mike’s music pages

Posts Tagged ‘music theory’

How many times have you become lost in the music because there was a repeat and you didn’t know where to go? It has happened to everyone who sings. Even when you know what Dal Segno means, sometimes it’s hard to find where to go. We won’t address Dal Segno in this lesson, but you will learn about simple repeats and 1st and 2nd endings.

I Don’t Want To Write The Same Music Again!

Fig. 1

Music often contains sections that are repeated. Instead of writing the repeated section again, the composer will supply instructions that tell the performer to play or sing a section again. Read the rest of this entry »

In this lesson you will learn about tied notes.

We have been discussing note values in 4/4 time. In 4/4 time a whole note gets 4 beats, a half note gets 2 beats, a quarter note gets 1 beat, an eighth note gets 1/2 beat, and a sixteenth note gets 1/4 beat. The people who write the music are composers or arrangers, and being creative types, they don’t want to be limited to the note values that I have listed. They sometimes want to use notes that are 3 beats or 8 beats or 7 beats. They even want to use notes that have durations of 1 and 1/2 beats. How do they do it? Read the rest of this entry »

Fig. 1

This is the second lesson in a series about how to read music.

In our first lesson we learned about notes and how to count them. In this lesson you will learn more about notes, rests, and how to count.

What Are Rests?

Rests are periods of silence in music. Just as notes represent a sound of given duration, rests represent silence of a given duration. In the first lesson we learned about different types of notes. Well, for each type of note there is a corresponding type of rest. See Figure 1.

In the first lesson we talked about the time signature of 4/4. The top 4 means 4 beats in a measure, and the bottom 4 means that a quarter note gets one beat. So, in 4/4 time a quarter note gets 1 beat, a half note gets 2 beats, and a whole note gets 4 beats. An eighth note gets 1/2 beat, and a sixteenth note gets 1/4 beat. The equivalent rests are counted simularly.
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How To Read Rhythms and Count Notes

Do you sing in a choir? Can you read music? Do you think that you would have a higher quality musical experience if you could read music? Well, on this site I am going to teach you how to read music.

One element of music is rhythm. Rhythm is the timing of sounds over time. When you tap your feet to music you are tapping a rhythm. When you learn to read music you must learn to read rhythms. Learning to read rhythms will help you become a better choir member because you will be able to learn your music faster.

In this lesson you will learn about notes, time signatures, and bars (or measures).

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