Sheet music. How do they work?

Chen

I'm playing WarioWare Do It Yourself and it has a similar music creating tool as Mario Paint. What I'm currently doing is adding notes from ear after listening to the tracks over and over. What I want to do is make it more accurately and efficiently, since I want to add multiple instruments, which is kind of hard to do by ear. Problem is I have no music background, so when I search the Internet for piano scores, chord charts and the like, it's like trying to read moon language. Is there maybe a way for newbies like me to learn to read music without memorizing the theory? The alphabetical notation is workable, but anything else and I'm stunned.

For the record, the tool uses 25 notes, 15 natural and 10 sharp. No flats. You can't hold notes. Absent are also major and minor scales. Or are they called chords... I'm not sure what I just said! It's pretty basic basically...

Oh, and 8th or 16th note drum beats would be appreciated if you know some cool sounding ones!

KalTorak

If you're on a Mac, I've heard good things about GarageBand.

Janson

Hmm... where to start!

Well, first off, looking at the Warioware DIY site, a piano keyboard is shown on some of the screens, so you may find it useful to look at a site like this, particularly the third image. You DO have flats. C sharp, for example, is the same as D flat. E sharp is F. F flat is E. It looks as if Warioware's keyboard goes:

G - G#/A flat - A - A#/B flat - B - C - C#/D flat - D - D#/E flat - E - F - F#/G flat - G - G#/A flat - A - A#/B flat - B - C - C#/D flat - D - D#/E flat - E - F - F#/G flat - G

What would be absent are chords, not scales.

As for reading piano scores - well, it can take years to learn to read a score correctly. But for your purposes, you'll probably just need to know the name of the notes on the lines, as shown here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Bass_and_Treble_clef.svg A sharp or flat sign appears before the note if that note is a sharp or a flat. However, music is also written in different keys, and this means that sometimes the flats or sharps appear at the very beginning of the lines and affect all of the notes (unless the note has a natural sign before it).

For example, take this image: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Lilypond-screenshot-adeste.png

The sharp signs that appear at the beginning of the lines indicate that ALL Cs, Fs and Gs are to be played sharp.

an_alt

If you go to this site it will show you how to read sheet music, give you a start to music theory, and let you hear actually hear notes and chords as you see them. It's pretty nifty.

Chen

I wish I had taken piano class when I was seven instead of the xylophone.

Thanks for the explanation and links! It's a bit confusing to me that a piano has different note patterns with the same notation. It's a bit of a guesswork to find the right pitch. I suppose it doesn't really matter when it's melodically correct.

I've found neat tutorial videos on Youtube that show what notes need to be hit in slow motion. Just an example:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDGj6ELWdTg

Since the tool in WarioWare is limited, I can't replicate it exactly, but that's fine. The problem is I can't see the note lengths, so it's pretty much guesswork, which sheets don't have. Ah, this tool is going to keep me busy for weeks! On the bright side, I don't have to actually play crazy impossible arrangements like the above, so there's that.

big l

Okay, for drumming, the basics are pretty simple. So, I am assuming all this is in 4/4, like most music you are familiar with. That means there are 4 beats in the measure. Each beat is a 1/4 note made up of 4 1/16th notes, pronounced 1-e-and-a-2-e-and-a-3-e-and-a-4-e-and-a-1 of the next measure, where 1-2-3-4 are the quarter notes on the beat, "and"s are the eighth notes in between, and "e" and "a" are the sixteenth notes between the eighth notes. The basic Western drum beat is to put the bass on the 1 and the 3 and the snare on the 2 and 4. Do this and 1/8th notes on the hi-hat and you have the basic beat. The most basic variations involve putting bass drums on the "and"s (try bass on 1 and the "and"s of 2 and 4 and snare on 2 and 4 for a simple classic) and putting snare on the "e"s and "a"s, particularly "a"s of 2 and 4. Play around with it, but in general unless you have a specific idea that you want to try, put the bass drum on the 1 and snare on the 2 and 4 and get creative in the rest of it.

Raern

I used this program to memorise basic note locations on a normal music sheet. I'm not 100% sure it's what you're looking for, but it's small and easy to mess with. Set the scale notes to 'chromatic' to get all the keys into play at once including sharps/flats. http://www.musicstudy.com/FreeDn.html


As a side note when you say the piano has different note patterns with the same notation, you're probably skimming past the key signature, a pattern of sharps or flats that tells you that note is *always* sharp or flat in the whole section unless noted otherwise.

Chen

I think I'm slowly getting the hang of it (thanks, an_alt and Raern!). I've downloaded the evaluation copy of NoteWorthy, imported a few MIDI files and did my thing (or tried to be precise). However there doesn't seem to be an option to show piano rolls. There's a piano at the bottom that highlights the keys that are being hit, but I have to look up to the sheet for the exact timing. This is particularly annoying when there are multiple instruments with blazingly fast melodies and a bajillion notes. Maybe you guys know of freeware that can import MIDI and do have piano rolls? A slo-mo option would be ace too. The software I found on the net are mostly proprietary.

Anome

In the long run I think it would be a lot more efficient to just learn how to read rhythms as they are notated in sheet music especially if you're using real music writing software (as opposed to the WarioWare you were starting with). It's really not that hard, it's quite a logical system. When I'm transcribing things I tend to work out the rhythm first and then figure out the pitches, it seems to be much easier. This is after a year and a half of music school so I like to think I'm not talking out of my ass.
I could get a lot more complex but that's not what you're looking for. Feel free to pm me if you've got any theory related questions, I should be able to answer or at least find resources for you.

Raern

Chen wrote:

I think I'm slowly getting the hang of it (thanks, an_alt and Raern!). I've downloaded the evaluation copy of NoteWorthy, imported a few MIDI files and did my thing (or tried to be precise). However there doesn't seem to be an option to show piano rolls. There's a piano at the bottom that highlights the keys that are being hit, but I have to look up to the sheet for the exact timing. This is particularly annoying when there are multiple instruments with blazingly fast melodies and a bajillion notes. Maybe you guys know of freeware that can import MIDI and do have piano rolls? A slo-mo option would be ace too. The software I found on the net are mostly proprietary.

The Youtube videos you linked are made with Synthesia, which was shareware last I looked. Turning MIDI into piano rolls was one of the basic/free features since it's the point of the program: http://synthesiagame.com/

cravipat

Chen wrote:

Maybe you guys know of freeware that can import MIDI and do have piano rolls?

Anvil Studio might be what you are looking for. It has the piano rolls for each of the different tracks. The layout is very close to the music maker in WarioWare.