If you are a student enrolled in an online music theory crash course, it becomes important to know about 5 things when reading a piece of music as given below:
1. Time Signature – The time signature educates you about how the beats are organized in a song. The top number educates you about how many beats are in a measure and the bottom number lets you know which note gets one beat. Consider the bottom number as a fraction, for example, if the bottom number is 4, you can assume that as 1/4 so the quarter note gets one beat. If the bottom number is 8, then you can assume that as 1/8 and results in the eighth note getting one beat.
2. Key Signature – The key signature tells you about what notes are sharp or flat throughout a piece of music. If you want to make out which notes are sharp or flat, we suggest you look at the line that goes through the center of the sharp or flat. The sharps or flats in a key signature apply to all of the instances of that particular note.
3. Dynamics - It tells you how loud or soft to play. The following dynamics are listed from the loudest to the softest like ff (fortissimo) is very loud, f (forte) is loud, mf (mezzo forte) is medium loud, mp (mezzo piano) is medium soft, p (piano) is soft, whereas pp (pianissimo) is softest. There are also crescendos which tell you to gradually get louder and decrescendos which specify to gradually get softer.
4. Finger Numbers - These are utilized to indicate what finger you should be using on a particular note. These are designed to make your life easy and your music sound better. Using the correct fingers enables you to play up and down the keyboard seamlessly and also helps you with better phrasing and articulation.
5. Articulations - This tells the piano player how to play each note. Some examples of articulations are staccatos (short), legatos or slurs (connected notes), and accents (hit the note with more force). These make the music sound better by providing more character to it and helps create musical ideas rather than just playing notes.
The above article lists the basic components of reading a piece of music that you should know or become familiar with. There is of course a lot more to playing music than this, but that you will come to know in our future articles. If you want to learn music but unable to find a good institution or facing time issue, then you can enroll in our online music theory classes.
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