Day Nine - Clefs, Time Signatures & Waits

Today I decided to actually absorb some knowledge about the alphabet of Music. With help of the internet and some friends, I thought I would start from scratch. Although I already know a bit about the clefs etc, I thought I would lose Face quicker than the A-Team in a Maze if I didn't know all the basics. (Joke shamelessly stolen from Not Going Out because it was that good).

And so, I crafted the following diagram with my own bloody hands to describe the very basics of Music.


While we're only interested in the Treble Clef with the Violin, it's useful to just see how the two fit together. The Red "C" on both staffs depict the same note, the middle C. The letters in Blue are the letters in between the lines. I remember the Treble clef simply by thinking "FACE", but the Bass clef is a little less obvious, so I learnt the Mnenomic "All Cows Eat Grass". As for the other marks on this diagram. The "Squiggle" is a quarter bar rest. As we have 4 notes per bar here, we need 3 to make the last bar "Valid".

Last but not least, we come to the 4/4 notation after the clef. This is the time signature of the piece which tells you how many notes to expect per measure and the length of each note. The top value is the number of notes per measure, while the bottom value tells you how long each of those notes is (as a fraction over one). For example, the standard time measure 4/4 shows 4 quarter (1/4) notes per measure. 3/4 shows 3 quarter (1/4) notes per measure. Finally, (6/2) for instance would be 6 half (1/2) notes per measure. Grooby baby.