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Ron Peters's Reviews > How To Read Music: For Beginners - A Simple and Effective Guide to Understanding and Reading Music with Ease
How To Read Music: For Beginners - A Simple and Effective Guide to Understanding and Reading Music with Ease (Music Theory Mastery Book 2)
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I want to listen more appreciatively to the music I like best so I’m starting to review (in some cases, learn from scratch) aspects of music theory that I haven’t looked at since I was a youngster. If you’re familiar with the material, it only takes a matter of hours to go through this book.
This is a pretty good basic introductory review of musical notation, though it contains a surprising number of typos and grammatical errors. Also, the book is 143 pages long, not the 84 pages indicated on Goodreads.
It covers the basics – staffs, clefs, key and time signatures, solfege, bars, rests, repeats, codas, segnos, reading notes and rhythms, dynamics, phrasing, and so on. I learned new things, e.g., about conventions used in musical notation software (which didn’t exist in the prehistoric mists when I learned this material), and in areas of music I hadn’t bothered with because it’s irrelevant to keyboards (e.g., annotating percussion rhythms, details about the tenor and alto clefs, clefs for instruments such as woodwinds, etc.).
It has written exercises, but not many. I would have liked more since, for me, learning musical theory involves acquiring skills via drills. Something useful was the link the author provided to the International Music Score Library Project, http://imslp.org. And, for that matter, even www.blanksheetmusic.net. Now I’ll go look for a book on theory more broadly speaking.
This is a pretty good basic introductory review of musical notation, though it contains a surprising number of typos and grammatical errors. Also, the book is 143 pages long, not the 84 pages indicated on Goodreads.
It covers the basics – staffs, clefs, key and time signatures, solfege, bars, rests, repeats, codas, segnos, reading notes and rhythms, dynamics, phrasing, and so on. I learned new things, e.g., about conventions used in musical notation software (which didn’t exist in the prehistoric mists when I learned this material), and in areas of music I hadn’t bothered with because it’s irrelevant to keyboards (e.g., annotating percussion rhythms, details about the tenor and alto clefs, clefs for instruments such as woodwinds, etc.).
It has written exercises, but not many. I would have liked more since, for me, learning musical theory involves acquiring skills via drills. Something useful was the link the author provided to the International Music Score Library Project, http://imslp.org. And, for that matter, even www.blanksheetmusic.net. Now I’ll go look for a book on theory more broadly speaking.
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