Topmusicanswers
Have you ever seen those letters up above the staff in your sheet music and wondered what they are? Those letters are chord symbols. Although guitar players use chord symbols all the time, for many beginning piano students chords are a mysterious art.
- What are letters above the staff called?
- What do the letters on top of a music staff mean?
- What do the chords above the staff mean?
- What do letters mean on sheet music?
What are letters above the staff called?
When you encounter sheet music or songbooks containing just melodies and lyrics, you usually also get the little letters and symbols called chord symbols above the staff.
What do the letters on top of a music staff mean?
Those letter symbols stand for the appropriate chords to accompany the melody note below. They are what's called "harmony" - guitar players, for example, do a lot of chord backup for singers.
What do the chords above the staff mean?
Chord symbols are written above the top staff of the written music. ... The quality indicates the type of chord (i.e. major, minor, dominant, diminished, etc.). With time, experience and study musicians (especially bassists) should know what notes are in various chords and what chord symbols are used to identify them.
What do letters mean on sheet music?
In music, letter notation is a system of representing a set of pitches, for example, the notes of a scale, by letters. For the complete Western diatonic scale, for example, these would be the letters A-G, possibly with a trailing symbol to indicate a half-step raise (sharp, ♯) or a half-step lowering (flat, ♭).
