How to Learn Music

Anyone who has enough interest in learning music and spends some time working at it can learn all the basics of music. If you strip the expressive qualities and complex techniques out of music, you're left with little more than basic muscle memory and visual comprehension.

On a basic level, music can be divided up into what is known as Clefs. The Clef of a piece of music dictates where the notes are located on the Staff which is five lines which notes can be placed on, above or below. The basic clefs are Treble and Bass. Practically every instrument's music is written for one of those two clefs. Other Clefs like Tenor and Alto clef do exist, but they are not used very often in modern music.

Notes that appear on the Staff represent musical tones and lengths. Regarding tone, a musical note has three basic values: flat, natural and sharp. These refer to the pitch of the note. The three distinctions relate to each other pretty much as they sound: flat is a lower pitch than natural and sharp; sharp is a higher pitch than flat and natural; natural is right in the middle. A piece of music will include a Key Signature along with the Clef. The Key Signature dictates which notes throughout the music will be flat, natural and sharp.

The length of notes can vary depending on the Time Signature of the music. The majority of modern music can be broken into 3 and 4 beat patterns. A piece of music is broken down into individual measures. A measure makes up a complete beat pattern and it can consist of either notes, rests or both. A Rest refers to a period of not playing music. Rests have different lengths like notes do.

Tempo and Dynamics are two other factors that round out the basic concepts of music. Tempo refers to the speed a piece of music is played and Dynamics refers to the loudness of the music. To get an idea of tempo, think of the Star Spangled Banner. This song has a tempo that is medium slow. While music can have a set Tempo, this tempo can also speed up or slow down, depending on the particular piece of music. Like Tempo, Dynamics of music can be at a certain level of loudness that can get louder or softer depending on the particular piece of music. Usually, a piece of music includes notations that dictate the kind of Tempo and Dynamics to be used. A lot of these notations are written in languages like Italian and Spanish, so some basic music terminology research may be needed to comprehend this.

There you have it - the basics of music in a nutshell. Think of music as a language. The basic elements of music can be grasped with a little time, work and of course interest. Moving beyond the basics of music is up to you.

Paul Heingarten has been playing music since 1980. Visit his blog http://www.musicandband.com for articles, ebooks, etc dedicated to music.