Terms that musicians mix up are quite a lot, there’s a ton of terminologies Note: A note is a notation representing the pitch and duration of a musical sound. Every note must have a PITCH or a duration PITCH: Pitch is the ...Read more
Terms that musicians mix up are quite a lot, there’s a ton of terminologies
Note: A note is a notation representing the pitch and duration of a musical sound. Every note must have a PITCH or a duration
PITCH: Pitch is the highness or lowness of sound; or how high or how low a note sounds; scientifically, pitch is a perceptual property that allows the ordering of sounds on a frequency related scale.
Duration: This is the amount of time taken for a note to sound; how long or how short a note/phrase/section sounds
Modulation: Modulation means changing the tonality; process of moving a collection of notes up or down in pitch by a constant interval. It is often confused with transposition.
Transposition: This is the art of playing or writing music in a way that makes it sound higher or lower either by playing the music in a different key or moving up or down an octave without changing the key
BMP: Beats per minute; 80 bpm is slower than 90bpm
Compression: This term is particular to music producers; it has the ability to reduce peaks or raise the noise floor depending on how the parameters are set.
DAW: Digital workstation; a software in which you can record, edit, mix and arrange your song; e.g. Garageband, Logic Pro x, Fruity loops etc.
Melody: This is a rhythmic succession of single notes organized as an aesthetic whole. It’s simply single notes
Harmony: This is the combination of simultaneous music notes in a chord. A chord on the other hand is three or more notes sounded simultaneously.
Parts of a music sheet: Treble is the highest voice is any harmonic music, alto is below it on the treble stave. Tenor notes are on top in the bass stave while bass notes are below
Mastering: This is the final process in music production and audio engineering. It involves compression, balancing, widening, preparing the audio for distribution.
Octave: A ladder of 8 notes; a sequence of 8 notes in ascending or descending order.
Reverb: A lot of people say reverb for echo, they are not the same; Reverb is a time based effect used to create space in the mix e.g. room reverb, hall reverb etc.
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