Reading and Writing Music

Understanding music Notation (or how to read and write music) is fundamental to musical growth and understanding how musicians communicate. So let’s learn it!

Music is written on the Staff

A lot of different music has come along since the Bach and Mozart, but surprisingly the way we write music is still largely unchanged.

A STAFF is five lines and four spaces used to arrange notes.

Each line and space represents one pitch in ascending order from A to G

Notes that wander outside the staff are kept in place with Ledger Lines. Many Ledger lines might appear above or below the Staff to help us count the letter

A CLEF SYMBOL tells us what note goes where

Guitar uses a Treble clef (G Clef) which looks kind of like a fancy G and wraps around the line for the letter G.

Here’s how the open strings look when written on the Staff:

The C Major Scale

Let’s look at ways to read the C Major Scale using the staff and tablature

Have you ever heard someone sing Do RE Mei Fa So La Ti Do? This simple “melody” is a Major Scale.

If you take a look at t keyboard and play all the white keys sequentially starting on C, you have just played the C Major Scale. Play or improvise a melody using these notes and you’ll be playing in the key of C Major.

The Key of C Major contains all the natural notes: A, B, C, D, E, F, G. What makes this a C Scale is that it starts on the letter C.

Here is a C Major scale written on the staff with the tablature below. C Major is a great scale for beginners because it only uses the natural notes A through G.