Category: Notation

Answer To Teaser Question

Here is the answer to our teaser question about musical notation.

Just a quick reminder. I had given this one bar example, where there appear to be too many notes (6 beats worth) in the right hand:

:

The reason why this works is because there are two separate voices in the right hand.

This is the first voice:

And this is the second voice:

As you can see, there is a two beat rest at the start of the bar in the example above. Normally you would show this when adding the two voices together:

However, as you can see this means that the rest would have to hang in between two staves, which does not look very neat. As the second voice does not enter until the third beat of the bar, it is therefore fine to omit the rest at the start of the bar, as it does not lead to any rhythmic unclarity.

***

The second, more complicated example I gave looked like this:

Again, there are two voices, here is voice one:

And here is the second voice:

As the piece (Debussy’s Claire de Lune) consistently uses triplets, it is quite common the omit the triplet sign, which was done here. Furthermore the notes on beats 2 and 3 have been written into the right hand stave, indicating the the left hand part may be played by the right hand. So the entire left hand part written in the left hand would look like this:

And finally, as the two voices share the same note on beat three (G Sharp), you have to take the note head of the longer value as done here, or write the notes next to each other, which the editor did not choose to do. Had he done so it would look like this:

Hope that all makes sense.

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Official Great Scores Blog Launch

Welcome to our official blog launch.

We want this blog to be about you, the customer. We invite your feedback and active participation, be that in suggesting new ideas for tutorials, guides, sheet music, videos, or in answering your (sheet) music specific questions.

We already have a few plans in mind with regards following on from our videos on our youtube page.

Our Jerry Lee Lewis Boogie with it’s tutorial and videos has proved extremely popular:

Click here for the sheet music.

Following on from that we added a Rock’n’Roll licks collection with 4 video tutorials and accompanying sheet music download, here is the first of those four videos:

Click here for the sheet music.

We are planning on doing more of these instructional videos that include accompanying pieces/guides as downloads.

We have already had the suggestion to create a piece from the Rock’n’Roll licks collection (thank you Hendrik).

Further ideas include a guide to how music works – but not your usual boring theory guide, but a more practical view on harmony, and how you can use this knowledge to fully understand music (it’s easier than you think). This series of guides would enable you to work pieces out from your ipod yourself.

Other plans include guides on improvisation, walking bass lines, time signatures, etc, but of course we will try to make these fun.

We’ll also try to answer any questions, and have regular Q&A sessions. To get things started, here is a little teaser question. You often come across bars of music that seem to have many more beats in them, than the time signature suggests. How is this possible?

Here is an “easier” example to solve; there seem to be eight beats of music in the right hand, when there should be four:

 

For the more seasoned pros, here is a more difficult one. There appear to be two beats missing in the left hand, and extra quavers (8th notes) in the right hand, but 6 of them, plus a minim (half notes) and some strange note that seems to be a minim (half note) and a quaver (8th note) at the same time on beat 3:

Now it’s over to you, suggestions on upcoming guides, videos, sheet music and answers to our little teaser question are very welcome.

Take care

Lincoln

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