Its quality refines this measurement.  An interval’s quality can be perfect,  major, minor, diminished, or augmented.  Perfect intervals include  unisons (firsts), fourths, fifths, and octaves.  Major and minor intervals are seconds, thirds, sixths, and sevenths.  Any interval size can be diminished or augmented.

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Much of the music we listen to and play consists of scale passages, simple intervals, and chordal structures, as in this excerpt from Mozart:

Mozart Triads - How to Read Music Notes

The ability to recognize these elements in melodic passages greatly assists in our fluency and accuracy in reading music, and helps us learn a particular piece more quickly.  We can learn to recognize these elements quickly if we explore manageable parts, and enjoy the process.  In this article I will present some simple ideas that I hope will help you with identifying triads.

Lets briefly review the triad.  A triad has three pitches built by stacking thirds.  For example:  C-E-G.  The first pitch is the chord’s root, the next pitch is its third, and the final pitch is its fifth.

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4. Now try descending thirds:

C A F D B G E C . . .

5. Could you figure out ascending and descending fifths?  Here’s how ascending fifths starts:

C G D . . .

Once you have mastered these basic patterns, its time to look at them on the staff.  The first two exercises are really just ascending and descending scales respectively.  What perhaps is a little different, however,  is that these scale-like patterns can start on any scale degree. – What this means is that the music notes in this scale can begin on any note -  For example below is the same music reading exercise in G major that presents a series of continuous scales that start on each pitch in the key:

How to Read Music Notes Exercises

To familiarize yourself with the note names you can practice a few simple exercises away from your instrument:

1. Say the note names out loud in order starting on any name, through two or more repetitions of the musical alphabet. For example:

D E F G A B C D E F G A B C D . . .

2. Now reverse the order:

D C B A G F E D C B A G F E D . . .

3. Once you can say the notes backwards, try this pattern starting on any pitch:

 C E G B D F A C … 

This is an ascending thirds pattern. C to E is the interval of a third ( count C D E, one two three)  Notice that this pattern of ascending thirds repeats itself once all seven note names are covered.  This kind of patterning and repetition comes up a lot in music theory and is a common technique in almost any real learning system to learn how to read music notes.

The musical alphabet uses the first seven letters of the English alphabet as pitch-names:  A through to G.  Arranged in a scalar pattern the note-names begin to repeat themselves after G.  The next note one step higher than G, for example,  is A.  The note lower than A is G.  This is shown on the treble clef below:

We’ll see you tomorrow for another music theory lesson and fundamental lesson to help you learn how to read music.

We can also notice something about the relative minor keys.  We can simply count down three letter names from the major key to help with memorizing them.  For example, the key signature for A major is the same a F-sharp minor: A – G-sharp – F-sharp.  It is important to identify the pitch names with the accidentals of the key signature to make sure we get to the correct relative minor.  In the above example, its F-sharp minor, not F minor.

Let’s now take a peek at the flat keys.  We have already memorized the key signature with one flat:  F major/D minor.  We can observe that there is also a progressive order to these keys:  B-flat major has the same key signature as F major, plus an E-flat.  The order of the first four flats is:  B E A D-flat.

There is a simple trick to recognizing the major flat keys:  its name is the second last flat in the key signature.  A-flat major has four flats, the second last flat is A-flat.

So that’s a big key to learning how to read music notes. Once you are able to recognize key signatures up to four sharps and flats, you will find the remaining keys quite easy to learn.  During this learning process you will probably discover similar patterns as those presented here.