Category Archives: Music Reading

Reading notes: are you sure that you know quavers and semiquavers?

Quavers and semiquavers

Do you know the meaning of quaver? Do you know exactly what semiquavers are and how they are represented graphically?
They are two notes that need to be known perfectly in order to read music notes with their correct duration.

Today I will explain why quavers and semiquavers are introduced and how they are used. We will learn how to read these notes in a bar.
So after today’s lesson you will be able to recognize the principal symbols that express the duration of a sound, essential in learning to read a piano sheet music or of any other instrument.

In order to put into practice what we have learnt so far in these lessons, we will do many exercises by combining notes of different duration. Thanks to the new interactive didactic system, you will be able to practise on your own and later check your answers.

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Learning material of this lesson

5 videos	35 mins
Introduction	2m 35s
1. What are quavers and how to read them	9m 54s
2. What are semiquavers and how to read them	8m 27s
3. Practice pt.1	8m 10s
4. Practice pt.2	7m 09s
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Reading notes, today I’ll be explaining the first essential concepts you must know

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Reading notes

One word you probably heard uttered hundreds of times is rhythm.
But what is rhythm exactly?
Rhythm is that aspect of music that deals with the duration of sound through time.

The duration of sound is the first property of sound that we want to depict graphically.
This is the first thing we have to learn to understand how to read and write music.
In today’s lesson, starting from a series of intuitive and common concepts, we will be able to understand how to represent the various sounds and their duration through time.

How can we graphically respresent the silence?

And it won’t end there: music is also made up of silence, the alternating presence of silence and sound.
But since silence has a duration too, we have to understand how it can be graphically depicted.

After today’s lesson you’ll have seen the basic knowledge necessary to begin reading (and writing) notes, among others;

What a bar is in music, and its’ beats
What notes are and how to distinguish them by their duration
What we mean when talking about crotchet, minime and semibreve
What rests are and how to graphically depict them on paper

But you’ll especially have taken the first step into learning to read music, which is the first step to being able to play it on piano or any other instrument from the music sheet.

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Learning material of this lesson

3 videos	27 mins
1. What does it mean to keep time and what is a bar?	8m 27s
2. The first graphical symbol to represent sound: a quarter note	8m 07s
3. Other notes of different durations and musical rests	10m 39s

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Here is the key to learn to read musical notes

How to read musical notes

Today we start our path into the world of reading musical notes.
If you will follow the path where I will lead you, musical writing will not appear as obscure as it probably was for you up to now.

To try to progressively under stand these concepts, we will try to put ourselves into the shoes of those who listen to music and want to find a musical aplhabet to represent it graphically.

With the videos that follow you will learn some fundamental concepts that will allow you to learn to read musical notes.

Learning material of this lesson

2 videos	11 mins
1. How to graphically represent music	4m 13s
2. The properties of sound	7m 04s

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With a Free account you gain immediate access to 15 lessons of piano, theory, harmony, music reading and composition for a total of 36 videos.

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Reading music, why it’s important to be able to

Reading music

Many folks I know often ask me, ‘Is it really that important to know how to read music?’
In this piece we will be approaching the problem and we will look for an answer to this question, that will open up new possibilities of how we can define the study of musical reading.
For starters, we have to admit that it’s not that easy to answer the question ‘Is it really important to be able to read music?’ because everyone has different musical requirements: some people are happy with playing everything exclusively by ear without studying, while others, who have started by self-teaching themselves music, have never studied the issue deeply and now feel they have a lack of knowledge in this sense.

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With a Free account you gain immediate access to 15 lessons of piano, theory, harmony, music reading and composition for a total of 36 videos.

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