Who here can read music? I need some help....

Help with what you can. (I hope those questions aren't too stupid...)

Damn that Tripod!

Here's something else I found:
http://home.sprynet.com/~grover/sheet_music.gif
I don't know the song, but at least it's a real song.

Assuming it's a treble clef, the lines are, from the bottom: E G B D F (Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge/Favour), and the space between are F A C E (again, going from bottom to top).

Sharp means half a note up, or one fret. Flat means half a note down, or one fret. If the sharp or flat symbol appears at the beginning of the bar by the clef, that designates the scale, and every note that appears along that line can be assumed to be flat or sharp unless the "natural" symbol appears before that note in the body of the music.

By the way, in case you didn't know, the symbol at the beginning of your second example indicates the treble clef. Anything that has that at the beginning will correlate with the EGBDF and FACE scheme. If it's a different symbol at the beginning, it will indicate bass or alto clefs which have a different scheme, which I don't know off the top of my head, so I'll let someone else handle that.

OK, thing at a time here. For chords, there are several possibilities you could use with the above melody, depending on how you wanted it to sound. Just glancing at it, you could use G for the first, third and fifth measures, C for the 2nd and 4th, and B minor for the last one. But, that would sound a little unfinished to my ears, like you're stopping in the middle of a phrase. In any case, the moral is it's up to you.

The sharp sign should be placed on the top line, which is 'F', and designating all Fs to played as F-sharps (unless you specify otherwise in the context of the piece). The order you are allowed to assign sharps in the key signature is F, C, G, D, A, E and lastly B. The order you are allowed to assign flats is the opposite: B, E, A, D, G, C and then F.

Re: the notes in the staff. If you take just the "lines" on the staff, starting from the bottom, you have: E, G, B, D, F ("every good boy does fine", or some such way to remember them). If you take the "spaces" in between the lines on the staff, starting from the bottom, you have: F, A, C, E (the "face" notes"). Therefore, putting them all together, starting from the low E (line), you have: E, F, G, A, B, C, E, D, E, F. The note right above the high F (line) is G, and it continues upwards ad infinitum. However, you may have noticed that for these higher notes, you have to start actually drawing more lines ("ledger lines") to accomodate the placement of the notes.

Hope that helps.

Bass clef lines (from bottom to top): G B D F A (Good Boys Deserve Fudge Always)
Bass clef spaces (fbtt): A C E G (umm... All Cats 'Ere Grey?)

Figuring out chords is a little trickier and I've forgotten enough theory that I'm very wary of giving advice. I do know that the piece you've put in as an example starts out on a G chord.

All helpful so far... But HOW did you decide which chords (G, C) would be appropriate for the measures you indicated? .. The song in this thread is not one of the ones I want to learn - it's just an example .. so I'm looking for advice on HOW to derive the chords...

The chords I listed were for your orig. tripod melody. The second you listed is easier to assign, because that kind of old English melody is pretty familiar to most people, and I'm used to hearing certian kinds of cadences. However, it would be a mess to post at ILM, especially as it looks like there are some instances where chords would change mid-measure.

Just found a page which might help you with determining keys: This page has a graphic partway down which lists flats and sharps and which key the piece would be in. There's a really good probability that the first bar of the piece will be in that key.

so I'm looking for advice on HOW to derive the chords...

Very strictly speaking, you derive chords from the notes in the melody, and recognizing which are emphasized, and which (if any) are merely passing tones or ornamental. I say 'strictly', because modern harmony isn't always interested in following melody lines to the tee, and a lot of times composers will use chords which don't obviously suit the melody -- perhaps going for dissonances on purpose.

That said, I chose the chords that I did because it appeared, for example, in the first measure as if G was emphasized (the note occurs three times in 4 beats) -- AND your key signature (despite the sharp being misplaced) indicated a key of G major (or E minor). I chose C for the second measure because 1) the presence of G and E suggests a move to C major, of which G and E are part of the triad, AND because I felt like going to the IV chord (of which C is in a G major, and because it is a very common chordal change in western harmony). In essence, it was the natural fit to my ears. However, you might just as easily go with E-minor for the second measure for similar reasons. It "works" just as well.

Thanks Sean - That website looks helpful...

dleone - that description is very helpful as well. Thanks.

For your second example, it'd probably be something like:

G | C | G, Em | Am, D | G | C | G, Em | D7, G |

As for the how-to of figuring out chords, the advice given so far is good. I'd add that it's tremendously useful to think of harmony in a contrapuntal sense -- by which I mean that, from one point of view, harmony is "bits of melody frozen in time", as a friend of mine likes to say. Writing four-part chorales and studying counterpoint is -- if you've got a good teacher (as I did) -- one way of developing a completely intuitive command of this part of the language.

Actually, if you transposed the first three notes of the fourth measure up an octave, your first melody could make a pretty plausible basis for a chorale harmonization. As it is, the skip down a sixth is a little too big -- tough to sing. But it's still got that phrase-ending-on-beat-3 thing that so many Bach chorales do...

What the hell: check this MIDI file out. I took your melody, transposed those three notes, tagged on the beginning to the end, and did a quick and dirty (under 20 minute) harmonization. It's not perfect, but you get the idea.

Whoops, I changed/mistranscribed a note (second B in the sixth measure -- changed it to an F#). No gold star for me...

You NEED Melody Assistant - it's a shareware program that after a lot of looking, beats all others. You basically write music as notation and hear it as you write. It's becoming a cult programme - it apparantly does everything Cubase does but better because you use notation, and that rapidly becomes more intuitive. I'ts only 4 megs in size. I wish I had it years ago. The full version costs something like $18 which is ridiculously cheap. It comes from a French collective, http://www.myriad- online.com. This is NOT spam, I don't know the people this thing has seriously helped me as a musician and finally got me reading music.