Method book for those beginning to learn flute.
Introduction
Introduction • Maintenance
Getting started
Lesson 2 • Lesson 3 • Lesson 4 • Lesson 5 • Lesson 6
Playing the flute
Lesson 7 • Lesson 8 • Lesson 9 • Lesson 10 • Lesson 11 • Lesson 12 • Lesson 13 • Lesson 14
Building on skills
Lesson 15 • Lesson 16 • Lesson 17 • Lesson 18 • Lesson 19 • Lesson 20 • Lesson 21 • Lesson 22 • Culmination
Appendicies
Links • Learning a piece of music
Related books
Saxophone • Music Theory • Baroque Flute Handbook • Western Music History
This page is to teach the treble cleff and types of notes. If you play another instrument or already know this, you can skip this and go to the next lesson.
Staff
Now you know how to produce sound and how to breathe properly. Now it is time to learn how to read music. This is not difficult, so don't worry. Pictured below is a musical staff. As you can see, it consists of five lines and four spaces. If you've ever learned piano school, you may know the Mnemonics, Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge and FunAlwaysCanEnjoy (or simply FACE). The first is the names of the notes on the lines, and the second is the names of the notes in the spaces.
Now, this symbol should appear at the beginning of every piece of music you see.
This is called the G clef or treble clef. It was originally used to write the voice part of trebles, of boys who sang soprano. This is very uncommon now, but the clef was adopted to write music of all instruments that had high registers, like the flute, saxophone, clarinet, oboe, etc. The G clef comes from the fact that the circular part of the symbol is always on the line that is G.
There is one more important element; ledger lines. these are lines that appear above or below the staff, to show notells that are lower than E or higher than G.
Notes
Time signature
An important part of reading music is time signature. This appears after the clef and key signature and consists of two numbers. The top number shows how many beats to a measure and the second shows what kind of note gets a beat.
The above is an example of a time signature; 3/4. This means that there are 3 beats per measure and a quarter note gets one beat.
The second number of a time signature is written as a number. 1 corresponds to a whole note, 2 to a half and 4 to a quarter. Just put one over that number and that is the note that gets one beat.
There are two other times that have different notation.
Using time signature, music can be divided into measures. Measures are made up of the top number of beats. A measure in 4/4 is 4 beats long. Originally, written music was not divided up into measures. It was divided up by groups of two or three notes. Measures were developed to make music easier to read and practice.
Notes
Now that you know what time signature is, you can learn what the notes are. For simplicity, notes are usually taught in some time of 4. For these purposes, I will use 4/4.
Rests
Rests are beats in music that are unplayed. The length of rests corresponds with the notes.
Accidentals
Accidentals are a kind of symbol that tells you how to play a note. The three you should know are sharps, flats and naturals.