Let's learn to read pitch notation using figures

What do you see if you look at the following notes (the black circles) as a group? Imagine each note like a point on a graph, and draw a line between them in your mind's eye. What shape do they draw?

You may notice that the group as a whole forms a smooth ascending line, each sequential note moving up by one position on the staff. Such a pattern is called a 'scale run'.

A scale run is one example of a melodic figure, a short pattern of notes that shows up across numerous genres of music.

Humans have a natural aptitude to recognise visual patterns. Quite literally, a significant part of the brain exists to process visual information.

And we can take advantage of this in sight reading by learning to recognise the common patterns of notes, and connecting them to the muscle memory of how they are performed.

In essence, figures are the musical equivalent of words, and through learning them we internalise the 'building blocks' of music, developing the tools to read *any* music with ease.

The C major scale

The first step in learning to read music using figures is ensuring that you know the C scale of your ocarina. We need to be able to move through these fingerings sequentially, in both ascending and descending order.

If you don't yet know the fingerings of the scale by heart, the basic idea is to break them down into small chunks as shown below and practice them individually. See 'learning the fingerings', for more detail.

If you're a beginner, it can be easier to start by learning a smaller part of the scale, which is discussed in 'Playing the ocarina with sheet music'.

C, D, and E

F, G, and A

A, B, and high C

High D, E, and F

Relating note movements to fingerings

To perform a figure, we need to learn how the visual pattern of the notes of that figure relate to the fingerings on an instrument.

One option is to be shown the notation, and the fingerings as ocarina tab, or through someone showing you in person. That works, but there's a better approach, to look at the relative distance between the notes on the staff, in relation to a scale.

In sheet music, low C is written like this, by marking the first ledger line below the staff. Notice that the vertical position of the note is roughly in line with the 'blob' at the bottom of the treble clef.

This position corresponds to the low C fingering on your ocarina, which is performed by closing all hoes except the subholes, as shown above.

Starting from low C, if a note moves up by one position on the staff, we also need to move up by one step in the C scale. On the ocarina, that means lifting your right pinky finger.

The distance between two notes is called an interval, and a movement of one staff position is called a 'second'.

The same pattern continues. A series of notes like the following, each moving up by one position, equates to sequentially moving up the notes of the ocarina's C scale:

• Start with all holes closed, except for the subholes.
• First lift your right pinky,
• and then your right ring finger.

And if you see a note one position lower than the previous note, you just move down by one step in the scale. To find the first note here, notice that it is one step above low C.

And finally if you see two notes in the same position then you don't need to change your fingering at all, just play the same note twice with the tongue, or fingered articulations.

Movements of two positions likewise correspond to moving two steps in the scale. But for this article lets just stick to movements by a single step, and really get that into muscle memory.

Reference points

It's pretty easy to read music by relative movement so long as you know how to find the first note on your instrument, but if you don't its more tricky. For example, this is obviously a descending scale run, but from where does it start?

The general solution to this is to use points of reference. To start with, you already know where the low C is, so one approach is to:

• Start on low C.
• Count upwards by the number of positions between there and the higher note.
• Move up by that number of steps on your instrument.

But its a better idea to learn a few more reference points. For example, the spaces from bottom to top, spell the word 'FACE'.

However, these names are only of ancillary value. What we actually want, is to connect the visual of these staff positions directly to their fingerings:

• Get some notation paper.
• Write a note in the low F position and finger the note on your instrument.
• Do this for the other notes.
• Write out a random selection of the notes 'FACE', and finger them to a slow metronome, aiming to remember the fingering when you see the position, without needing to name it.

Once we have a few fixed references, it's easy to find all the other notes by moving up or down a few steps in relation to the closest one.

Where next?

So you have the first pitch, you can finger it on your instrument. Now the question is, what are the following notes going to be?

As we've already explored, we can read music using the relative distances between the note heads, but isn't the point to get this into the subconscious mind?

That's where melodic figures come in. A figure is just a short sequence of notes. If we take a starting note, and a set of ways of moving from one note to the next (staying the same, or moving up or down by one position), it's easy to generate every possible combination over a short sequence:

It's then easy to practice these patterns, by looking at the notation and repeating each one until it becomes muscle memory.

And by involving the visual of the notation in the process, the notation becomes connected to the fingerings, so when we see the notation of a figure, we immediately know how to perform it.

As we start to learn figures using larger distances between notes, reading notation becomes a matter of pattern recognition - reading one figure after another.

Shifting figures for practice

We can practice performing a given figure from a single note in the scale, such as low E as above, but what if that same pattern shows up starting from a different note?

To address this problem we can practice the same pattern starting from every note in the scale, spanning the whole of the instrument's range.

For instance, you may take the 3 note ascending scale figure, and practice it across the whole of the instrument's range:

And here's the same exercise for descending scales:

By practising a pattern in this way, you're learning how to finger the pattern, what it looks like in notation, and developing a connection between the two. Then if you practice this repeatedly for a few days, it'll start to become automatic.

Every 3 note figure in c major using unisons and seconds

To develop a through muscle memory of the possible note movements from any note in a scale, it can be helpful to practice every possible figure within a short sequence, such as 3 notes.

Here are all of the 3 note sequences possible, starting from every note in the range of a 10 hole C ocarina:

From C

From D

From E

From F

From G

From A

From B

From high C

From high D

From high E

From high F

Practising reading figures in some music

Here are some examples to practice which make use of the previously introduced figures. Look through each one and recognise each figure pattern, remember how to play them, and then try sight reading it.

If you need to, clap through the rhythms in advance.

Practice 1

Practice 2

Remember to look across bar lines to find the next figure, and what note it begins on.

The note following a bar line may be the same:

Or it may be higher:

Or lower:

Practice 3

Note that in real music you'll often encounter the same figures, but played to a different rhythm. To find the figure being used focus just on the pattern of pitches.

Practice 4

Practice 5

Practice 6

When music includes rests as below, look forward to the note after the rest to work out how much you need to move up or down by.

Practice 7

Notice which staff position the first note starts on.

Practice 8

Practice 9

Practice 10

You shouldn't have too much trouble reading this. Just remember that a step of 2 staff positions corresponds to 2 steps in the scale. We'll be exploring larger intervals in full detail soon.

Closing notes

The next step is to start learning some figures using larger intervals, and we'll do that over the following articles in this series.