Music glossary
Plain-language definitions of the terms you’ll meet while learning an instrument — from scales and chords to rhythm, technique and jazz vocabulary. Each definition is short enough to absorb between practice sessions; many link onward to courses where the concept is taught properly.
A
- Arpeggio
- A chord played one note at a time instead of all at once, ascending or descending. Arpeggios are core technique on piano, guitar and strings, and the raw material of countless accompaniment patterns.
B
- Barre chord
- A guitar chord where one finger presses multiple strings across the fretboard at once, acting as a movable nut. Barre chords let you play the same shape in any key by sliding it along the neck. Guitar courses →
- Bebop
- A fast, virtuosic jazz style developed in the 1940s, built on rapid chord changes, chromatic passing notes and long improvised eighth-note lines.
- Blue note
- A note sung or played slightly below its expected pitch — most often the flattened third, fifth or seventh — giving blues and jazz their characteristic bittersweet colour.
C
- Cadence
- A chord progression that ends a musical phrase, like punctuation in a sentence. A perfect cadence (V–I) sounds finished; an interrupted cadence (V–vi) deliberately avoids the expected resolution.
- Chord inversion
- A chord voiced with a note other than its root at the bottom. Inversions smooth out chord changes by minimising hand movement and create stepwise bass lines.
- Chord voicing
- The specific arrangement of a chord’s notes — which octave each lands in, which are doubled or omitted. Two players can play “the same” chord and sound completely different because of voicing. Jazz piano courses →
- Comping
- Short for “accompanying”: the rhythmic chords a pianist or guitarist plays behind a soloist in jazz. Good comping leaves space, answers the soloist, and keeps the harmony moving.
D
- Dynamics
- The louds and softs of music, from pianissimo (very soft) to fortissimo (very loud). Dynamics are one of the main expressive tools a player has beyond the notes themselves.
E
- Embouchure
- The way a wind or brass player shapes their lips, facial muscles and airflow on the mouthpiece. A stable embouchure is the foundation of tone, tuning and stamina. Saxophone courses →
F
- Fingerpicking
- Playing guitar strings directly with the fingertips or nails instead of a pick, letting one player carry bass, harmony and melody at once. The engine of folk, blues and classical guitar styles.
G
- Groove
- The rhythmic feel created when all parts lock together — the quality that makes music move. Groove lives in timing details smaller than the notation shows. Drum courses →
H
- Half step (semitone)
- The smallest interval in Western music — one fret on a guitar, or two directly adjacent piano keys. Twelve half steps make an octave.
I
- Improvisation
- Composing in real time: creating melodies over a song’s harmony as it goes by. Far from being unstructured, improvisation draws on internalised scales, arpeggios and vocabulary.
- Interval
- The distance between two pitches, named by counting scale steps — a third, a fifth, an octave. Recognising intervals by ear is the core of practical ear training.
K
- Key signature
- The sharps or flats at the start of each staff line that define a piece’s key, so accidentals don’t have to be written on every note.
L
- Lead sheet
- A compact song chart showing only the melody, lyrics and chord symbols. Jazz and pop musicians read from lead sheets and supply their own voicings, rhythms and arrangement.
- Legato
- Playing notes smoothly connected, with no audible gap between them — the opposite of staccato. On piano it’s achieved with overlapping finger timing; on guitar with hammer-ons and pull-offs.
- Lick
- A short, reusable melodic phrase — part of the shared vocabulary of a style. Players collect licks the way speakers collect idioms, then adapt them in improvisation.
M
- Major scale
- The familiar do–re–mi seven-note scale, built from a fixed pattern of whole and half steps (W-W-H-W-W-W-H). It is the reference point from which most Western harmony and other scales are described.
- Metronome
- A device that clicks at a steady adjustable tempo. Practising with a metronome exposes timing drift and is the standard way to build a passage up to speed gradually.
- Minor scale
- A seven-note scale with a flattened third giving a darker colour than major. It comes in three common forms — natural, harmonic and melodic — each altering the sixth and seventh degrees differently.
- Modes
- Seven scales derived by starting the major scale from each of its degrees — Ionian, Dorian, Phrygian, Lydian, Mixolydian, Aeolian and Locrian. Each has a distinct colour used heavily in jazz, rock and film music.
O
- Octave
- The interval between one pitch and another with double (or half) its frequency — the same note name higher or lower. Notes an octave apart sound “the same but different”.
P
- Pentatonic scale
- A five-note scale that removes the two most dissonance-prone notes of the major or minor scale. Its built-in safety makes it the first improvising scale most guitarists and pianists learn.
- Pizzicato
- Plucking the strings of a bowed instrument (violin, cello, double bass) with the fingers instead of using the bow. Violin courses →
- Position (guitar/strings)
- Where the hand sits along the neck, numbered by the fret or note under the first finger. Playing “in position” lets the fingers cover a span of notes without jumping.
- Progression
- A sequence of chords underlying a piece of music. A handful of progressions — like the 12-bar blues or the ii–V–I — power an enormous share of popular and jazz repertoire.
R
- Rhythm section
- The players who provide a band’s harmonic and rhythmic foundation — typically drums, bass, and piano or guitar. Soloists float over the rhythm section’s groove.
- Riff
- A short, repeated instrumental phrase that anchors a song — usually rhythmic, memorable and central to the track’s identity, from Delta blues figures to rock guitar hooks.
- Rubato
- Expressive, flexible timing — momentarily stretching or compressing the tempo for musical effect, especially in romantic piano repertoire, then giving the time back.
S
- Sight-reading
- Playing a piece of notation correctly on the first look, without rehearsal. It’s a trainable skill built from pattern recognition — intervals, rhythms and chord shapes — rather than note-by-note decoding.
- Staccato
- Playing notes short and detached, marked by a dot above or below the notehead — the opposite of legato.
- Swing
- A rhythmic feel where pairs of eighth notes are played long-short instead of evenly, creating the lilt at the heart of jazz. The exact ratio is felt rather than notated.
- Syncopation
- Accenting beats or parts of the beat that are normally weak — placing rhythmic weight “off” the pulse. Syncopation is what makes funk, jazz, and most popular music feel alive.
T
- Tablature (tab)
- A notation system for fretted instruments showing which string to play at which fret, rather than which pitch. Tab is faster to read for beginners but omits rhythm detail that standard notation carries.
- Tempo
- The speed of the music’s pulse, measured in beats per minute (BPM). Slowing the tempo while practising — without changing pitch — is the single most effective way to learn difficult passages. How to slow down sheet music →
- Time signature
- The two stacked numbers at the start of a piece: how many beats per bar (top) and which note value counts as one beat (bottom). 4/4 is so common it’s called “common time”.
- Transposition
- Shifting a whole piece to a different key while keeping every interval intact — for a singer’s range, an easier fingering, or a transposing instrument like the B♭ trumpet.
- Turnaround
- A short chord progression at the end of a section that leads the harmony back to the top of the form — in jazz and blues, typically some variation of I–vi–ii–V.
V
- Vibrato
- A small, regular oscillation in pitch that warms and humanises a sustained note. Singers, string players, guitarists and wind players each produce it differently, but the expressive effect is universal.
W
- Woodshedding
- Musician slang for intensive, focused practice — isolating a hard passage and drilling it (traditionally, out in the woodshed) until it’s effortless.