Posts Tagged half note
Reading Music – Learning Rhythms, Time Signatures and Counting
One essential part of learning to play a musical instrument is often sidelined – learning to count and to understand time signatures. Let’s start with a basic foundation in reading music rhythms.
All commonly used time signatures consist of one figure over another at the start of a piece or section of a piece of music. The top figure represents simply “how many” of whatever value the bottom figure relates to, will be in each bar of music in that piece or section. To understand what the figure on the bottom refers to, we need to understand a western evaluation (mainly US based) of note-lengths. This system expresses the semibreve (an open note without a stem) as a “whole note”, and can therefore be thought of as being represented by the number 1. The note half the length of a semibreve is a minim but referred to in this system as a “half-note.” It is an open note but with a stem either up or down from it. If we think of one-half written as a fraction we have the number 2 at the bottom, and the figure 2 at the bottom of a time signature also refers to “half-notes.” Therefore in a time signature of 3 over 2, there are three half-notes in each bar. 2 over 2 would be two half-notes in each bar, etc.
Tags: bottom figure, Counting, eighth notes, half note, half notes, Learning, Music, quarter note, quarter notes, quaver, Reading, rhythms, semibreve, Signatures, Time, time signature, time signatures that
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Basic Music Theory for Guitar – Scales and Keys
To a beginner the world of music theory can seem a daunting one. There are a lot of terms, phrases and ideas that can seem so foreign that they may as well be a different language. Understandably this puts a lot of new players off from starting to learn music theory and apply it to their playing.
I was the same until I’d been playing for three years or so and decided start learning some theory to help take my playing up a notch. It has been many years since and I’d like to share some things that I used to get started, and to guide you through the first basic steps of learning to apply music theory to your guitar playing.
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