#TYPES OF MUSICAL NOTEA HOW TO#

Even then, printers had an aversion to ledger lines which caused difficulties in setting type, wasting space on the page and causing a messy unwanted appearance. Notes can also be placed above and below the stave.Īlthough ledger lines are found occasionally in manuscripts of plainchant and early polyphony, it was only seen the early 16th century in keyboard music that their use became at all extensive. Its purpose is to inform you how long to hold a note. The note flag is a curvy mark to the right of the note stem or the line that comes off the top or bottom of the note stem. When beaming notes, you might come across a pair of notes where one is above the middle line and one is below.ģ – the flag (also referred to as a tail or a hook) As a rule, any notes at or above the B line on the staff have downward pointing stems, those notes below the B line have upward pointing stems. The direction of the line doesn’t affect how you play the note however, it serves as a way to make the notes a lot easier to read while allowing them to fit neatly on the staff. The line extends from the right if it’s pointing upward or from the left if it’s pointing downward. The note stem is a thin line that extends either up or down from the note head. In that case, a line (known as a ledger line) is drawn through the note, above the note or below the note head, to indicate the note letter to play.

In some cases, note heads will sit above or below the five lines and four spaces of a staff. Let’s take a look at some of the music note types you definitely need to know about when learning to read music.īefore getting into the types notes let me show you the three parts of a note.Įvery note has a note head either filled (black) or open (white), Where the note head sits on the staff (either on a line of the staff or space between the lines) determines which note you will play. Composers tell them by using different note symbols. When playing music, a musician needs to know how long to play each sound for. When they’re written in sheet music, note values of different lengths are depicted in different ways. There are three parts of each note, the note head, the stem, and the flag. Notes placed on the staff tell us which note letter to play on our instrument and how long to play it. and they’re used as a reference note to the line, F-clef fixes the F below middle C, a C-clef fixes middle C, and a G-clef fixes the G above middle C. They have letter names because they assign the note with that name to a particular line on the staff. Clefs in modern music notations are 3, the G-clef, F-clef, and C-clef, All of these clef symbols intentionally resemble the cursive forms of their respective letters. a clef is a musical symbol used to indicate which notes are represented by the lines and spaces on a musical stave. If the clef could talk, it would say something like, “For this set of notes, the lines and spaces represent these keys”. Until the clef is placed at the very beginning of the stave we do not know what to call the notes placed on the stave.

Those lines and spaces represent notes named A-G, and the note sequence moves alphabetically up the staff.

Each of those lines and each of those spaces represents a different letter, which in turn represents a note. The five-line musical stave is considered to be the fundamental building block of musical notation. The lines and spaces on the stave represent different notes, which vary depending on the musical clef associated with the stave. The staff consists of five lines and four spaces.

#TYPES OF MUSICAL NOTEA HOW TO#

Have you ever listened to a song and thought, “wow I’d like to know how to play that” well, learning the basics of reading sheet music will help you achieve that, and by saying learning sheet music I mean knowing all types of musical notes and the components of the musical sheet, learning the types of notes without knowing the fundamentals of musical sheet would be a thorn among the roses for you. I will cover all types of notes in depth to pave you the way to master reading music. Learning about all the types of musical notes is essential in the study of music theory, Knowing the names of all these notes, as well as their time values, knowing how to read them, how to draw them and what the parts of the notes are called is the master key to being able to read music well.

Types of musical notea