Tips on Sheet Music Symbols

Video Transcript

"As I scan over here and I've been looking at this music some more, I see a couple of others that I'd just like to throw in and mention. There are at the top of these, we've got these little dots on the top of each little note. Those are staccato markings, meaning that those notes are going to be played a little bit shorter, so that they don't sound quite as long as some of the other notes without them. There are so many symbols that need to be learned and again, if you buy the dictionary and you are able to look them up, you will know what each of these mean. As I look here at the beginning, I'm noticing this symbol here. There's the piano, which we've just previously talked about and now this symbol here looks like this opening up of this line that is splitting and going two different directions. This here is called the crescendo. This means that I'm going to start at a soft volume and I'm going to gradually through each one of these notes get louder and louder until I have reached this here, which we've talked about which is a forte. So, we've gone now from piano to forte within these two bars and to the beginning of this third bar. This is basically the way that we produce feeling or the louds and softs of the pieces or the musicality of the piece. And most composers or writers will write these in to make sure that the piece is played correctly and not just played all at one volume level."