Notation for a beginner guitarist

2024 Author: Leah Sherlock | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 05:25

Everyone who wants to learn how to play the guitar virtuoso needs to know a lot of different things, from tuning the instrument itself to extracting sound from it, including scales, chords and dynamic nuances. Understanding all this at once is not easy, but if we talk about basic knowledge for a beginner, which you simply cannot do without, then this, of course, is musical notation.

Anyone who went to school and did not sleep during music lessons knows the basics of musical notation. Therefore, we recall them only in general terms.

Staff

Let's start with the staff - these are the five lines on which the notes are located. Note lines are counted from bottom to top. That is, the first is at the very bottom, and the fifth is at the top. In addition to the main five, additional rulers are sometimes used, they are short and support only one note. The beginning of the staff traditionally denotes the main symbol of musical notation - the treble clef.

Notes and tones

Note, as you know, seven. I will not repeat them, otherwise I will get musical notation for children. I hope older people read this article. Notes can be located in differentplaces of the staff: on the rulers themselves, between them, as well as above or below, with additional lines. The arrangement of notes depends on their octave. The first octave contains notes within five lines: from "to" on the additional one at the bottom, to "si" on the third line. The second one begins with "do" between the third and fourth and ends with "si" above the top additional ruler. Finally, the notes of the small octave are located exclusively on the additional rulers below the staff.

Between each of the adjacent notes (for example, "to" and "re", "la" and "si") there is an interval, which is indicated by a full tone. However, between the notes "mi" and "fa" (as well as between "si" and "to" the next octave) there is a semitone interval. In other words, a tone is two notes taken across a fret. A semitone is notes between adjacent frets. Knowing this principle will help you find any note on the fretboard.

Time signature and beat

Notation for the guitar includes not only playing, but also silence, indicated by pauses. Both notes and rests have different durations: whole, half, quarter, eighth, sixteenth and thirty-second. To indicate the measure of a whole note, you need to stretch it for four counts.

Different note durations are combined in different variations during playing. This is called musical rhythm. On the staff, rhythm is indicated by vertical lines dividing five lines into segments of a certain length. Each one is called a bar.

Flat and sharp

To these accidentals,raising and lowering a note by half a tone, the bekar sign also applies, which cancels two fellow alterations at a given measure. For example, if we see the note “do”, before which there is a sharp, then we need to take the second string not on the second, but on the third fret. A flat, say, before the note "la", means that the note will sound the third string not of the second, like the usual "la", but of the first fret.

Any musical notation will tell you that the sequence of notes when playing a guitar is arranged in a circle from "to" to "si". Each of them corresponds to its own string. The first and sixth strings (thinnest and thickest) are designated the same - the Latin letter E. The fifth string is A, the second is B, the fourth is D, the third is G. This is the classic string guitar tuning.

Of course, this is not the whole musical notation, but only its basics.