Beginning Music Concepts

When you look at a major sports event like the Super Bowl, World Series, or US Open, what are we really viewing? We are viewing people, who spent a lot of time becoming very good at the foundation principles of their job. With football, for instance, the game is the game. It is the same game, whether you’re playing on a high school, university, or pro team level. But the time spent in the weight room, running patterns, catching, blocking, etc. is what makes a championship player. Great knowledge and practice in the fundamentals of the game.

The same is true about music.

Now, there is not a lot to learn, and you only need to learn it once. Music is really not a theory, it's a FACT, a fact that never changes. Too many times this gets overlooked. This FACT applies to any and all instruments. If you know a musical scale on one instrument, that same exact musical scale (the same notes) applies to every other instrument. There is no difference. This foundational education is what we're about to learn, really learn, and learn to apply it.

The five terms listed below are the foundation blocks of music. Let’s explore them and catapult ourselves once and for all into complete music understanding and personal creativity (and have fun while doing it).

Notes

Notes are individual sounds, in this case played on a piano.

Intervals

An interval is 2 notes played together or separate in a consecutive order and the relationship between those 2 notes

Scale

A scale is a set of musical notes defined by a set pattern. In this example, the 7 note Major scale is played.

Chord

A chord is 3 or more notes played together.

Rhythm

Rhythm is the timing of musical events that occur over a specified time period.

Don't worry if all that felt a little vague, Clarity is coming.

We will start our journey here with a note, a simple single-pitched sound.

The piano is probably the most familiar instrument to all of us, so let’s base our journey using it.

Below is an 88 key piano keyboard.

An acoustic grand piano has 88 playable piano keys (in this case keys refers to the 88 individual physical wooden keys, black and white).

Starting from the far left we have the low pitched notes

And continuing to the far right we have the high notes.

FUNDAMENTALS

A note is played on the piano by pressing down on a piano key.

When a key is pressed, it makes a sound, which we call the start of the heard sound. The note continues to make a sound which we call the duration (length of sound).

When you release the key the sound ends.

When you release the note, the sound stops. This is a pretty simple concept, I know, but just making sure we are all on the same page with clarity.

The time between the start of the note and the release of the note represents the note duration. Just hold on to that thought, it is very important. We will be visiting the term duration quite a bit.

Here are several notes played that have the same duration:

Here are several notes played that have different duration:

How hard or soft you press down on the piano key dictates how soft or loud a note will sound.

Here is the same note played with different levels of loudness:

1. The  note start
2. The  duration
3. The  release
4. And its  loudness