For Those About To Read!
By Lynne Davis

There are many ways to exchange musical ideas; number charts, chord charts, tablature, hand signals, by ear—but hundreds of years after its invention, standard notation (you know, the dots) still reigns as the most effective and specific way to share musical information. Although you may think learning to read music is difficult, all musicians can recognize what they hear, and musical notation is simply a graphic representation — a picture of a sound. All the music you hear can be translated into pictures, and as a reading musician it is your job to translate those pictures back to into sounds.

For Those About To Read – Click for full-size version

Any course of study that deals with reading music has to begin with learning the staff and how it is used to indicate pitches (what note to play) and rhythms (when to play them). FIGURE 1 shows the musical staff—a five-line, four-space system where pitches and rhythms are notated. At the far left of the staff, you will notice the familiar symbol known as the bass clef. This clef is used to notate the lower register of music. To learn the basic staff, all you’ll need to know are the 9 notes contained within these five lines and four spaces, shown in FIGURE 2. Find these notes on your fingerboard, (hint: the lowest G is the third fret on your E string) and say the names out loud as you play them. To memorize the letter name corresponding to each line and space, acronyms like “Good Boys Do Fine Always” (for the lines) and “All Cows Eat Grass” (for the spaces) are used. To help you remember this information, I suggest creating your own acronyms—some of my favorites are: “Great Big Dogs Fight Always” for the lines, and “All Cars Eat Gas” for the spaces.

The musical range of the bass does not fit within the confines of the staff, so ledger lines (shown in FIGURE 3) are used to extend the staff beyond the standard five lines. If you include one ledger line above and below the staff, (and the spaces that occur between the ledger lines and the staff) you now have 13 different pitches to recognize—ranging from your low E to the 5th fret C on the G string. Once again, find the notes on the neck—say them and play them. For more help with note recognition, download the Musical Alphabet flashcards from my website.

Once you have learned to instantly recognize the pitches of the bass clef staff, you’ll start to see how notes form “words” on the staff. When you read a book, you process the letters in groups and patterns, not one at a time. Eventually, reading music can become just as natural as reading English. Try this experiment: Look at FIGURE 4 and quickly try to imagine what it sounds like, without even attempting to play it on your instrument. Since written music is a picture of a sound, start by trying to hear what you see! Take the next step and try to sing it. At first, don’t worry about the exact pitches, just get a general idea of how the pattern might sound.

Even if you’re not completely familiar with the note names, you can still see how notes move up or down, and if they are close together or far apart. When you look at FIGURE 4, notice the movement up and down the staff — the direction of the notes corresponds to the pitch going higher or lower. Find the first pitch on the bass and play the notes, use FIGURE 3 as your reference source if necessary. Notes that move from a line to the next space, and so on, are said to be moving in “steps” (as in FIG. 4), whereas notes that jump from line to line, or space to space are said to be moving in “skips” like FIGURE 5. You can learn to think in steps and skips by practicing these musical alphabet drills. For steps, pick a letter — G for example, and speak or sing your way up alphabetically to the next G, then reverse: “G – A – B – C – D – E – F – G; G – F – E – D – C – B – A – G”. To practice skips, start on any note (G for now) and speak up the alphabet, but skipping every other note: “G – B – D – F – A – C – E – G; G – F – E – D – C – B – A – G”. By starting on every note in the musical alphabet, you can really nail down your understanding of how notes get organized in these two very common patterns. Then, of course, practice playing steps and skips on the bass, and you’ll develop quick note recognition on the staff.

Remember, the goal is to read the entire pattern as you would read a word of English, as opposed to reading each letter separately. Here’s the process: Study FIGURES 4 and 5 for a moment, imagined how they sound, then try to play the entire pattern slowly without stopping. Did your playing match what you heard in your head? Look again at the pattern and think about the sound. Keep trying until you can see the pattern and hear the correct sound in your head. In future columns we will learn about rhythms, recognizing the distances between notes on the staff (called intervals), and “pictures” of other very common bass patterns.

But in the meantime, hey, you’re reading already!