You might find that understanding or reading music, or singing the song, i.e. the actual notes, isn’t the major problem. For many singers, rhythm is the main issue. It’s easy to get lost, hard to find the accent of the beat and it’s generally all a mystery.

This is particularly true if the performance is sounding “flat”, i.e. no emotion behind the song. Feeling the rhythm as you sing also helps enormously with:

1. Phrasing, i.e. feeling your own internal rhythm
2. Which in turn helps you find your own voice
3. Good phrasing. This stops the performance from feeling too uniform, thus getting boring, i.e. if it’s a repetitive song, singing everything the same.

Feeling rhythm is as much of a learned response as actually singing the song, and just as important. Once again, it’s something that you have to work at, so it becomes part of the emotional memory of the body. In other words, you have to learn feel it, not think it. Over time feeling time becomes second nature.

And “having good time”, i.e. singing in time and with a good feel, is also just as important as good breathing technique and singing in tune and pitch. You always know where you are in the song for one thing (at the beginning of the verse or about to sing the chorus for example), and on a deeper level you can play with the song and give your performance greater depth and subtlety.

If you find rhythm is a big problem then help is always at hand. You can learn to be in time, just as you can learn to sing in pitch with good tone.

The first practical thing to do is tap your foot, or a part of your body, in time to the music as you’re singing. If the song’s in 4/4, the most common Western time signature, just count “1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and” (if you have no knowledge of music, or how to read it, then I suggest that you also read the articles “How Music Is Constructed” and “How To Read Music”. Just the basics, but it should help to shed some light on the subject).

Try to feel the first beat of the bar, what musicians call, strangely, “1“. Listen to the song and try to hear the rhythm. There’s usually an accent on the first beat of the bar, often with the bass drum or bass guitar if it’s, for example, a track with the classic line up of drums, bass and guitar or piano.

Rhythm And Rhythm Notation

Understanding how syncopation, i.e. rhythm, is created and notated can also help tremendously when learning to feel time.

As I mentioned in the other theory articles, music is extremely mathematical. And rhythm plays a great part of that equation. We’ve looked at how music is broken down into bars, and how they make up the structure of a song in the aforementioned article “How To Read Music”. To re-cap, here’s a breakdown of the variations of notes one might expect in music:

We start with a Breve. Two whole notes, 8 beats:

A breve

Then a semibreve, or whole note. 4 beats. 1 note to a 4/4 bar:

To a minim, two beats in length, 2 to a 4/4 bar:

And a crotchet. One beat in length, four crotchets to a 4/4 bar:

And a quaver. 8 beats to a 4/4 bar:

2 quavers can also be notated as:

or a single quaver:

The stem can be drawn with the stem facing up or down, shown by the flag on the right hand side of the note, depending on the path of the music.

Double the time of quavers are semiquavers, 16 beats to a bar:

The double line at the top shows it’s a semiquaver.

A single semiquaver looks like this:

The squiggly line after the notes in this diagram in a semiquaver rest (for more on rests see below).

To a demisemiquaver, the same as a semiquaver but 32 beats to the bar, shown with 3 notes to the tail instead of two.

Syncopation

Syncopation is physically created as soon as we move away from the regimented use of a note. We create syncopation in musical notation by using dots, ties, rests and triplets. Here’s a syncopation example. One bar intro ‘in time’ and then one bar of syncopated rhythm, shown below:

Hear The Bar Above

4 straight beats and then a crotchet, two quavers, a quaver rest, a quaver, a quaver rest, and a quaver.

(As a musical check note, you might see rhythm notated as a small ‘x’, with the tails etc the same as normal notes. A drummers part, for example).

However, we need to feel the beat we’re singing, even if we’re singing the song from sheet music. Some people have this ability naturally, and for others, as I mentioned earlier, it’s a learned response. The “emotion memory” of the body has to learn to count, so that you always know where you are in the song and where the beginning of the next bar is.

Here are a few tips to get you started:

1. Get to grips with the rhythm: clap some different rhythms. Start easy and then get more complicated.

First in straight4/4 time: first crotchets, then quavers, then semiquavers :

Clap along to straight crotchets, then quavers then semiquavers

2. Now clap on 1 and 3, i.e. the 1st and 3rd beats of a bar:

Clap along to 1 and 3

3. Now every 2nd and 4th beat, called, even more spookily, “2 and 4″. In 4/4 time, the 2 and 4 accent is used time and again. Getting to feel this rhythm is particularly useful:

Clap along to 2 and 4

Now clap the same thing to a 4/4 metronomic beat:

Click track

Once you feel you have it, experiment with how, you personally, feel the beat. Accenting the 2 and the 4, are you right in the center of the beat, or behind it? Or naturally ahead? In Jazz, having a loose, groovy feel to this rhythm is called “swinging”. Pop music is generally more on the beat, i.e. in the center. Rock can be both. Indie can be both but tends to be more on the loose side. Soul can be both but is best, for me, when it’s behind the beat. If you listen for it, you can usually hear it in how the drums and bass work with each other. Pop music tends to be more in the center because not only does the music seem to demand it (and it wants you to dance, goddammit!), but is quite often a programmed loop, quantized (keeping it to a regular, exact, beat) and programmed in. So the music feels more regimented, and thus in the center. Of course, you can allow for this in the programming, but when something is played live its always going to breathe better. However, sometimes the exact beat makes for some very interesting textures within a song, so once again there is never any real hard and fast rule with song making.

4. Chose a tune you like that’s relatively simple, where you can hear the instruments clearly. It being the rug that ties the room together, I’m going to stick with Amazing Grace for the moment, using the (instrumental) 4/4 soul version from the How To Ad-Lib article as a demonstration. Try clapping along to the track below:

amazing-grace-soul-instrumental.mp3

There’s a very loose feel to this version. Try to clap along on the 2 and 4 and feel the loose rhythm in your body. Try dancing and clapping – even if it’s just tapping a foot.

And few other things to try:

1. Mark the 4/4 time and try to also accent the first beat of every bar. Then do the same thing with the second, third and fourth.

2. Now get used to counting in double time: ’1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and’. This makes it much easier to feel the rhythm, and also get those little accents that are just in-between the beat etc.

3. Try mixing up the 1 and the 3 and the 2 and the 4. 2 bar of 2 and 4 and then 2 of 1 and 3 etc.

4. Now try doing the same thing but put in the odd accent on the different notes in the bar as well, for example clapping on the 1 and 3 and 4.

5. Now try doing the same as in 4. above, while counting 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 at the same time.

6. Now try doing the same as the above while moving in rhythm. Once again, even if it’s tapping a toe!

7. And when you feel you have the basics down, try clapping a solo, like a drummer. Mix up the time etc, but, mainly, try and hear the music and how you’re interacting with it. Feel the rhythm, and trust your instincts.

8. It needn’t be that complicated, but try and make the phrases you clap relate to each other, like you’re telling a story.

9. And start to experiment with where you come in on the bar. Starting on a pickup beat into a bar (one and two and three and four and) sounds much hipper than right on the beat of one, for example.

If you’re still really stuck, try and learn a solo by ear. It’s amazing what the subconscious retains from concentrating that hard! Ella Fitzgerald is a good one to try. You’ll pick up on her phrasing, and she’s always clear and spot on with her timing.

Here’s a clapping example:

Clapping Example 1

And a slightly harder one (listen out for the triplets):

Clapping Example 2

By now, you’re hopefully listening to and hearing music very differently, so now might be the time to go back and clap along to the

amazing-grace-soul-instrumental.mp3

‘ad-libbing’, i.e. making stuff up, and see if it’s made a difference. And also remember, the spaces in between, the rests, are just as important as the notes you clap, so it can be very simple.

In fact, you’ll find that you have a different feel and perception of the “time” when you come back to singing a song.

If you really found the above exercises hard, start out with even simpler rhythms, then gradually make them more and more intricate. Try interweaving them so that they tell a story, are in some way related to each other, even for just a couple of bars.

5. Now let’s sing the song. Read the lyrics like a poem. Try to connect with the feeling of the song through your heart and diaphragm, a relaxed diaphragm being the doorway to your intuition and emotion.

6. Now sing the song to the instrumental track above, and see if it’s made any difference.

Here’s an example of the soul-type version with vocals for reference:

Amazing-grace-Soul-version

I mentioned in the clapping section above that the spaces in between the notes are just as important as the notes themselves. By the same token, the same applies when singing a song.

(There’s also a folk, jazz and country version to try, which you can find in the ‘How To Ad-Lib, Or Improvise’ article).

A Few More Tips

If you tried the above to no avail, then here are a few more tips that might be helpful:

1. If we imagine that the diaphragm is not only just the breathing instrument of the voice, but also where the feeling comes from, the solar plexus is the center of the emotion of the song. Listen to your instinct from there. It’ll tell you what to do. If it tells you to move your body in a different way, then try it out. If it feels wrong, then you are on the way to doing it the right way. If it feels right, odds on you’re truly expressing the song. It’s the whole body expressing the song, balanced, that gets real and lasting results. If you’re voice is centered, and you’re using your core energy, it’s OK to move around because you know where you’re going back to, where your internal spirit level is.

2. A singer is, at best, part of the whole band. Music is always a sum of the parts put together to make: music. So listen to the other musicians, especially if you’re in a band. If you’re singing karaoke, try to hear the different instruments within the song, and how the piece is “put together”. Especially how the rhythm of the song works with the chords. See if you can hear the difference between the musicians. And how they interact with one another. Hear the bass line. Hear the feel of the drums – is the drummer or the rhythm track behind the beat, in the center, or ahead? Hear if the drum and bass are playing together, and are “locked in” or “tight”, daddio, i.e. is the rhythm section tight?

3. As I mentioned earlier, you can take this further and learn a few solos (see the section below, “Learning to Ad-Lib, or Improvise”).

4. Record yourself. What we hear in our heads is often not what an audience hears. I’ve often found that you can “get it” when you hear what you’re truly doing, or at least know the next step forward.

5. Choose songs that you love, and that mean something to you personally. Let the audience come to you, rather than you focusing solely on them and what they might be thinking of you. This always results in losing focus and confidence. And last but not least, commit to the song completely. You then stay in the meaning of the song while staying centered.

By ‘commit to the song’, I mean ‘make the decision to focus purely on what you’re doing here and now, and not judge it’. Easier said than done, but this can be a learned response as much as anything else. And the decision has to come from you: make the decision that the whole of your body be connected to the song. The first line of the chain is to feel the song in the center of your body, like a ball the size of your fist behind your diaphragm (for me it’s a white one which stops it getting tense, but that is of course arbitrary). The next action is to relax the diaphragm as you breathe in, and so on up the chain until the note comes out of your mouth. The decision to commit to the song, and to the meaning of the song, is made before you’ve even taken a breath.

6. In other words, once you’ve tried the technical stuff, forget it and surrender to the song, the feeling and story of the song. See if the body takes over, now that you’ve started to re-program it, and if you’re singing the song differently as your focus changes.

Learning to Ad-Lib, or Improvise

If you found the exercises in the “Rhythm And Rhythm Notation” section useful, as I mentioned above, then you can take this idea further and learn some jazz solos. Ah! you might be thinking. She’s sung a lot of jazz. I hate jazz, it’s so far away from the music I like. In which case, of course, don’t do it. But for the curious, I’ve tried this out with quite a few students, and it’s always been helpful. It helps amazingly with learning to build a song through phrasing, and to ad-lib at the end of a tune (whatever genre). If you noticed a difference doing the clapping exercises in the section above, then learning to put notes to the syncopation is the next logical step. The article “How to Ad-lib, or Improvise” deals with the basics of these issues. Most modern genre music is either directly related to the blues, or a watered down version of Jazz and European harmony. So there’s an element of jazz in there, even if it’s just an F7 chord! When learning to improvise, obviously, start easy. Try some simple blues licks for starters. Sometimes, that’s all you need. If you’re trying to find your own voice, or have a real problem with rhythm (or any number of reasons in between), then try something medium, then really hard, i.e. build up to it. Ad-libbing is like learning a different language. It might seem like a Herculean task, but in my experience, once again it can be really fun.

If improvising just isn’t your thing, then once again just try clapping along to one of your favorite songs. Listen to the rhythm, the instruments and how they all fit together. Try to isolate them and hear how everything works together.

Ending A Song

Lastly, you might have the time down, but ending the song is causing all sorts of problems. If you’re singing with a band and have the luxury of practice, then first of all work out what you’re going to do. Most endings are pretty obvious. Three times round the last phrase, a pause and then a chord or two for a ballad, for example. This is easier with well-known modern genre songs, because everyone knows the famous version, or has the sheet music in front of them, and you play and sing it like the record. So just learn what the original singer did first of all (not ideal, obviously, since you want to sing any song in your own way. Once you’ve learnt the original, you can experiment with different endings etc). The issues with how to end a song usually come in the genres of rock, blues, jazz and folk. With rock, you usually rehearse or have written the song, or you have the original singer once again (the article “How To Lead A Band, How To Count In And End A Tune” might be useful here). If you’re in a live situation, are at the end of the song and don’t know what to do, look at the keyboard player or guitar player (they’re at the front of the stage, usually, so everyone can see them), and follow their direction. A downward motion with the hand usually means a chord, or else they’ll make a movement like “end of song” (a finger slashed across the neck being a popular sign). And if you trust your instinct, you can usually tell where the tune is headed, and hear as the chords are resolving to an end of the song. And if not, then watch that keyboard or guitar player. So follow the band, and once again resist the temptation to just go for it and be hopelessly wrong, i.e. the band knows how to finish the song, so follow their lead. If you know the arrangement and feel confident, then take charge and give the signals to end the song.

Many thanks to:

Pianist, composer and arranger Terry Disley for playing and arranging the soul version of Amazing Grace

terrydisley.com

wikipedia.com

I mention in that article how mathematical music is, and musical notation (for example, sheet music) is no exception. Everything is split up into parts and segments, starting with the whole form of a song, right down to the millisendth of a note, and vice versa. When you understand the form, and how each increment of that form is broken down, i.e. notated, then reading music is relatively easy.

3 Octaves C To C

With sheet music, a three octave scale in C would be written like this:

Low C to High C Scale

If we think in terms of a piano keyboard, middle C is the note in red. Anything below that is part of the “bass clef”, the curly sign on the bottom left of the diagram. Anything above that is the “treble clef”, and is described by the sign on the top left hand side of the music. The time signature is also shown on the left hand side of the music, in this case 4/4 time, the most common of time signatures. A bar means a whole section of that time signature, i.e. four beats. The horizontal groups of lines in the diagram that make up both the treble and the bass clef are called “staves”. There are 5 lines grouped together in a stave.

In the sheet music above, the staves are broken down into 6 blocks by vertical lines. Each block is called a bar, and denotes 4 beats, thus creating the 4/4 time signature indicated at the beginning of the music. The musical notes are then notated in time the with beat of the music, and thus the pacing of the bars.

Notes can be placed on a bar in the white spaces, or on the black lines, each line of the stave representing a note on the scale.

For the black notes E G B D F I learnt this rhyme as a child:

“Every Good Boy Deserves Favor”

And for the white notes it was F.A.C.E:

“F.A.C.E.”, face.

Notes

The notes in the music above are “crotchets”, meaning a single beat, and in 4/4 time, there would be 4 crotchets to a bar, making four single beats, 1,2,3,4. Once again, music being mathematical, a single bar can be split into further increments. We start with a Breve, often called a double whole note in American and German terminology. One note, 8 beats. It’s either shown over two bars (yet again, in 4/4 time):

Hear A breve

Or notated like this:

The diagram on the left hand side shows a hollow oval note head, like a whole note, with one or two vertical lines on either side. An alternative notation consists of two adjacent hollow oval note heads, as in the double noted bar on the right .

SemiBreve

Once again sometimes called a whole note in American and German terminology.

A semibreve is 4 counts long. So in 4/4 time, a semibreve would look like this:

Hear A semibreve

A Minim

A minim is two beats, the above diagram showing 2 minims in a 4/4 bar.

Hear A Minim

A Crotchet.

Four beats to the bar.

4-Crotchets

A Quaver

8 beats to the bar.

Hear the bar above

Quavers can also be split up into increments. So two quavers look like this:

Hear the bar above

A single quaver is notated like this:

The stem can be drawn facing up or down, shown by the flag on the right hand side of the note, depending on the path of the music.

Double this time are semiquavers, 16 beats to a bar:

Hear the bar above

The double line at the top shows it’s a semiquaver.

A single semiquaver looks like this:

The squiggly line after the notes in this diagram in a semiquaver rest (see below).

To a demisemiquaver, 32 beats to the bar, which is just getting silly:

Rests

If there’s a space in the music, or rest, this is shown as:

A whole bar:

This bar rest also translates as a two bar rest, when it’s shown, for example, after a semibreve:

The single bar rest (squiggly sign), meaning one beat:

The above 4/4 bar shows a crotchet, a crotchet rest and a two bar rest.

A quaver rest looks like this:

And a semiquaver rest has a double tail on it, shown after the two semiquavers:

And a demisemiquaver rest looks like this:

Keys

OK, so that’s the basic notes and rests, and how they’re shown on the stave. Now let’s look at keys, i.e. what they are and how to recognize them. I mentioned keys, scales and chords in the “How Music Is Constructed” article. Every song has a key (with only rare exceptions, for example, free Jazz). The key of a piece of music can be a complicated subject. But, in a broad sense, it means that the note the key pertains to is the song’s harmonic center, or tonic. In other words, if the song was in C for example, you could play the note of C more or less throughout the piece as a bass note and hear the key (see the section ‘Finding a song’s key’ for more info).

Music is also generally written in either a major or a minor key. The major or minor depends on the scale on which the key is based. The key of a song is shown at the left hand side of the stave.

The Key of C looks like the very first scale above, with nothing on the left hand side of the stave, having no sharps or flats. “C” is also sometimes written to denote the key.

The Flat Keys

F : 1 flat, Bb:

Bb: 2 flats. Bb and Eb:

Eb: 3 flats. Ab, Eb and Bb:

Ab: 4 flats. Ab, Bb, Db, Eb:

Db: 5 flats. Db, Eb, Gb, Ab, Bb:

Gb: 6 flats. Gb, Ab, Bb, Cb, Db, Eb:

Cb: 7 flats. Fb, Gb, Ab, Bb, Cb, Db, Eb:

By the time you get to Db, it’s getting ridiculous. 5 flats and above make these keys really hard to play for any musician. By just changing the key to either C or D, a simple half step in either direction (whichever is most comfortable for you, the singer), you’re making everyone’s life much easier.

The Sharp Keys

G: 1 sharp. F:

D: 2 sharps. F and C:

A: 3 sharps. F, C and G:

E: 4 sharps. F, C, G and D:

B: 5 sharps. F, C, G, D and A:

F#: 6 sharps. F, C, G, D, A and E:

C#: 7 sharps. F, C, G, D, A, E and B:

The same applies as above. From B onwards, these are pretty redundant keys.

Minor Keys

I mentioned relative minor keys in the article “How Music Is Constructed“, and how they relate to the cycle of 5ths:

A minor key has a flattened 3rd, 6th and 7th note. Each minor key is related to a major key with the same amount of sharps or flats.

So, looking at the diagram, it shows that the key of C is related to A minor. The key of C has no sharps or flats:

and neither does the key of A minor:

And so on round the cycle: the relative minor of G is D minor, D is B minor etc.

Finding A Song’s Key

If you have sheet music that doesn’t have a key written in the left hand corner, you can find the key in a number of ways:

1. It’s quite often the first or last chord, or else the chord the first chord resolves to.
2. It’s the predominant bass note (if the key is F, for example, you can pretty much keep playing an F in the bass and it’ll sound right).
3. If you have a keyboard or guitar, then if you can pick out chords it becomes much simpler. You’ll see certain chords repeating themselves. If the key is G, for example, you’ll find yourself playing the F# again and again. A big sign that the key is G.

Half Tones, or Semitones

What about half notes, or semitones, i.e. the equivalent of a white to a black know on the piano? This is notated by sharps and flats:

The diagram and the sheet music above show F to F#, a semitone.

Playing up octave using every note, i.e. every semitone, is called a “chromatic scale”.

Sharpening And Flattening Notes

If you want to write a note that’s not in the key of the piece, for example a semitone higher or lower than the current note you’re playing or singing, then this is notated by a flat or sharp sign before the note.

Hear The Bar Above

Once you’ve assigned the command to the music with a raised or sharpened sign, it’ll keep being played as such until you tell the music to do otherwise. So if you want to go back to the original note that fits in with the key of the song, then the opposite sign is used to once more raise or lower the note a semitone. This snippet is in the key of C. F is sharpened to F sharp, and then flattened back to F.

Dots

Hear the bar above

In the example above, there’s a dot after the crotchet, the first note. A dot after any note means “half as much again”. This makes the count of the dotted crotchet 1 1/2 beats, the quaver (half a beat) completing the first half of the bar, i.e. 2 beats, and a 2 bar rest completing the 4/4 bar.

The dotted minim 3 beats, the crotchet 1.

Ties

Ties work in 2 ways. They either simply tie the note together, as in the bar below:

Hear the bar above

A dotted crotchet (1 1/2 beats) a tied crotchet (1 1/2 beats), a quaver rest and a quaver for the first bar, with a semibreve the next bar.

The second crotchet is tied because it’s in effect tied to the 2nd half of the bar. The first dotted crotchet and quaver being the first two counts, the crotchet, rest and quaver making up the 2nd 2 counts.

Hear the bar above

A tied, dotted minim make up the two bars above. When a note is tied it means: play it once, for the duration specified. In this case across one bar into the next. The note above is 5 counts (the first minim being 2 counts, the next dotted minim, 3 counts).

Syncopation

“Dots” and ties create syncopation – changing the length of notes so they’re no longer regimented, i.e. strictly in time. Mixing up the length of the notes creates rhythm, and as soon as rhythm is introduced into a song, it becomes syncopated.

The examples used in the ‘Dots’ and ‘Ties’ sections above demonstrates this.

When thinking of the rhythm of a song, for example 4/4 time, it can help to count in quavers: one and two and three and four and etc.

For more on syncopation, check out the article: ‘How To Feel Rhythm‘.

Triplets

Hear The Bar Above

Another thing to now throw into the mix before moving on is triplets. This is simply a single note, but counted in three. To count a crotchet triplet, as in the bar above, hold your hand in an upright position and count “One, two, three”, moving your hand ‘up, down, up’. One is the upright position, two, the down, three the up position once more.

Triplets can be counted over any value of note: breve, minim, quaver etc.

Articulation

Articulation actually means, “how things are articulated”, or joined together, for example a skeleton or the syllables of a word. In music, the articulation means “what happens in between the notes”. The rests, the accents, the expression of the piece. And articulation depends on what’s at the beginning and end of each segment, as well as in between. We’ve already looked at rests and dots, and will be looking at some basic terms over the next few paragraphs.

Accents

In music notation, an accent mark means “accent the note”. The most common form being the fourth note in the diagram above.

The first note means staccato, meaning the last part of a note should be silenced to create separation between it and the following note, creating a note about half as long as the note value indicated.

The second note means staccatissimo and means a staccato note even smaller than staccato.

The third note, the teepee accent, means ‘play with a combination of accent and staccato‘.

The fourth note, the Accent mark, means that the marked note should have an emphasized beginning and then taper off rather quickly.

The fifth note, the tenudo mark, indicates that a note is to be separated with a little space from surrounding notes.

Legato

Legato is the opposite of staccato, and means that the notes are played “long”, very connected, like there’s no space between them, i.e. continuously. In the bar above, legato indicates this musical feel.

Slurs

A slur looks the same as a tie but has a very different function. Indicating a legato feel, a slur sign means “blend the notes together seamlessly so there’s no space between them”. With a tie, the note doesn’t move, but is “held”.

Slurs can be performed quite fast, as in the sheet music above. Along with violin sections, a lot of singers use slurs as an artifice, often to great effect. Christina Aguilera, Maria Carey, Celine Dion, Beyonce et al. Usually based around a blues or pentatonic scale (check out scales in the “How Music is Constructed” article), they’re a form of ad-libbing. And for more on ad-libbing check out the article: ‘How To Ad-Lib, or Improvise’.

Portamento

The first sign above means Portomento and/or glissando. Portomento means to wobble the note very obviously, similar to using a heavy vibrato, and glissando means to wobble the note and glide, upwards or downwards, a technique used extensively in opera. The bottom symbol above shows the sign for ‘glissando up’ and ‘glissando down’. Portamento was also used extensively by early sythesizer players (think Rick Wakeman), rock guitarists when using the whammy bar(nearly every heavy metal guitarist alive or dead), and, last but not least, the classic portomento instrument, the organ. Hammond in particular. Plus church organs and everything above and between.

Scoops and Falls Offs

These signs are used by composers to show they want a slide down from the note, or a scoop up to it. They haven’t been standardized (except maybe for glissando, the last one, yet their appearance is pretty explanatory.

Grace Notes

Hear example

A grace note means, in essence, an ornamental note, an embellishment to the original. Either on the way up or down to the target note. Used extensively in classical music, this kind of embellishment is usually left up to the taste and skill of a performer in modern genre music, but occasionally you might see it notated.

Tempo Terms

Grave – Very Slow

Largo, Lento – Slow

Larghetto – A little faster than Largo

Adagio – Moderately Slow

Andante – “Walking” Tempo

Andantino – A little faster than Andante

Allegretto – A little slower than Allegro

Allegro – Fast

Vivace – Lively

Presto – Very Fast

Prestissimo – Very Very Fast

Moderato – Moderate(ly)

Molto – Very

Accel., Accelerando - Gradually becoming faster

Rit., Ritardando – Gradually becoming slower

Songs

We’ve now looked at the basics of music notation, let’s take a look at some sheet actual music and what you might expect to encounter.

Songs come in many shapes and sizes, and, although rules are made to be broken, most songs are written in the form of either a verse, or verse and chorus, or verse, chorus and bridge. The classic form for a song is verse, verse, bridge, verse. This form of song is called a “standard”, and refers to the works of composers such as Cole Porter and Irving Berlin. Usually 16 bars for each verse and 8 for the bridge (middle bit), 32 bars in total. Modern genre songs often veer away from this format, so you might just get a verse and a chorus repeated with a small solo section, for example. Or just a riff or hook, repeated at various times throughout the song (for example, rap and hip hop).

Let’s look at the formation of the song used in the “Singing A Song – Putting It All Together” section of the program, the timeless “Amazing Grace”. In this song there are simply 16 bars to each verse, which make it like a traditional Folk song. So we need only look at a single verse to see the basic form of the whole song. To demonstrate this, the version below is a simplified form of the chords and tune, in the key of Eb.

Hear the verse above

Not the most inspiring of versions when there’s no groove, i.e. syncopation, just the basic tune. However, once again we have the time signature in the top left hand side of the sheet music, 3/4 time, demonstrated by the click track. One and two and three.

The chords are played depending on the bars indicated. The notes of the tune are part of the chord within the bar.

This sheet music is split into the treble clef (higher) and bass clef (lower). In this instance, the chords are in the bass clef, the tune in the treble clef. It’s in the key of E flat, shown at the left hand side of the music.

The beginning chords are E flat, the key of the song, then A flat, the fourth note in the key of E flat, and then back to E flat again. And the tune fits in to the key of E flat with every note:

The 9^th (the lyric ‘how’) simply means that from the root of E flat, or wherever you start the scale, you keep counting up 9 notes. So after an octave, E would become the 9^th, G the 10, A flat the 11^th, B flat the 12^th and C the 13^th.

Amazing Grace Full Song

And moving on to the full sheet music of the Amazing Grace version (above) used in the Full Program section “Putting It All Together: Singing A Song”:

This is another 3 stave version of the sheet music, with voice, piano and bass in that order (piano and bass are grouped by the curly sign at the left hand side of the page). It’s in 3/4 time and the key of Eb, with a 4 bar intro.

The chords have been somewhat changed from the first ‘straighter’ version, bringing out the blues and Gospel feel of the song (for more on chords, chord voicings and construction and how they ‘fit in’ to a song, check out the article “How To Ad-Lib, Or Improvise”. There are four different vocal versions of Amazing Grace, soul, Jazz, Folk and Country, with sheet music).

D.S.Al Coda

There’s one sign used in the sheet music above that’s net yet been mentioned, however, D.S. al Coda. Loosely translated, this means ‘ repeat back to the coda sign’. And when the coda is reached, i.e. the coda symbol, to jump to the end of the piece, symbolized by a second coda symbol, and to play to the end. This is notated in the music above as a coda sign at letter A:

There are repeat signs in the same bar of the music. On the next page at the end of the second set of staves is another repeat sign. These two signs are always seen together and mean, of course, ‘play round and round’. The writing ‘repeat A (coda sign) X 5 take Coda last X means just that: 5 verses and then the coda sign, the circle with a cross in it, and jumping to the second coda sign with Coda written by it, to the last 5 bars of the tune.

And So…

There are a plethora of examples of the notation described earlier in the article in the “Amazing Grace Full Version” sheet music above. Semibreves, minims, crotchets, quavers, triplets, rests, a letter A, dots, ties, slurs, a Rallentando, coda, repeat signs et al. Ah yes, and the little sign at the end of the song, the slur with a dot above it on the very last bar, means ‘pause’.

For more information on how to read sheet music, chord voicings and musical notation check out the article “How To Ad-Lib, Or Improvise”. There are four different versions of Amazing Grace (soul, Jazz, folk and Country) with sheet music explained and vocal MP3 examples.

Many thanks to:

Musician/composer/arranger Terry Disley for arranging and writing out the Amazing Grace Full Version sheet music:

terrydisley.com

http://en.wikipedia.org

http://www.theoreticallycorrect.com/MusicFiction/index.html

http://www.dolmetsch.com/index.htm

http://cnx.org/content/m11884/latest/

http://library.thinkquest.org

for many of the above diagrams and information.