I've never liked the term “music theory.” It sounds rather intimidating doesn't it? What notes do we use, what rhythm sounds good, or which notes sound good together. It's something most people take for granted and never think about. This section deals with the basic things all musicians should be familiar with. Feel free to skip around to find things that you are curious about or need to brush up on. Here goes!

Music has several fundamental components:

• The basic element of music is the note. They're usually arranged in some kind of order to create melodies that can be simple or very complex.
We group notes into scales that follow regular pattern.


When we play more than one note at a time we're playing chords. Chords are groups of notes that sound good when played at the same time.


Rhythm deals with the length and speed of notes.


Harmony relates to how different notes sound when played or sung at the same time.

In order to talk about music we need a system to write music down. In western music tradition we use notes written on five lines. Each line and space between the lines corresponds to a specific note. This type of music notation is independent of the instrument playing the music. In teaching most bluegrass intruments we use a system called tablature that uses line to represent the strings and numbers showing which fret on that string is being played. It's really a picture of the neck and strings. Tablature is easy to learn (see the Tablature section of

Tablature starts by telling us which strings to pick and which frets to put our left hand fingers on. We also need to know how long each note lasts. Without this information we can't really play anything. Most tablature borrows from standard music notation to show us the length of notes. In regular music notation notes are written using small ovals that are either black or white inside and usually have a vertical line attached going either up or down. As we'll see below tablature also uses these lines to indicate note length.

Here is a measure of tablature and music notation showing the forward roll. The music section on top has a few symbols or numbers that we don't see in the tablature.

The squiggly symbol on the upper left is a treble clef. We don't need to know what this means right now. Next we see two number fours with one on top of the other. This is called a time signature and it's important to us. Measures of music or tablature are designed to have a certain number of beats. The top number indicates that there are four beats per measure. The bottom four tells us that a quarter note is one beat. We call this time signature four-four time. Most banjo tablature is written in it.

Occasionally you will see things written in two-four time. This just means the measure is half as long as four-four. The other common time is three-four which is often referred to as “waltz time.” It has three notes to the measure. We count these one, two, three, one, two, three with emphasis on the first beat. Think of the song “Rank Stranger” by the Stanley Brothers. The last common time you may see is six-eight time. It's called “jig time” because Irish and Scottish jigs are danced to it. An example is “The Irish Washerwoman.”