More on Music

From the guy what doesn't know much of anything about music ...

If you have heard a song and you are a singer or player, you can figure it out -- you don't need to have the musical notation. This is why folk songs, blues, and a lot of rock require no musical sensing ability beyond that of a good ear. You hear it, you repeat it, and that's how it gets passed along. It's the same way we learn to talk as children.

None of the Beatles could read music. They did all right for a Liverpool bar band.

If, on the other hand, you want to play a piece of music you have never heard before, that's where the notation is useful. The language gives you the notes, the timing, rhythm, keys, all that, and if you can sight read and are a master of your instrument, you can play a piece flawlessly having never experienced it before. In the days before recordings and lacking direct contact, if you wanted to play a Bach fugue, all you needed was the sheet music and a will.

These days, it's easier. Goggle it, listen, and for a guitar, tablature or TAB will be enough because you already know the other stuff. (TAB shows you the fingering on a stringed instrument, using a number to indicate a fret, upon a line that represents the string. You do a schematic of the fretboard and it tells you exactly where to put your fingers. )

Me, I don't play songs I've never heard. No reason to go there. That's why I'm not a musician of any -- pardon the pun -- note.

Part of what you get instinctively by listening is the cadence. In standard notation, the time is usually denoted by a fractional symbol on the staves: 4/4, 3/4, 6/8, etc. And there are other symbols on the staves that indicate where you should slow down or speed up. I love the word "rubato," which means you can mess around with the time as needed. So if somebody says, "Hey, you lost the groove there, dude." you can say, "Naw, man, it was rubato, you know?"

I love it that the word "rubato," from the Italian, means, literally, "robbed."

4/4 is the most common time in western music, and sometimes you see it indicated by a big "C," which started out meaning one thing but which has come to mean "common time."

Most blues and rock are in common time, as are many folk songs. When you hear the lead singer cranking up with "One, two, three, four!" that's 4/4 time. Usually two of those beats get the accent. Front beat, back beat, middle beat ...

So the bottom number is the note that gets the beat and the top number how many such notes appear in each measure. So 3/4 time would be one-two-three, one-two-three, and most waltzes are in this time. As is our earlier musical example by the Beatles when talking about key, "Blackbird."

Notes start with a whole one and then get broken down into fractions -- half-note, quarter-note, eighth, etc., each has a different symbol, and they have funny names. An eighth note, for instance, is a quaver. A sixty-fourth note is a hemidemisemiquaver. Is that fun, or what?

And that pretty much exhausts my knowledge of that subject ...