Where the notes are on guitars and keyboards for children, music explained if you don’t know about it and the strange things adults do in the children’s sections of bookshops.

With written music the line,

usually the top line (which is five lines) is the bit you play on guitar and with your right hand on the piano or any other keyboard and the notes you sing.

The

 line usually the bottom line is for the left hand on the keyboard 

A is pink

B is brown

C is red

D is blue

E is yellow

F is orange

G is green

Music lines _________________ F  football  orange

Music spaces                                 E                 yellow

Music lines _________________Deserves      blue

Music spaces                                 C                  red

Music lines _________________Boy               brown

Music spaces                                 A                  pink

Music lines _________________Good             green

Music spaces                                 F                   orange

Music lines _________________Every            yellow

The spaces between the lines spell; face.

 click on the picture to make it bigger

    Sharps flats and key signatures: at the beginning of a bit of sheet music, on the line where a note goes you sometimes get # which means sharp or b, which means flat. This means that you play all of those notes all the way through the music that way. So if you get b on the middle line – which is a B “boy” note – then you play all of the B notes flat (even the ones that are not on the boy line) and if you get # on the top line – which is the F football note – then you play all of the F notes sharp (even the ones that are not on the football line.

 click on the picture to make it bigger

Playing a note sharp means playing it a bit higher, this means the black key to the right of the note on a keyboard or the fret next to the fret for the note and closer to the big hole in the middle of the guitar. Sharp notes often make music sound happy.

Playing a note flat is the other way round and often makes the music sound sad.

Now grownups know where all the notes are and some of them my not like it if you colour in their guitars, pianos and sheet music so you know which note is which, so be very careful.

With music that has too many notes that are all supposed to be played at the same time, you can usually get away with just playing the top line.

Getting the timing right is a bit complicated and listening to the music you want to play while tapping your foot and singing along to it followed by tapping your foot and singing along to it while you are playing it will sort out most of the timing problems.   

Tuning the guitar is easier if you download a tuning app for your phone, be careful not to go past the note and make the string too tight as the string may break.   

Here in the bookshop we now have a different table in the children’s book section because a very large grownup sat on the last one and broke it.

A bit of a further note here, still on the arts front, but not really worth a separate post.

I am trying to print copies of paintings which have the same colours as the original painting and am slowly getting there. the one on the left is a pen and watercolour which I drew the other day and the one on the right is a print of it.

It’s a strange and difficult thing to do with watercolours where the texture of the paper puts a shade of it’s own in and when you make one colour right another goes wrong.