More On Notes, and Introducing Time and Tempo

The six strings of a guitar are tuned (from the bottom up) to the notes of E, A, D, G, B and E.

One thing to understand about the guitar is that guitar music is written up one octave. This is to enable the whole range of the guitar to be written on the treble staff (right hand on the keyboard). This places the guitar in the category of a transposing instrument or an instrument whose played notes sound at a different pitch from those written and saves the guitarist from having to bother with the bass clef (left hand on the keyboard).

The unfortunate bass guitarist, on the other hand, whose four strings are tuned (from the bottom up) E, A, D and G must also transpose written music one octave above it’s actual pitch to avoid excessive ledger lines.

So, now that you know that A, B, C, D, E, F and G are all the notes you will ever need to read and play, except for the sharps and flats, we can move on to note groupings. When notes are written down they are grouped together in small blocks called measures (or bars). Each bar contains a defined number of beats depending on what the rules of the time signature are.

Time Signatures

Time signatures are those fraction-like numbers you see at the start of a piece of music. The number at the top tells you how many beats there are in the measure and the bottom number indicates the time value of each of those beats. If the bottom number is two, this would mean that a half note gets one count in this piece of music. If the bottom number is four, then a quarter note receives one count. Two-four time is usually associated with march tempos and three-four time with waltzes.

Sometimes songwriters will change time signatures on us mid-piece. The notation for such occurrences is quite simple – when it happens the new time signature is placed at the start of the new bar-line. From that point onwards this new time signature remains unchanged until either the piece is completed or another change shows up.

Tempo refers to the speed at which a piece of music is played. In written music this can be shown in two different ways: it can either be in the form of a general instruction such as “Fast’ or “Very Fast” – or in terms of how many beats can be played in a minute. The latter instruction appears at the start of music and is shown as a note-type followed by a numeric value.

Written tempo marks were (and still are) popular in classical music and have traditionally been shown in their original Italian names, which has meant that for centuries, classical musicians throughout the world have had to acquaint themselves with foreign terms. Here are some examples:

Italian Name Description: