So here we are in our fifth installment of this series, and the response has been overwhelmingly positive. As a teacher, I can’t tell you how gratifying it is to hear from guitarists—some of whom have been playing for decades—who are just now, for the first time, embracing reading standard notation. A good teacher encourages students to teach themselves, so let me put it back to you. What do you want to learn? What part of reading music is most confusing? What would help you get over the next hurdle? What just plain doesn’t make sense? Tell me at
Since I can’t hear you right now, I’ll have to offer up a topic: key signatures. Key signatures are those collections of sharps and flats that you see at the start of a line, next to the time signature. They tell you what key you’re in (duh), and they make reading the notation easier, because they tell you, for example, that all your Fs are sharped in the key of G, all your Bs are flatted in the key of F, and so on, so we don’t have to clutter the chart with accidentals (sharps or flats) every time those notes come up.
Key signatures represent a deep, heavy concept that we can (and probably will) spend a lot of time dissecting. But, in keeping with the spirit of this series, we’re going to approach them from a very guitaristic standpoint.
When there are no sharps or flats in the key signature, that’s the key of C, home base for pretty much every instrument in the world except guitar. Every note is natural, as in