Understanding the Musical Alphabet

Series Summary

The beautiful thing about music, or at least one of the beautiful things about music, is its ability to be order disguised as chaos. To the untrained ear, and even to the trained ear, music can come across as a series of unrelated and unconnected incidents, paint randomly thrown across a canvas. However, the truth is, music is just a glorified system of mathematics, it is truly the art of mathematics and physics. Music theory is the underlying and often times unseen force holding the creative chaos and fragile beauty of music together, the basic color principles that make Kandinsky's seemingly meaningless paintings breath taking. Any musician that is serious about his craft needs to learn how to read music and other music theory. Picasso never could have done what he did if he had not learned the basic principles first.

In this free video series, watch as professional musician Eric Williams teaches how to read music. Learn about the musical alphabet, what sharps and flats are, what half steps are, what a musical staff is, how to read the bass clef and treble clef, what ledger lines are, what quarter notes are, what half notes are, what whole notes are, how to play notes on the piano, how to read 3/4 time signature, how to read extended notes, and how to use flats, naturals, and accidentals while reading and writing sheet music. Understanding the basics of music theory and reading sheet music is an integral part to being a professional musician and helps with technique when playing any instrument. Learn your craft better with these videos with the help of the great experts here at Expert Village.

Video Transcript

"On behalf of Expert Village, I'm Eric Williams and I am here to tell you about how to read music. To ready music, you need to know the musical alphabet. The musical alphabet is illustrated up here. The musical alphabet goes a, b, c, d, e, f, g and then starts over again on a and goes a, b,c, d, e, f, g. Starts over again a, b, c, d, e, f, g. So there is really 7 letters that you have to memorize. And it goes a, b, c, d, e, f, g. The reason I illustrated it with the piano keyboard of black and white keys because that is a very easy way to get familiar with the musical alphabet. All musical instruments whether they be trumpet, saxophone, guitar, or bass, they all use the same musical alphabet but just aren't as easily visible as on a piano keyboard because this is a way to look at it where you can't make any mistakes. Once you understand that different pitches have different alphabet letter names that go with them, that is the beginning stage and that leads us into reading notes on the staff which will be in our next segment. So remember a, b, c, d, e, f, g, which are the letter names that go with the pitches of music. The musical alphabet played on a piano in real life so you can hear it sounds like this. Here's the letter a and those were the musical alphabet. We had a, b, c, d, e, f, g, a and it actually works backwards too. You can go a, g, f, e, d, c, b, a. So as you notice as you go up the musical alphabet a, b, c, the pitch gets higher and higher a, b, c, d, e, f, g, a. If you go backwards on a musical alphabet the pitches go downward and get lower in pitch a, g, f, e, d, c, b, a. The musical alphabet."