pitches

each Pitch will be the distance of a half-step apart

any SIMILAR sounding PITCHES played higher or lower will be in a different BATCH of 12 called a pitch class

OH, and only 7 get their own letter…”

The Musical Alphabet consists of the 7 letters A through G (the white keys on the piano). These Notes are called NATURAL.

Sharps and Flats

To name the other 5 pitches (the black keys on the piano) we either add a SHARP to the letter to raise the pitch a half-step or a FLAT to lower the pitch a half-step. For instance, the black key between the C and D would either be a C or a Ddepending on how it’s being used in the music. These Sharp and Flat pitches are called ACCIDENTALS and will learn about them in an upcoming lesson. For now all you need to know is that a Sharp raises the pitch a half-step and a flat lowers a pitch a half-step.

Intervals

The distance between two notes is called an interval and this interval is called an octave… this is the first repeated note on the guitar in a higher pitch class.

A guitar typically will span roughly 4 octaves for a total of 48 notes on a 24 fret guitar. Trying to write a melody using all 12 notes is pretty tricky. With all these notes to choose from, how do we know which ones to play?

Early composers picked one note to be the root for the melody and 6 more notes to define the musical feel which they called a Key. There is a Major or Minor Key for each of the 12 notes in western music.

Duration

Notes are symbols used to write-down the length of time and pitch of a sound.

The length of time a Half note is half as long as a Whole note. The length of time a quarter note is half as long as an Eighth note…notice a pattern?

Rests are symbols used to write-down the length of time there is an absence of sound.

There is a rest symbol for every note symbol

Take a look at the different rest values and how they related to each other.

Time signatures

As you tap along to that catchy song, you’ll start to notice that the beats naturally groups together in sets. It’s common to hear beats in groups of 2, 3, or 4 but the possibilities really are endless. These groups of beats are called Measures and we use Barlines to separate them.

The time signature tells us how to read the beat. The top number tells us how many beats are in the measure, and the bottom number tells us the beat unit which is the note type used to represent a single beat.

We can use any note to represent the beat unit. Here are some examples of time signatures using a quarter note as the beat unit.