Music Theory 101 #5: The Basic Skills of Music; Rhythm: Pt. 2

Hello everyone and welcome back to the Music Theory 101 series on ASMTB! I hate that last week was a dud but I had a lot going on I had to take care of (mostly pertaining to updating the site soon!) and posting sort of slipped my mind. I am really sorry about that, but I hope this episode and the updates will make up for this little mishap!

Today's lesson is to continue talking about rhythm in comparison to the six basics of music. If you would like to follow along with the previous ones then I made a tab above (If you're reading this from the newsletter then head on over and show us some love). As I mentioned in the last post, duration is the length a pitch is produced. I failed to bring up that it is not strictly related to pitches, but can measure rests as well. Rests are something that are not commonly mentioned because they are simpler than pitches, however they have an equal amount of importance compared relative to music. Music can be seen as a very carefully planned balance of sound and silence. Composers such as John Cage and Penderecki made sure that it was clear composers and musicians should know these differences. If you are interested in hearing these pieces, check out "4:33" by John Cage and "Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima" by Penderecki. Both of them are earfuls for two different reasons! Digressing from modern music and back onto my last post, we see that I explained how music is divided counting wise and what the time signature is. Now we need to continue and explain more on these concepts.

Music Terms:

~Dotted Rhythm
~Simple & Compound Meter
~Tuplets (Triplets, Duplet, etc.)

Credit: Music-Mind.com

Music does not only divide two ways, but it is possible to divide it into more divisions. The first way is to use dotted rhythm. Dotted rhythms is when you add a dot after the note. The dot represents adding half of the original value to the note. So if you add a dot to a half note, then you have a half note PLUS another quarter note, making it equal to three quarter notes. Also, adding a dot after a whole note makes it a half note added onto the whole note. If you want to add more dots, then you add half of the last value. So a double dotted half note is one half note, PLUS a quarter note PLUS an eighth note. So you half three and a half quarter notes.

The uses of this makes it possible to have compound meters. The best way to explain compound meter is through actual examples. If we take a look at most music, one can feel music in a two or as in four. This is called simple meter. It is either feeling a beat, or pulse, as "one & two &" or something that can be subdivided into half. All of these include 2/4, 3/4, 4/4, or anything related to them. Compound meter comes into play for meters such as 6/8, or 12/8 where the beat is broken into 3. For a more classical and audible examples of this, listen to Mozart's "Eine Kleine Nachtmusik" compared to his "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring" (Click on the names to hear audio). Eine Kleine is in a simple meter because the division of the beat is in two, versus Jesu which is in 12/8 and is subdivided in three.

Credit: Scaletrainer.com

If you do not want to write a piece that is completely one way the entire time, you can use tuplets. Tuplets is the generic term used to define a rhythm in a different rhythmic subdivision. The most common example of these are triplets. Triplets are when you fit three notes in the space of two, such as fitting three quarter notes within a two quarter notes. The reverse is true as well, you can fit 2 notes in the space of 3. Using a duple, you can fit two notes within three. It is even possible to fit more in a space.

Before this drags on much longer, I'm going to wrap up rhythm here. Later on, I'll write a full post on polyrhythms and other cool things one can use rhythm for. For now however, this will be the end of this discussion and I'll start with the next topic of this series. Until then, this is Sulli signing off! 

Music Theory 101 #4: The Basic Skills of Music; Rhythm: Pt. 1

Hello and welcome to the next part of the Music Theory 101 series. In our last post we finished our discussion on the first basic principle of music, pitch. For a complete coverage on that topic then click here for the complete list of posts, but here is the quick summary: Pitch is the first of 6 basic principles of music that helps define music. Pitch is the sound that we hear. Think of it as if it’s the clay for our sculpture because without pitch we would not have music. It is the foundation of sound and the foundation of music. Also as mentioned previously, it is measured in Hertz or waves per second. The more waves that pass by a point per second, the higher the frequency is produced and the higher the pitch is. Lower the number of waves that pass by the same point lowers the frequency and the pitch. Finally, the pitch is notated in music by placing notes on the staff. The two common staffs are treble and bass clefs. Each other indicates their own range of notes, and have their own shapes but remember that there are more than those two. There is one more thing I need to bring up. The thing I have yet to mention yet is key signatures, but I will make sure it has its own episode later on after I cover the basic six parts to music.

Music Terms:
Duration (Length)
Note values (Quarter note, eighth note, sixteenth note, etc.)
Dotted notes
Time Signature

Moving on from pitch is the next thing on is the length of the pitch, mentioned as duration in the first post. As I mentioned, duration is the length the pitch is produced. So it can be played at a certain rate (say 440 Hertz for example) for as long as you want it to be played. However, in order to keep everyone together, there must be a system to make sure that they are together. This is where beats come in. Beats or pulses help define what we feel drives it along. For example, if you've tapped your toe to a piece of music then you understand the way beats work. However, we need to begin by explaining the math behind beats before we combine everything.

Source: PocketMusician

Notes are broken down into values much like fractions are. The best place to start is the quarter note. The quarter note works like a fraction because you combine them and divide them. A quarter note can be subdivided into two eighth notes, or four sixteenth notes. Something good to know is the more it is subdivided, the more flags it will show. So a sixteenth note has 2 flags then an eighth note, which has one. Reversely, two quarter notes equal a half note and two half notes equal a whole note. Just as the smaller notes gain flags, the patter for these is not quite as obvious. The half note looks like a quarter note without a solid body. The whole note is like the half note but without a stem. These are not the only division however because there are other ways to combine them. The largest note value that is notated, but is not the largest possible is a breve (pronouced Brev) or a double whole note. The smallest most commonly seen is a 64th note, or a 16th note of a 16th note. These extremes are not usually used, but it helps to know they exist.

Another thing to understand is how dotted notes work. Dotted notes work as their value plus the value of half of itself. So if you have a dotted half note, then it is read as a half note plus the value of half of itself or a quarter note. So dotted half notes are worth a half note and a quarter note, or three quarter notes. Same for a dotted eighth note. It is worth an eighth note plus a sixteenth, or half its value. So it is worth 3 sixteenth notes in length.

4 notes per measure
quarter note gets the beat
Source: donrathjr.com

Now that I've explained how beats work, and how to visually see them, time to wrap everything together. The way most composers and musicians group beats into manageable groups is the time signature. The time signature is the fraction like section of the staff that shows us where the beats of the piece are. The time signature also makes it possible to break up music into measures. A measure is a section of the staff that is enclosed by two bars. Each bar contains the right amount of beats to follow the time signature.The trick to the time signature is understanding how it works. Each number represents a type of division of time. The numerator (the number on top) represents how many beats are in a measure. It can be any number you want but commonly things are either in 3, 4 or 6. The denominator (the bottom number) is what value gets the beat. There is a limited number that can be used for the denominator because these are the fractions. So in the example above 4/4 time means 4 notes are in a measure and the quarter note gets the beat.

Next time I will go into more detail about how these work together. Thanks for reading and sorry about the delay of this post!

Music Theory 101 #3: The Basic Skills of Music; Pitch Pt. 2

Hello everyone and welcome back to the Music Theory series on here. Before I begin, I would like to say thank you for all the reception and the help that was given towards helping me out with the site! It is not very apparent unless you run a project or a website to realize how much help there is when everyone submits feedback on it. From the bottom of my heart, I sincerely mean thank you. There was some things discussed that will cause a huge shift in this website within the near future, so stay tuned for that!

Key Terms:
Staff
Middle C
Treble Clef (G clef)
Bass Clef (F clef)
Grand Staff

As we were discussing last time, pitch is one of the six basic principles of a language. We have also discussed the basics of pitch as well from it's purpose to how it is heard and even broken it down into the 12 pitches on a keyboard. However, just so we can wrap this discussion up we need to go ahead and head from the basics that every musician knows and talk about the basic skill that every musician should know but do not. This is the staff and reading the clefs.

Blank staff lines from this site

First, we must look at what the staff is. The Music Staff is the space that musicians start when looking at music. It is a set of lines and spaces that musicians use to create notes. There are five (5) lines and four (4) spaces. As you go towards the top of the page, you go higher in pitch or heading towards the bottom of the page the lower you go. The notes themselves vary depending on which clef you are using.

In order to make sure that the following is extremely clear, we must find one point that defines each clef equally. For this, we are going to use "middle C" or the C that is in the middle of the piano. It is usually marked by the logo in the middle of the piano's cover but there are digital keyboards that note where it is. Something else I should bring up now is the statement of octave indicators (or Scientific Pitch Notation). This is how we figure out if a note is higher or lower without saying "this note is higher than" and so on. In the case of the previously stated "Middle C", it is identified as C4. The way I remember that middle C is C4 is thinking "Music starts at C and music is explosive!" (corny, but it works if you need something to use to learn). The way the indicators are meant to work as from C to B. So for example B3 is the B below middle C. For another example, let us look at D5. It is the D an octave above middle C. So instead of being the D directly above middle C, it is a note and an octave up.

This is a treble clef on a staff
Source: It's A Visual Medium

The clef is the first symbol on the staff. It defines where what note is on a staff, much like a a musical GPS coordinator. There are several dozen standardized clefs that are out there, and hundreds of non-standardized but  for this article, we will will talk about two specifically. The first clef we will look at is the Treble Clef, also known as the G clef. The reason for the name is the part that curls around the second to bottom line is noted as G. The space below that is an F, the line below that is E and so on. The space below the G is A, the line above that is B and so on. This G is known as G4 which means it is the G above middle C.

This is a bass clef on a staff
Source: Mr. Scheiber's Music Room

The other clef is the Bass Clef also known as the F clef. As with the previous, the reason for the second name is because the dots are placed around the note F. Also as before if you go down, you have E and D or up leads to G and A. Now, the thing to realize is this F is an F3, or the F below middle C.

This is a grand staff and note equivalents
Source: Click here

The final portion of this post will be about the grand staff and it's uses. The Grand Staff is the combination of the bass and treble clefs. It is used for piano, piano styled instruments and harp reading primarily but is used to condense scores down into an easier to read format. The reasoning is to create a larger range of pitches than any one can accomplish by themselves. It reads as if one large staff. The meet in the middle at middle C. Along with the additional space, there is an additional an bracket at the beginning to link them together. In the case of organ music, there would be three or possibly four staves but as I stated before this is primarily two. Next time we will start heading onto the next topic of discussion!