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Game Maker School:
Music Composing
Week 1
The Fundamentals of Music
All the lessons of this class are for use in Noteworthy Composer (Unregistered or
registered.) You can download Noteworthy Composer at
http://www.noteworthysoftware.com. We use Noteworthy Composer because it is
the most easy to use and user-friendly of most computer music composers.
Day One: The Staff
This is what your typical staff of music looks like:
As you can see, the staff consists of five horizontal lines. These lines represent
the different pitches of notes you can use.
As you can also see, the very first object on the staff is a weird 6-like thing. This
is called the treble clef. Clefs are essential to know where the notes are on the
staff.
The other commonly used clef is the bass clef:
The treble clef has higher notes, and the bass clef has lower notes. Notes are
referred to by the letters A, B, C, D, E, F and G, also known as the musical
alphabet. These are what these notes look like on the staffs:
© Cuznersoft (Caleb Cuzner) 2008
As you can see, the first C on the treble clef and the last C on the bass clef have a
line through the note. These lines are called ledger lines and they are for
displaying notes off the staff. As the notes move upward, the pitch gets higher,
and if they move downward, the pitch gets lower.
As you have probably seen on all these staffs, there is a vertical line near the end
of each staff. This line is called a bar line. You will learn about these bar lines later
in the lesson. I bring these lines up now because you will notice at the very end of
the staff, there is a vertical thin line with a vertical thick line next to it. In
Noteworthy Composer, this is called a Section Close. You can usually find these at
the very end of a piece of music. Noteworthy Composer has these at the ends of
staffs by default.
Day Two: Notes and Rests
As you learned “yesterday,” there are different notes in a staff. You have already
learned what the different notes are. You have seen that all the notes shown so
far are black dots with lines sticking vertically out either above them or below
them. These notes you have seen are called Quarter Notes. There are many other
types of notes, the ones recognized by Noteworthy Composer shown on the next
page.
© Cuznersoft (Caleb Cuzner) 2008
Whole Note
Half Note
Quarter Note
Eighth Note
Sixteenth Note
Thirty-second Note (not used that often)
Sixty-fourth Note (rarely ever used)
In music, the amount of time a note is sustained is determined by beats. In most
cases, the whole note gets 4 beats, the half note gets 2 beats, the quarter note
gets 1 beat, the eighth note gets ½ beat, the sixteenth note gets ¼ beat, the
thirty-second note gets 1/8 beat and the sixty-fourth note gets 1/16 beat.
If you find a dot immediately after a note, this means that the note is sustained
for 1½ times longer than it would originally be held, such as a dot after a half note,
known as a dotted half note, would be held for 3 beats.
This is what a dotted half note looks like:
© Cuznersoft (Caleb Cuzner) 2008
In order to get a note sustained for an unordinary number of beats, such as 2½,
you have to use a tie. A tie combines two notes so that they sustain as long as both
of them together would sustain. A tie is a curved line connecting the two notes. For
example, here is what a note held for 2½ beats would look like:
Ties can also be used to have notes sustain across measure bars, which you will
learn about “tomorrow.”
“Yesterday,” you saw eight different notes on each staff, being on lines or spaces
on the staff. There are other notes on the staff, all still being referred to by the
musical alphabet. There are unlimited pitches of notes available. When the musical
alphabet starts repeating itself again, that means you have completed an octave of
notes. An octave is a group of eight notes, going from a letter in the musical
alphabet, up or down to that same letter, like so:
This is a C octave, also known as the C Major Scale. You will only be learning about
the C Major scale in this class, since you are trying to learn how to compose in 21
days. A huge variety of songs can be written in the C Major Scale, and almost all of
the hundreds of songs I have written are in C scales. As you have probably
assumed, there is also a D, E, F, G, A and B major scale. And, believe it or not,
there are even more different scales out there, such as minor scales. (And you will
eventually learn about the C Minor Scale and the C Blues scale later in this class.)
To demonstrate that the musical alphabet can be repeated over and over again in
different octaves, here are two octaves of the C Major Scale:
© Cuznersoft (Caleb Cuzner) 2008
As you can see, the lines sticking out of the dots, known as stems, change direction
at one point. By default, Noteworthy Composer makes it so these stems point in
the direction that makes it so the majority of the stem will be on the staff, and
not sticking out in an awkward direction. You can manually change the directions of
the stems, but you do not need to worry about that for amateur composing.
Along with notes, there are similar objects called rests. Notes represent when
sound is playing, and rests represent when there is silence in the staff. Here are
the different types of rests:
Whole rest (4 beats)
Half rest (2 beats)
Quarter rest (1 beat)
Eighth rest (½ beat)
Sixteenth rest (¼ beat)
Thirty-second rest (1/8 beat)
Sixty-fourth rest (1/16 beat)
© Cuznersoft (Caleb Cuzner) 2008
Rests are just like notes except for that they are silent and they usually do not
have more than one position on the staff.
Day Three: Time Signatures and Measures
As you have probably noticed and wondered about in the previous days, there are
two fours on top of each other right after the clef in each staff. These are called
time signatures. Time signatures determine how many beats are in a measure. You
will learn about measures later today.
Here are the most commonly used time signatures:
Since this class is supposed to teach you how to compose in 21 days, we will only go
over two of the time signatures. If you are just composing simple (or even complex
sometimes) songs, you can just use the 4 4 time signature and the common time
signature.
How time signatures work is that the top number is the number of beats in a
measure, and the bottom note is which note gets one beat (in most cases 4, or
quarter note.) So in the 4 4 time signature (the time signature with one 4 on top of
another 4,) there are 4 beats in one measure, and the quarter note gets one beat.
In common time (the big C), it is the exact same as 4 4 except that it looks
different. So in general, 4 4 and common time are the exact same thing.
In a 4 4 time signature, this is what a measure of 4 quarter notes would look like:
You are not allowed to have more than 4 total beats in a 4 4 time signature, so you
cannot have something like 5 quarter notes or a whole note and a half note tied
together or anything like that.
© Cuznersoft (Caleb Cuzner) 2008
You are probably wondering what I am talking about when I say measures. A
measure is, as you have already read, the segment in which a certain amount of
beats is allowed, which in the case of a 4 4 time signature is 4. Measures are
separated by vertical lines called bar lines, as mentioned in Day One.
Although the typical bar line is one vertical line, there are also double bar lines and
repeat signs. Double bar lines look like this:
A double bar line acts exactly like a normal bar line, and is usually used to separate
sections in music. They have nothing to do with what the music sounds like at all, so
they are rarely used in background music, unless you are really organized.
A repeat sign is just like a Section Close or double bar line, except that it has two
dots before or after it. What a repeat sign does is repeats the measures between
a repeat sign with two dots after it and a repeat sign with two dots before it.
In Noteworthy Composer, there are two types of repeat signs, local and master.
Master repeat signs only repeat once, when local repeat signs can repeat as many
times as desired. Here is what they look like:
As you can see, there is a (2) above the second local repeat sign. This number
shows how many times the enclosed measures will play, so 2 would mean it is played
twice, also known as repeated once.
Usually, when I’m composing, I don’t normally use repeat signs. I actually find it
more convenient to manually copy and paste the measures. But it differs between
composers from which are easier. When writing music by hand, though, repeat
signs are the way to go. There are a lot more sort of complicated things you can do
with repeat signs, such as Special Endings, but to save time just do it my way and
copy and paste everything instead of using repeat signs.
© Cuznersoft (Caleb Cuzner) 2008
Just for the sake of mentioning it, there are also things called D.S. al Fine, D.C. al
Fine, D.C. al Coda and D.S. al Coda. The meaning of D.C. al Fine is to go from the
placement of those words back to the beginning of the song and then stop where
the words Fine are placed. The meaning of D.S. al Fine means to go back to the Slike thing, which looks like this:
And then end where the word Fine is placed.
The D.C. al Coda and D.S. al Coda are basically the same, except instead of ending
at the Fine, the go until the words To Coda are placed and then jump to where ever
in the music the word Coda is placed and then end at the end of the song.
Just as earlier, this whole DS DC thing can get kind of confusing, so to save time
you can just do it my way and manually copy and paste everything.
Day Four: Key Signatures and Accidentals
If you just randomly look at some random piece of music, you may notice a bunch of
b’s or #’s placed in between the clef and the time signature. This is called the key
signature. Here is what a typical key signature looks like (This is the Ab Major or C
minor key signature):
Key signatures determine how many flats, sharps and naturals are in a selection of
music. And then you are probably thinking “What the heck are flats, sharps and
naturals?”
Flats, sharps and naturals are the three different types of accidentals. A flat
looks like this:
© Cuznersoft (Caleb Cuzner) 2008
A flat lowers the pitch of the note slightly so that the pitch sounds like it is right
between the flat note and the note below. There are a few exceptions though. An F
flat is actually an E, and a C flat is actually a B. But besides those two exceptions, a
flat note is as stated a few sentences earlier.
A sharp looks like this:
A sharp raises the pitch to that the pitch sounds like it is right between the sharp
note and the note above. The two exceptions to this is an E sharp is actually an F
and a B sharp is actually a C.
The odd thing about accidentals is that they do this thing called “carrying
throughout the measure.” This means that if one note is sharp, flat, or normal
(natural,) then all of the notes after that have the same letter name and are in the
same measure are also respectively sharp, flat, or natural. This is where naturals
play their most common role.
When a composer does not want a sharp or flat note to be sharp or flat in that
same measure anymore, they make it natural. A natural looks like this:
There are two ways to tell if a note is sharp, flat, or natural. The most common way
is if it has a sharp, flat, or natural sign before it. The other way is through the key
signature.
Key signatures are usually used to specify what key, or you can call it scale, the
song is in. Songs using the C Major Scale have all naturals in the key signature, so
basically you could say there is no key signature. The only other key signature we
will go over in this class is the one shown earlier, the Ab key signature, which we
will use as the C minor key signature. (Major is always capitalized a minor is always
© Cuznersoft (Caleb Cuzner) 2008
lower-cased.) The C minor key signature basically states that all Bs, Es, and As in
the song are flat, unless otherwise specified by an accidental.
Day Five: Tempo and Dynamics
You may eventually wonder or may have been wondering exactly how to change the
speed of a song. The speed of a song is called tempo. Here is what the typical
tempo marking looks like:
You will see that there is a quarter note and then an equal sign, and then 120. This
means that when the quarter note gets one beat, such as in time signature 4 4,
there are 120 beats per a minute, or bpm. 120 bpm is the default, and you may
sometimes here it referred to as “Moderato.” Tempo markings with numbers higher
than 120, such as 140 or 160, are considered fast songs, and tempo markings with
numbers less than 120, such as 100 or 80, are considered slow songs. If you want
to make a song get faster or slower, just add in another tempo marking to change
the speed.
There are different tempo markings using things such as half notes and such, but
we won’t get into that as those are not absolutely essential to compose a song.
There is also something called dynamics. Dynamics regulate the volume, or
“loudness” of a song. These are the different dynamic markings in Noteworthy
Composer:
fff ff f mf mp p pp ppp
You may notice that I have them just written out instead of in a picture. This is
because dynamics are expressed with letters. f is called forte, which means loud,
and p is called piano which means soft or quiet. ff, or fortissimo, is very loud, while
fff, or fortississimo, is really loud. pp, or pianissimo, is very soft, while ppp, or
pianississimo, is really soft. mf, or mezzo-forte, is medium loud, while mp, or
mezzo-piano, is medium soft.
If you want to have the volume gradually increasing or decreasing, you use things
called crescendos and decrescendos. They look like this (crescendo on the left,
decrescendo on the right):
© Cuznersoft (Caleb Cuzner) 2008
Or, if you have unregistered Noteworthy Composer, they look like this instead
(they may look like this in registered if you so choose):
With the way Noteworthy Composer works, when you use a crescendo or
decrescendo, you have to have a dynamic marking before and after the crescendo
or decrescendo in order for it to work properly.
What crescendos do is gradually increase the volume from your first dynamic
marking to your second dynamic marking. Decrescendos do the opposite, gradually
decreasing the volume from your first dynamic marking to your second dynamic
marking.
© Cuznersoft (Caleb Cuzner) 2008