sheet music

when you read sheet music and it says like play one B or C or something how are you supposed to know which B or C they want us to play??
idk..i guess its different with the notes and stuff and like it isnt wrote down as A, B, C, D, E, F, G at the sheet music but anyway i mean it cant be possible to write down which of the 88 keys and a whole bunch with A, B, C, D, E, F and G's you want when its only 5 Treble Clef and Bass Clef line notes and 4 Treble Clef and Bass Clef notes. Hope you got my question although it was like a really stupid one and i didt manage explaining me well:P im really wondering though..

hi mokka here is a little link posted by one of our forum members previously ..it should help you a lot ...just print it of or save as your background ....hope this gives you the answers ...www.frank-buss.de/music/piano.pdf

thanks but.. idk its still not 88 notes there i mean dont you have to add a whole bunch with leger lines to write down the 88th note or 1st or something like that?:/ is it wrote down like something like.. 1st A, B, C... 2nd A, B, C... 3rd A, B, C, D.. and so on cuz isnt the notes just repeating themselves..? rr im making this really complicated im starting to loose myself in my own question.lol:)

mokka wrote:thanks but.. idk its still not 88 notes there i mean dont you have to add a whole bunch with leger lines to write down the 88th note or 1st or something like that?:/ is it wrote down like something like.. 1st A, B, C... 2nd A, B, C... 3rd A, B, C, D.. and so on cuz isnt the notes just repeating themselves..? rr im making this really complicated im starting to loose myself in my own question.lol:)

Hi, mokka

From what I understand, there are a couple ways to answer your question.

First, if in casual conversation, or on a board like this, individual notes can be referred as, say, C5, or G2, meaning the fifth C from the bottom, or the second G from the bottom. Basically, the number identifies which octave the note belongs to. So, that's one way.

In sheet music, there are two ways that I know of. One, like you mentioned, uses extra staff lines to show the note, like this:



Another way is to show in the score that the notes shown on the staff are actually 1 octave higher than shown, like andrew does on his latest hit "Dolphins". It's shown on the last line of his music here:

http://img3.photographersdirect.com/img/262/wm/pd655004.jpg

Hope that helps!

In english you use numbers, yes. In hungarian we have a different prefix (a word) for every octave.

thank you so much Circle_of_Fists i think i got it now.. so in sheet music you do add leger lines to show which ever note you want even if itll take the whole page..? i mean cuz i guess you need very many leger lines to show the 88th note... but i guess notes like that isnt really used that much. did i get it right or am i just talkin nonsence??:/

After a little more digging, I think the notation mostly used for the very highest and lowest notes uses a method similar to andrew's song I posted a link to earlier.

In the score, a "8va" can be used to tell the reader to play one octave higher than what is shown, or "15ma" to play 2 octaves higher.

There is a little more here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octave#Notation