Basic Music Theory Flashcards
This is a half-note. In 2/4, 3/4, or 4/4 time it receives ______ counts (or “steady beats”).
two
If you give a quarter-note one count, then you must give a half-note ___________.
two counts.
Remember: A half-note always receives twice the value of a quarter note.
Below is a measure containing single eighth-notes. With several of these in a measure, your music score can quickly begin to look very cluttered and messy.
When at least two eighth-notes appear side-by-side in a music score, what can we do to make them easier to read?
We can use a beam to group them together. (Sometimes we might say that we are “tying their flags together”!)
There are several clefs which can be used on the staff.
Which clef do we use in guitar notation?
The G-clef (or treble clef)
The _____________ is a group of five lines and four spaces onto which you can place symbols to indicate pitch and duration (the length in time) of sounds.
staff
In order to show pitch, we must have three particular elements of music notation.
What are these three elements of music notation?
What is this rhythm symbol?
Whole-note
On which beats would you strike the strings to sound notes in measure two of the example below?
beats one, two, three, and four
On which beats would you strike the strings to sound notes in measure one of the example below?
beats one and three
Term: pitch
Pitch is the highness or lowness of sound.
In music notation, pitch is determined by the placement/location of a notehead on the staff.
In the example below, the second pitch would sound higher since it is shown higher on the staff!
This is a whole note. In 4/4 time, it receives ______ counts (or “steady beats”).
four
The top number of a time signature typically tells us the _____________ in each measure.
number of beats (or “steady beats”)
Without a time signature, notated music would be much more difficult to read. It would be like to trying to read without any punctuation!
Time signatures tell us the number of beats that must occur in each measure throughout a piece.
** See what notated music without a time signature might look like in the example **
However, once we have a time signature we can divide the notes into __________, each having an equal number of beats.
“measures”
In the example below, the time signature tells us that we can only notate four beats worth of rhythms at a time. After that, we have to somehow separate this group of rhythms from the next group of rhythms.
We use bar lines to separate each of these groups of four beats into measures.
A note can have up to three parts (such as the eighth-note, shown below). What are these three parts?
The length of time (duration) that we hold a particular pitch is called _________________.
rhythm
This is a quarter-note. In 2/4, 3/4, or 4/4 time it receives ______ count (or “steady beat”).
one
A note head (see examples) can be placed directly onto either a line or a space on a music staff.
Attached to the note head, you will sometimes find a stem. On this stem there might even be a flag, or perhaps multiple notes with stems could be connected by a beam.
Regardless of the lack of or addition of stems, flags, or beams, ALL notes will have a note head.
Placement of the note head on a line or a space at various places on the staff indicates ______.
pitch
Remember: Pitch is term we use to describe the “highness or lowness” of a sound.
The job of a _______ is to assign (or “lock in”) a note name to a specific point on a staff.
This symbol is placed onto the staff at the beginning of each line throughout a piece of music, and gives us a starting place (it identifies a particular pitch name) from which we can find the names of all other notes.
“clef”
This particular clef is what we use for guitar notation. It locks in the second line from the bottom as a “G”.
As G is the last note (or the highest-named note) in the musical alphabet, the note immediately higher on the staff is an A, the next a B, and so on.
What is this rhythm symbol?
Quarter-note
This symbol might look like a fraction - but it definitely is not! It is found at the beginning of a notated piece of music.
Time signature
