How to read a staff

Reading a staff is not too hard, yet you need to be careful with a few things. On the previous page about the staff, I already mentioned that three are the most used clefs in music: do, fa and sol. You also read what note is in each position of the staff, according to them.

Now you need to learn the duration of each sound and how it is represented in a staff. Each has a numeric value, a name, two symbols (one for sound and one for rest) and a duration. Hope this short table will allow us to summarize them properly:

Numeric value	Name	Sound symbol	Rest symbol	Duration
1	whole			4
2	half note			2
4	quarter note			1
8	eighth note			1/2
16	sixteenth note			1/4

In British English, these are named semi breve, minim, crotchet, quaver and semi quaver, respectively. Rarely, some other notes can be used.

There is an important extra to consider:

+ A tie indicates you need to play all the notes in the tie as one long sound, adding up their duration.
+ A dot to the right of a note indicates that it should be played one and a half times.
+ Two dots to the right of a note indicate that it should be played one and three quarter times.

Time signature

OK, with this, you can now read what is next to the clef on a staff: the time signature. The time signature tells us how many notes will the song has per measure or bar, taking into account that:

+ The numerator indicates the number of notes
+ The denominator indicates the units of measure, according to the notes' numeric values

Thus, the most common of these time signatures is the 4/4 or C, and it indicates each measure or bar will have 4 quarter notes in total. Other common time signatures are 3/4 and 6/8. Of course, there might be many others.

Key signatures

Key signatures are used to avoid repeating time and again the same accidents (flats or sharps) in the same notes of a song. There are comprised in the left side of the staff to this end.

Read them like this:

+ C major scale has no sharps or flats
+ For any number of sharps, take the last sharp displayed and take it one semitone up. That's the major key.
+ F major has one flat
+ For more than one flat, the key is indicated by the the penultimate flat.

If you need to cancel any of these accidents, you use a natural sign.

Now you can read a staff more clearly.