Music Theory For Beginners

Hello everyone and welcome to the first lesson in my series Music Theory for beginners, in this season I am going to be covering some basic music theory that will be able to help any player improve their musicianship in general and help them to improve on their chosen instrument.

Notes

We are going to start off simple by looking at the notes that are used in the music notation system that we use today.

Names of the notes

So there are 12 different notes that we use when we are writing and communicating music but at the moment we will only focus on eight of these notes and we will leave out all of the sharps and flats for now.
A ---- B ---- C ---- D ---- E ---- F ---- G
As you can see above we have the letters A through G which each represent a different musical note.(as a side point the order of the notes above form an A minor scale).

The Stave

We will now take a look at how these musical notes

Looking at the image that I made above. On the left-hand side, you can see a curly symbol, this is known as a treble clef or sometimes as a G clef(this is because the middle of the clef curls around the G line on the stave). The purpose of the clef is to dictate what notes the horizontal lines on the stave dictate(there is more than one clef).

As you can see there are 5 lines on the stave and 4 spaces, the lines are annotated with the notes E, G, B, D, F from bottom to top. There are a few rhymes to help you remember the notes. The one that I was taught at school was Every Good Boy Deserves Food. Though I am sure you could make up your own rhyme to suit.
The spaces on the stave make up the notes F, A, C, E, a simple way to remember this is simply by remembering the word face.

These are not the only notes that can be represented on the stave and in future lessons, we will look at how to represent more notes but for now, I would like you to get familiar with the content I have presented.

Challenge

In these lessons, i will be providing some challenges for you to complete at the end. The aim will be for me to provide you with an image that you can draw on in Paint, then you can post your completed challenge in the comments and I will give you some tips on how you can improve.

In this challenge, we are going to be finding some notes on the Stave. Look below for an example of me finding the note A.

Your challenge is to find the notes B, D and E(pay attention to E).

To complete this challenge save this image and edit it in paint then attach your answer to the challenge in the comments below.

Conclusion

This concludes our first lesson on music theory, when writing this lesson I realised how much information there is to get across about music theory, especially in the beginning stages, for this reason, I will be breaking down the lessons into smaller chunks, with at least 2 lessons a week and maybe 1 weekly challenge. If you enjoyed this lesson the please follow me to see the rest of this course unfold.

Message to readers
Thanks for taking the time to read my post, if you are interested in Music, Science, Technology or Computer Science then check out my blog, I am making an effort to provide good quality original content to the Steemit community.