Learning to Read Music - Part 1 - Overview of the Staff

The musical staff is the basic framework for traditional music notation. The staff consists of a series of five parallel lines. The sequence of musical notes that make up a song are then placed along these lines. The two dimensions represented on the staff are pitch and time.

Pitch - whether a note sounds "high" or "low" - is represented by placing notes higher or lower in the series of staff lines.

Each line and space between the lines represents a specific note position. An oval shaped note under line 1 is understood as D. A note on line 1 is E. And so on, until we get to E again in the top space, and F on the top line.

Time - There are actually two different components to the time dimension of music. Every piece of music has a beat which varies from song to song, and sometimes within the same song. This is called the tempo of the music.

Tempo is normally measured in terms of beats per minute (bpm), and is indicated at the very beginning of the first staff line of a composition. In our example the tempo is indicated as 80 beats per minute. And this tempo is maintained unless a different tempo is indicated.

The length or duration of individual notes is  measured with reference to that tempo. If a song has a tempo of 60 bpm, then each beat will be one second long (1/60th of a minute), and in 4/4 time, each quarter note will have a duration of one beat.

The notes placed along the staff therefore tell us three very different things about the sounds they represent. First, they tell us the pitch of the sound. Second, we are told how fast or slow the piece is to be played (its tempo). And third, we know from the shape of each note symbol how long that sound is to be held - the duration of each note or rest.