PianoVideoLessons | How to read piano music | Year 1, Unit 1, Lesson 1

 

 

 

Lesson 1. How to read piano music

 

Welcome to pianovideolessons.com

Welcome to piano video lessons year 1, lesson 1.

The best way to experience these lessons is on my website pianovideolessons.com

There you'll find the complete lesson index and printables.

In the series of lessons were moving on from the beginner lessons, we learned to play piano without reading music.

In this series, we're going to be learning to play piano while reading on the staff.

In order to complete this lessons, it's important that you know 2 things.

You must know it's all the piano key names, 

and also your piano finger numbers.

So before embarking upon at this year 1 series of lessons, 

it's a very good idea to go back and check those two lessons which I have already taught in the beginner piano course.

You can click appear in the corner and check the information cards for all of the links that I'll be mentioning in this video.

 

 

Notes - High and Low

So let's get started.

In order to playing music, we're going to be reading music on the staff.

And we're gonna be reading notes.

And a note can be represented with just a circle.

That's the most basic form of note and we'll call that a whole note.

So, in order to read those notes, we need to understand a little bit about the piano itself.

So, piano notes, all sounds, of course, but they can be represented visually with these notes.

And sometimes the sound goes higher.

And sometimes the sound goes lower.

If you think about a bird in a tree, you can remember that notes that move up to the right are called high notes.

And if you think of something low on the ground, like maybe an elephants, or a snake, or a shark underwater.

These are the low notes on the piano.

So anytime I refer to high notes, I'm talking about notes that are to the right.

And I'm talking about low notes, I'm talking about notes that are to the left.

So if I visually represent these notes, as high and low, that helps us understand a little bit about the way, the staff works.

So, let's have a look at the concept of the staff.

Because this is where going to be reading the music.

 

 

Music Staff

Here you can see, a staff. It's actually two separate staves that are(is) the plural for staff. for staff

There is one staff at the top, and the staff is five lines.

And this set of 5 lines is for the right hand,

and this set of 5 lines, the lower set, is for the left hand.

So each hand is going to be reading as its own staff.

 

Treble Clef and Bass Clef

At the beginning of the staff, there are some symbols.

This symbol is called the treble clef.

Now if you're going to tune the sound on your stereo, 

and you wanted to adjust the high sounds, you would adjust the treble on your stereo.

So this treble clef is the way we represent the high sounds on the staff for piano.

We usually play these sounds with the right hand because it is convenient.

And we can also play these sounds with the left hand because it's very possible.

But in general and for getting started, we're going to think about using the treble clef on the top staff for the right hand.

If you're going to tune your stereo to adjust the low sounds, you would adjust the bass on your on your car stereo.

And so, base means low sounds and low is in this direction.

So in order to represent these notes on a staff with only 5 lines, we could put them all on this treble staff.

We need(ed) another staff, so we have this bass staff with a bass clef at the beginning.

So if I move down into this range here, I usually use my left hand.

And so this lower staff will represent left-hand notes, especially at the beginning.

But the right hand can play in this area.

So, don't get it in your mind that bass staff is always for the left hand.

The low staff is the left hand staff, and the high staff is the right hand staff.

Awesome. So that helps under help you understand what these 5 lines are for, but we still don't have any notes on the staff.

 

How Notes Move On the Staff

So let's draw some notes.

And like I said before, a note, really can just be a circle.

So I can draw one note, right here.

And if you look at that note, you'll see that it has a line going through the middle of the note.

We'll call this a line note.

If I move it up just a little bit, it's got a line on either side of it.

So in the middle of this note, there is no line.

This is called the space note.

And as I move this note up the staff, it goes to the series of line notes and space notes.

So I can place a note, on a line, or I can space place a note between two lines.

So we would call this note, a line note, because it has a line going through the middle of it, just like a bead on a string.

Going right to the middle of the bead.

And here, we'll call this one a space note and again.

It's because there's only space inside this note.

There's no line going through that note.

When we write music on the staff there are 5 different places.

We could put line notes on the staff, one on each line.

And there are four different spaces where we could write.

Space notes within the staff one in each space.

When we move along the piano, we'll start on a line or space note, and in this case, I've started on a line note.

The note that's beside it is the very closest note, I'm going up in this case, so these are both the same.

They're both on the same line, now if I go up the smallest amount I can, I'll go up to this first space.

If I go up again I'm going to move from this same note, up to the very next note which will put me on another.

Another line, on line 2.

I can move up another note, and will this one be a line note or a space note do you think?

I'm going to(on) move up just a tiny bit here and I'm going to be in space 2.

Again, I can take another step, from space to up.

One white key and and up on the next note, it's a line note.

And I think you can see that I'm building a pattern here.

Every time I go up a note, and I'm alternating between lines and spaces.

So, this is the way that notes move on the staff.

And what we're going to be learning to do is actually recognize each one of these pitches for its own note that it will be representing.

So, rather than just in general moving up the notes, we're actually going to know specifically which notes each of these a line or space notes represents.

So let's have a look at your lesson materials.

You can see here there's a review of everything that I've just told you that music is written on the grand staff.

Um That the top staff is for the right hand and that the bass staff is for the left hand.

Now, just to clarify, that when we're piano music, these two uh the treble staff and the bass staff aren't just hovering beside each other.

They are actually gonna be connected.

Grand Staff

So I'm gonna draw a line down here, that's a bar line.

And then to show that this is played by the same performer there is a brace in front of this bar line.

So anytime you see this brace and bar line with 2 staves, we know it's a grand staff.

And that is what piano music is written on.

And we also said that the treble clef is where the high notes are written, and the bass clef is where the low notes are written.

 

Review and practice

The right hand usually plays treble clef notes, the left hand usually plays bass clef notes.

And then here you can see I've shown an example of a line note.

And then an example of a space note.

So now, it's time for you to practice drawing these.

Just get out your pencil and draw some notes making sure that each one of these has the line going right through the middle of the note.

Make sure that you're not squishing it like this, or squishing it like this, this makes it difficult to read.

Keep your notes centered on the line.

And then you can practice drawing some space notes.

And again, keep your notes centered between these 2 lines, these ones are looking good.

Here is a bad example where I've gone over this line, and here is another bad example where I've gone over this line, and here is a bad example where I didn't touch the lines at all.

So try to make your notes touching the lines on both sides.

And then we can draw the 5 notes going up on each line of the staff.

Just to help us recognize that note will be moving in different directions up or down.

And here we have the 4 space notes.

So go ahead and print out if you haven't already this worksheet and read through the information (to) make sure you understand that all.

We watch any portions of the video that you might need (to re-explain)re-explaining and do the written work.

 

 

Intro to Lesson 2

In lesson 2, we're going to be learning 2 of the notes, middle C and treble G.

And we're gonna be playing a song using those 2 notes called Google Maps.

So click up here in the corner to take yourself to the website and also there's a link to this lesson number 2.

Alright. See you in the next lesson!