How to Read Music (The Notes)

Video Transcript

"Hi, this is Tom Kenaston, I'm a singer, songwriter and pianist and I live in West Palm Beach and also New York City. In this clip we're going to talk about how to read the music, the notes. The music that you're reading is written on, generally for piano, especially two staves, one is called the treble stave and one is the bass. This is a treble cleft, and this is a bass cleft. Generally, for beginning pianist, if you're looking at the treble cleft, you're talking about everything that you're going to play with your right hand. If you're looking at the bass cleft, you're talking about things that you're going to play with your left hand. There are millions of exceptions and when you get more advanced you'll of course, start to find out what those are. So, now let's look at, the first thing that you need to know is the notes on a piano start with the letter A, and they go through G, it's just like the alphabet, A, B, C, D, E, F, G, then it starts over with A again. And, all music is based on those notes. If you're looking at the music on the staff, you'll see that you'll have a series of five lines in each of the two staves. These lines are a grid, on which the notes that you're going to learn how to read are drawn, so these notes are all named after letters in the alphabet. This one, the first ledger line below is C and now as the notes travel upwards, they travel upwards in the alphabet. If you're starting at C then the next one's going to be D, and then the next one is E, F, G, A. B, C. O.k, so now let's take a look at the keyboard, let's say you've spent some time studying the staff and the notes and how they lie there, let's just talk about where these notes are on the keyboard. As I mentioned, middle C was that lowest note, with the ledger line below the staff, on the keyboard middle C is right here, and the easiest way to find that is always to start by looking at the groups of the black keys, black keys are groups in threes and two, threes and twos, and etcetera, and it goes all the way up and down the keyboard. So, if you're sitting in the center of the keyboard, you know, you stretch your arms out as you need to and you come towards the middle, you're going to find three, and two, and the C is the white key just diagonally to the left of the lowest of the two. So, that's the easiest way to find the C, so now as you're traveling up, just like you were on the, looking at the notes on the staff, you have C, D, E, F, G, A, again you skip from G to, or, G, you start over again at A. G, A, B, C, and that's a C major scale actually, so now in this clip you've also learned a C major scale. In the advanced classes you probably will learn about the black keys, for now just concentrate on the white keys. C through C is a good place to begin. This is Tom Kenaston and this has been how to read music, the notes."