I may have mentioned this before … but M.C. Escher was a genius. Seriously, it’s like he had some kind of x-ray vision that let him see things in a totally unique way. When he looked at the world, he definitely saw it as a bunch of patterns. I mean, how else could someone draw a

So … music is all about time. And that’s why we need a way of showing exactly how long each note should last. In music notation, we can do this by using special duration symbols—which are simple because they basically follow the beat of a song. For example, the song “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” includes four

The chromatic scale is important because it’s the basic layout of all 12 notes in music. In other words, it includes every interval of half-steps and whole-steps. But, as we’ve seen before, the chromatic scale is also kind of boring … because it doesn’t sound very interesting. The major scale, on the other hand, sounds really good.

A couple of years ago, I saw Paul McCartney in concert. And I have to say … it was awesome. He played dozens of songs over a couple of hours, making it the longest concert I’ve ever attended. And of course, that only makes sense—because he’s got about 10 trizillion excellent songs to choose from. His set

With all this talk about sharps … and flats … and key signatures, you might start to think there’s something special or different about the black and white notes of a keyboard. After all, music notation seems to make a big deal about which notes should be sharp, flat, or natural. But the truth is, it doesn’t

After playing through each major scale, you may have noticed that some of the keys have a lot of sharp (#) symbols … while others have a lot of flat (b) symbols. For example, check out the B major scale, which has a total of five (count ‘em … 5) sharp symbols: Seriously, can you imagine

So … music notation is just another way of showing the 12 notes of the chromatic scale. Which means we are—yet again—back to square one (or circle one … pardon the pun). You see, nothing has changed about the 12 notes in this pattern. It’s just that we now have the advantage of being able

Now we know that the lines and spaces of the grand staff are laid out in a C major scale pattern. So notes   C, D, E, F, G, A, B  repeat as they rise up from the bass staff—all the way through the treble staff. But by zooming in a little, we can get an even

Since we’ve been looking at the chromatic scale a lot lately, maybe it would be nice to stop for a moment and take a little quiz. That way, we can stretch our hands, rub our eyes, and think about something else for a change. After all, we don’t want to go crazy, do we? What if we even

So … music notation was designed to favor the key of C. And that’s why the grand staff is centered around the note we call “middle C.” But back in the day, when musicians developed notation, they decided to take things even further … and they actually based the layout of the staves on the C major