Measure lines don’t affect how the music sounds, but they help the performer keep their place in the music.

• As we’ll see below, another handy thing about measures is that each one gets the same number of beats. For example, if you find yourself tapping “1-2-3-4” along to a piece of music on the radio, you’ve probably subconsciously found the measure lines already.

• On a piece of sheet music, the beat is expressed by something that looks like a fraction written next to the first clef symbol. Like any fraction, there is a numerator, and a denominator. The numerator, written in the top two spaces of the staff, tells you how many beats there are in one measure. The denominator tells you the note value that receives one beat (the “pulse” that you tap your toe to).
• Perhaps the easiest meter to understand is 4/4 time, or “common” time. In 4/4 time, there are four beats in each measure and each quarter note is equal to one beat. This is the time signature you’ll hear in most popular music. You can count along to common time music by counting “ONE two three four ONE two three four…” to the beat.
• By changing the numerator, we change the number of beats in a measure. Another very common time signature is 3/4. For example, most waltzes will have a steady “ONE two three ONE two three” beat, making them in 3/4 time.
• Some meters will be shown with a letter C instead of two numbers. 4/4 time is often shown as a big C, which stands for common time. Likewise, 2/2 meter is often shown as a big C with a vertical line through it. The C with the line through it stands for cut time (sometimes referred to as half common time).

However, whereas meter simply tells you how many beats, rhythm is how those beats are used.

• Try this: tap your finger on your desk, and count 1-2-3-4 1-2-3-4, steadily. Not very interesting, is it? Now try this: on beats 1 and 3, tap louder, and on beats 2 and 4, tap softer. That’s got a different feel to it! Now try the reverse: tapping loud on 2 and 4, and soft on beats 1 and 3.
• Check out Regina Spektor’s Don’t Leave Me. You can clearly hear the rhythm: the quieter bass note happens on beat 1 and beat 3, and a loud clap and snare drum happen on beats 2 and 4. You’ll start to get a sense of how music is organized. That’s what we call rhythm!

When you see a dotted note, that note is increased by one half the length of its original value.

• For example, a dot placed after a half note (minim) will be equal to the half note plus a quarter note. A dot placed after a quarter note (crotchet) will be equal to a quarter note plus an eighth note.
• Ties are similar to dots—they extend the value of the original note. A tie is simply two notes linked together with a curved line between the note heads. Unlike dots, which are abstract and based wholly on the value of the original note, ties are explicit: the note is increased in length by exactly as long as the second note value.
• One reason you would use a tie versus a dot is, for example, when a note’s duration would not fit musically into the space of a measure (bar). In that case, you simply add the leftover duration into the next measure as a note, and tie the two together.
• Note that the tie is drawn from note head to notehead in the opposite direction as the stem.

Those spaces are called rests, and even in silence, they can really add motion and life to music. Let’s take a look at how they’re notated.

• Like notes, they have specific symbols for specific durations. A whole note rest is a rectangle descending from the 4th line, and a half note rest is a rectangle resting on the 3rd line and pointing upwards. The quarter note rest is a squiggly line, and the rest of the rests are an angled bar that looks like a number “7” with the same number of flags as their equivalent note value. These flags always sweep to the left.

Once you have that locked into your brain cells, the rest will follow naturally.

• First, we’ll show you what it looks like, then we’ll show you how to make sense of it, and begin to read music! Here’s what it looks like on the staff. See the “C scale” above.
• If you’ll take a look at the first note, the low C, you’ll see that it actually goes below the staff lines. When that happens, we simply add a staff line for that note only—thus, the little line through the note head. The lower the note, the more staff lines we add. But we don’t need to worry about that now.
• The C scale is made up of eight notes. These are the equivalent of the white keys on the piano.
• You may or may not have a piano handy, but at this point, it’s important for you to begin to get an idea of not just what music looks like, but of what it sounds like, too.

• By learning to sing the notes that you see, you’ll begin to develop the skill of sight-reading—a skill that can take a lifetime to perfect, but will be useful right from the beginning. Let’s take a look at that C scale again, with the solfege scale added. See the “C Scale Solfege 11” above.
• Chances are, you know the Rogers and Hammerstein song “Do-Re-Mi” from The Sound of Music. If you can sing the “do re mi” scale, do that now while you look at the notes. If you need a refresher course, you can hear the song on YouTube.
• Here’s a slightly more advanced version, walking up and down the C scale using the solfège notes. See the “C Scale Solfege 1” above.
• Practice singing Solfege—part II a few times, until it becomes familiar. The first couple times, read very slowly so that you can look at each note as you sing it. The next couple times, substitute the “do re mi” for C, D, E. The goal is to sing the actual notes.
• Remember our note values from before: the high C at the end of the first line, and the low C at the end of the second line are half notes, while the rest of the notes are quarter notes. If you imagine yourself walking, again, there is a note for each step. The half notes take two steps.

• You may have seen sharps and flats in music: sharp looks like a hashtag (♯) and a flat looks like a lowercase B (♭). They are placed to the left of a note head and indicate that the note to follow is played a half-step (semitone) higher for a sharp, or a half-step lower for a flat. The C scale, as we learned, comprises the white keys on the piano. When you’re beginning to read music, it’s easiest to think of the sharps and flats as the black keys. However, one should also note that sharps and flats are on white keys in some situations (for example, when the key signature calls for it). For instance, B sharp is played on the same note as C.

If you look at the C note on the piano keyboard, you’ll see there’s a black key between it and the next note up, the D. The musical distance between the C and the D is called a whole tone. The distance between the C and the black key is called a semitone. Now, you may be wondering what that black key is called. The answer is, “it depends.”

• A good rule of thumb is if you are going up the scale, that note is the sharp version of the beginning note. When moving down the scale, that note would be the flat version of the beginning note. Thus, if you are moving from C to D with the black key, it would be written using a sharp (♯).
• In this case, the black note is written as C♯. When moving down the scale, from D to C, and using the black note as a passing tone between them, the black key would be written using a flat (♭).
• Conventions like that make music a little easier to read. If you were to write those three notes going up and used a D♭ instead of a C♯, the notation would be written using a natural sign (♮).
• Notice that there’s a new sign—the natural. Whenever you see a natural sign (♮) that means that the note cancels any sharps or flats previously written. In this example, the second and third notes are both “D”s: the first a D♭, and so the second D, since it goes up a semitone from the first D, has to have the note “corrected” to show the right note. The more sharps and flats scattered around a sheet of music, the more a musician must take in before the score can be played.
• Often, composers that previously used accidentals in previous measures may put “unnecessary” natural signs to provide clarity for the player. For example, if a previous measure in a D major piece used an A♯, the next measure that uses an A may be notated with an A-natural instead.

If you just play all the white keys, though, you will not be playing a major scale, but something called a “modal scale,” which is beyond the scope of this article.

• The starting note, or tonic, is also the name of the key. You may have heard somebody say “It’s in the key of C” or something similar. This example means that the basic scale starts on C, and includes the notes C D E F G A B C. The notes in a major scale have a very specific relationship to each other. Take a look at the keyboard above.
• Note that between most notes, there is a whole step. But there is only a half step (semitone) between E and F, and between B and C. Every major scale has this same relationship: whole-whole-half-whole-whole-whole-half. If you start your scale on G, for example, it would be written as G-A-B-C-D-E-F#-G.
• Notice that in order to maintain the proper relationship between the notes of the scales, the F has to be raised a semitone so that it’s a half step from the G, not a whole step. That’s easy enough to read by itself, but what if you started a major scale in C♯? Now it starts to get complicated! In order to cut down the confusion and make music easier to read, key signatures were created. Each major scale has a particular set of sharps or flats, and those are shown at the very beginning of the music. Look again at the key of G. Instead of putting that sharp next to the F on the staff, we move it all the way to the left, and it is just assumed from that point on that every F you see is played as a F#.

• If the rhythm and meter are the heart of the music, and notes and keys are the brains, then dynamics are surely the voice of the music. Consider the first version above.
• On your table, tap out: 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and 5 and 6 and 7 and 8, etc. (the and is how musicians “say” eighth notes). Make sure every beat is tapped at the same loudness, so that it sounds a bit like a helicopter. Now take a look at the second version.
• Notice the accent mark (>) above every F note. Tap that out, only this time, accent every beat that you see the accent mark. Now, instead of a helicopter, it should sound more like a train. With just a subtle shift in accent, we completely change the character of the music!

• There are dozens of dynamic markings you may see on a piece of music, but some of the most common ones you’ll find will be the letters f, m, and p.
• p means “piano,” or “softly.”
• f means “forte,” or “loud.”
• m means “mezzo,” or “medium.” This modifies the dynamic after it, as in mf which means “medium loud”, or mp, which means “medium soft.”
• The more ps or fs you have, the softer or louder the music is to be played. Try singing the example above (using solfège—the first note in this example is the tonic, or “do”), and use the dynamic markings to notice the difference.

• A crescendo gradually gets louder, and a decrescendo gradually decreases the volume. You’ll notice that, with these two symbols, the “open” end of the symbol represents the louder dynamic and the closed end represents the quieter dynamic. For example, if the music directs you to gradually go from forte to piano, you’ll see an f’, then a stretched out “>“, then a ‘p’.
• Sometimes a crescendo or diminuendo will be represented as the shortened words cresc.” (crescendo) or dim. (diminuendo).