Music Theory : Lesson 1

I will begin a series of Music Theory class. I want to make sure that this Music Theory is easy to understand and short. All my materials are reproduce from http://www.smu.edu/totw/rhythm.htm

pitch vs note vs rhythm

is actually

frequency of note vs note vs how long the note is sustained


To indicate rhythm, man create notes below to indicate how long to hold the note which whole note need to be hold 32 times longer than thirty-second note:


To indicate pitch, well, use a staff (five lines) . Put the music note higher on the staff for higher pitch (frequency) and lower part of staff for lower pitch. Example below, highest G is higher pitch than lowest C4.


Rhythm can be divided by half using dot:

Rhythm can be divided more than half using tuplets:
Tuplets are very hard to understand. Explaining it will make it worst. Anyway, I'll still try. There's number on top which specify how many notes within that tuplets. To count how long you take to play this notes, you need to minus other notes and see what you're left with. In the left part of that example, the calculation is:

4 quarter notes - (1 quarter note + 2 eighth notes + 1 quarter notes) = 1 quarter notes.

So play the three eighth notes tuplets within 1 quarter notes time frame. Understand? No? It's okay. Don't worry. Skip this and come back later and reread. Or search from googles for different explanation such as http://www.musictheory.halifax.ns.ca/19triplets.html

This is end of lesson 1.