(blues piano)
- Hey guys!
And welcome back to music
theory for the drop outs.
I'm Cassi Falk
and we've been going through many ways
of how to apply our music
theory to note reading,
reading rhythms.
And today, we're going to
get into music symbols.
So music symbols are
everything to do with music
except for the actual notes that tell us
the pitch and the rhythm.
Let's start off by talking about dynamics
or the volume of our music.
Dynamic marks are represented
by a little letter
that tells us how loud
or quiet we need to play.
The fancy F stands for
the Latin word forte,
meaning strong.
On the other end of the spectrum,
we have a fancy letter P
that stands for piano, or soft.
We can add an M in front of each of these.
And we have Mezzo-Forte, or medium loud
and Mezzo-Piano for medium quiet.
The louder we want to
go, the more Fs we add.
The quieter we want to
go, the more Ps we add.
Our crescendo lines start
off closed at one point
and open up indicating
an increase in sound
from quiet to loud.
The diminuendo or decrescendo
starts out open at one point
to its closing at the
end representing a louder
to a quieter sound.
Now, onto articulation.
Articulation represents
how a note is played.
The most two common ones is legato
in which we connect our notes together.
And that's represented by a curved line
underneath or on top of our notes.
The opposite of that is staccato
represented by a little dot
added above or below the note head.
So legato is smooth
and staccato is very jumpy.
A couple other articulations
include an accent
represented by a sideways V
which means to play the
note a little bit louder
than the previous.
And a tenuto written by a little
line above or below a note
which means for sure to hold
the note for its full value.
Up until this point, we haven't
talked about the black keys.
So let's get into that now.
We're going to talk about
the two most important in music symbols.
A sharp and a flat.
A flat alters a white
key down a half step.
And a sharp alters a
white key up a half step.
So let's take this black key here.
We can call it two different names.
We can go from C
and call it a C sharp.
Or, we can start from
D and call it a D flat.
So if we have a sharp at
the beginning of the measure
with an F,
that sharp will apply to all
the other Fs in the measure
until it gets canceled out by a bar line.
We have to add another
sharp in each measure
if we want to keep it in there.
If we want to cancel the sharp
out before the bar line hits,
then we have to add
something called a natural
which cancels out and goes
back into a regular white key.
These are just a few
of the many music symbols
that are out there,
but these are the most common.
Thanks for joining me, and
I'll see you at the next video.
