Music theory 101

4 min readOct 3, 2018

So I’ve studied a fair bit of music theory and find many people who struggle to understand and confuse the terms of music theory.

In music, a note is the pitch and duration of a sound, and also its representation in musical notation

In western music the notes are represented as …. C D E F G A B C D E….

The first image which appears in everyone’s minds when thinking of written music is of confusing lines and symbols like the one shown below

This can be daunting for a newcomer. But in fact, it is quite simple we just need to understand what each symbol means.

Staff

First, let’s talk about, the five horizontal lines. Each of these lines and the spaces between them represent a different pitch. The pitch increases as we move from the bottom line to the top one. What is the absolute value of the pitch? For knowing that we need a clef at the start of the staff. So now let’s find out what clefs are

Clef

A clef indicates the pitch of musical notes written on a staff. It indicates the name and pitch of one of the lines on the staff. The rest of the lines can be determined by using this as a reference. There are two common clefs

The first one is known as the G clef. The Gnote can be determined by where the starting curl touches the line. The second one is the F clef and the F note line is between the two dots. In piano, G clef is played in right hand and the F clef is played with the left hand.

Remembering notes for the G clef

One easy mnemonic for remembering the pitch for each staff is

For the notes on the line from bottom to top

Every Good Boy Does Fine

for notes in between the lines, in the spaces

Face In The Space

Remembering notes For the F Clef

Easy mnemonic for remembering the pitch is

For notes on the line from bottom to top

Good Boys Do Fine Always

For notes in the spaces between the lines

All Cows Eat Grass

Types of Notes

There are different types of notes based on their durations. In addition there are rest notes during which nothing is played for that duration.

Time Signature

A sequence of notes is separated into measures which have a duration of a given amount of notes. The first measure in the image has time signature 4/4 which means it contains equivalent offour quarter notes. The second time signature is 3/4 which means it contains total equivalent of 3 quarter notes.

In this example, the first measure contains equivalent of 6 eighth notes. The second measure contains equivalent of 3 half notes.

Steps

Sometimes we want to play a note half a step more than a given note. For example the note half step above C is C#. How to convey this on the staff?

We use something called Accidentals to convey this. There are two kinds known as sharp or flat. Flat ♭ represents half a step below and sharp represents one step. Sharp # represent half step above. If a sharp or flat is placed at the start of the sheet then it applies for all the measures following.