Hey, what is up guys? Walt here and today, we are going to be working on Stems. I got a question from someone that wants to know “why in a piece of music do some stems point down and other stems point up?” And the simple answer for that is because you always want everything to be condensed in the sense that you do not want things sticking out of top here or sticking down through here.
So in a piece of music, you always judge it simply by the actual note head. So here, this head here is on the end. Now here are the note, F, A, C, and E. Any note that is below the B right here would usually get a stem pointing up. Any note that is above the B gets the stem pointing down. I will just extend this and it would look like this.
Now, if you are on the B, you really have your option of either choosing whether you want this stem to go up or down. Here I have a quick example of the notes from E right here and I go up to the high G right here. You will notice that all the stems are pointing up until you get to the B right here. As soon as you get to that B, I have everything pointing down.
Now the option that you have as the person who have heard the music or whatever, is that you have the option of everything pointing down or up. I will just go down. And the reason for this is because if you have them going down, imagine them going the opposite way of how difficult it would be to actually read the music. Let me show you. I will write this down and do all the stems separately and you will see how bad it looks. So all these stems are going down and these ones are going up. That is what it would look like if I did it incorrectly.
And now, instead of the piece of music only taking up this much space between the actual five ledger lines, I am now taking up this much space. And the problem with that is that not only does it look bad but it is actually very difficult to read because when I put a base up here, for example if I am playing a piano, then I now have a problem if I do the stems wrong because now, the stems are going to be fitting each other.
Now, if you do a 4th quarter writing which is a whole other thing, if you begin to do that, there might be times when you might have the notes look a little bit different. The rules are simply things that you should follow but that can be broken on certain examples and here is a good example right here. This is something that is completely out of the concept of this beginner stem rule. But for the most part, there you have it. We will get to this in several lessons, I suppose. Okay, I hope that helps you guys, stay well.
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