How to Read Sheet Music

Music is a language that has existed for thousands of years, and the musical notations we use today have been around for more than 300 years. Notation is a way of recording sound with symbols, from the basic notation of pitch, duration, and rhythm, to more complex symbols of expression, timbre, and even effects. special. This article covers the basics of how to read a piece of music, guides advanced methods, and outlines several ways you can learn more about the subject.

Table of Contents

Basic knowledge

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Understand the musical staff. Before you start learning music, you need to have some knowledge that anyone should know when learning music. The horizontal lines on a piece of music are called “staff”. It is the most basic musical notation and the foundation for everything in music.

The staff consists of five parallel horizontal lines, in the middle of which there is a space (called a slit). Both the lines and slots are numbered for easy memorization, and are always numbered from low (bottom of staff) to high (top of staff).

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Let’s start with the Treble Key. One of the first things you will encounter when learning music is “Music Course”. The winding symbol at the left end of that staff will tell you the pitch of the piece to play. All high-pitched instruments and vocals are in the treble clef. In this basic tutorial on how to read music, we’ll just use the Treble key in every example.

The Treble key, also known as the Sp key, is derived and stylized from the Latin letter G. A great way to remember this is that the circular stroke in the center of the Sp key is shaped like the letter G. When the notes are recorded on the staff with the key Sp key, they will be in the following order:
Five lines, from the bottom up, will record the following notes: EGBD F.
The four slots, from the bottom up, will record the following notes: FAC E.
This can be a bit difficult to remember, but you can apply some of the following tips to make it easier to remember. For the musical notes above the line, you can memorize the sentence: “I Call You To Go”. For the notes located in the slot, you can remember: “Must Eat With You”. Practicing with a live note recognition tool is also a great way to remember this order.

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Gain knowledge of Bass Key. Bass clef, also known as Fa clef, is used with lower-range instruments, such as the left hand accompaniment of a piano, bass guitar, trombone…

The Fa key is derived from the letter F in the Gothic language group. The two dots of the Fa key will be located in the slots above and below the line of the F note on the staff. The staff containing the Fa key will have a different note order than the Sp key.
Five lines, from bottom to top, will record the following notes: GBDFA (“Calling You To Go Ferry?”).
The four slots, from bottom to top, will have the following notes: ACEG (“Eat With My Sister.”).

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Learn about the parts of a musical note. A musical note consists of up to 3 parts: Head, body and tail.

The beginning of the musical note . This is an oval that is left blank (white) or filled in (black). Its most basic function is to tell the musician what note they will play on their instrument.
Body notes . This is a straight line drawn with the top of the note. If the note body is facing up, it will be drawn to the right of the note head If the note body is facing down, it will be drawn to the left of the note head. The direction of the note body has no effect on the note, but it does make the notes easier to read and less distracting.
The general rule of thumb when drawing note bodies is: for notes that are above the third line, the body should point downwards, and for notes below the third line, the body will point to the bottom of the third line. go up.
Musical note tail . This is a curved line drawn at the other end of the note body. Whether the note body is to the left or right of the note, the tail is “always” drawn to the right of the body, never to the left.
The three parts of the note head, body and tail will tell the musician how valuable each note is in terms of rhythm. When you listen to music and you stamp your feet in rhythm with the melody, you have captured the rhythm of that piece of music.

Rhythm and Beat

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Learn about spans. In the music, you will see lines that divide the staff at equal intervals. Those lines represent a “bar”. The space before the first bar is the first bar. The space between the first and second bars is the second bar, and so on. The bars have no effect on the music, but they make it easier for the performer to follow the track.

As shown below, we see that the bars all have “some of the same spans”. For example, when you type “1-2-3-4” to the tune of a song, you accidentally hit its bar.

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Learn about the beat, or the number of beats. The beat is the rhythm of the song. You can feel it naturally when you listen to pop or dance music, it’s a “boom, chat, boom, chat” sound or a classic dance song can also illustrate the beat well.

On sheet music, the beat is represented by a symbol like a fraction right next to the clef. Just like a fraction, it has a numerator and a denominator. The numerator is written on the top two lines of the staff, indicating how many beats are in a beat. The denominator indicates how many musical notes (each stomping) beat is worth.
The 4/4 beat is probably the easiest to understand, or “common” type of beat. For 4/4 time, each measure will have 4 beats and each measure is equivalent to one beat. This is the type of beat you often see in pretty popular music. You can count to this beat by typing “1-2-3-4” to the beat of the song.
When we change the numerator, we change the number of beats in a beat. Another fairly common type of beat is the ¾ beat. For example, most waltzes will have a regular “1-2-3 1-2-3” beat, so they have 3 beats in a bar.
Some beats will be shown with the letter C instead of two numbers. Time 4/4 is usually represented as a big C meaning Normal time. Likewise, the 2/4 meter span is represented as a large C with a vertical line through it. The letter C with the line through it represents the Break span.

Beat

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Feel the rhythm. Like beat and beat, “rhythm” is an important part of the nuance of a piece of music. However, while the beat only tells you the number of beats of the track, the rhythm tells you how the beats are arranged.

Try this: tap your fingers on the tabletop, then count 1-2-3-4 1-2-3-4 steadily. Not very interesting, right? Now try this: on beats 1 and 3, tap harder, on beats 2 and 4 tap softer. So it sounds very different. Now try the opposite: tap hard on beats 2 and 4, tap lightly on beats 1 and 3.
Listen to Regina Spektor’s song: Don’t Leave Me. You can hear the rhythm very clearly: the drums (boom) will beat lighter in beats 1 and 3, and the loud claps (chat) will be on beats 2 and 4. You will understand the arranged sounds. how. That is the rhythm.

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Imagine yourself walking. Every step is a beat. Those beats are represented by black notes, because in Western music (i.e. all of the music in that region and not just Hank Willian’s music), each measure has four beats which are equivalent to four notes. black. The rhythm of your footsteps should look like this:

Every step is a black note. On music, a black note is a note that is black, has a body, and has no tail. You can count each step in the rhythm of “1, 2, 3, 4 – 1, 2, 3, 4”.
If you halve the speed, meaning you only take 1 step into beat 1 and one step into beat 3, those steps will be denoted by a white note (the value is half a bar). In a piece of music, white notes look like black notes, but they are not blackened, but leave the beginning of the note white.
If you go even slower, which means you only take one step into beat 1 every four beats, you’ll denote that step with a round note – one note per measure. On sheet music, the round note looks like an O or a donut, a bit like a black note but without the stem.

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Let’s speed up! It’s enough to go slow. As you have seen, when we slow down, the notes lose parts. First, we remove the color from the note head, then, we remove the note body. Now try increasing the tempo. To do so, we will add parts to the note.

Go back to the same rhythm as before, and picture it in your head (or you can tap your hand on the table). Imagine the bus has just arrived, and you are still a short distance from the bus stop. What you will do? You will run. When you run, you kind of “grow extra legs” to chase the bus.
To make the rhythm of the music faster, we will draw more tails for the notes. Each tail will halve the value of the note. For example, a single crochet note (with a tail) is worth half the black note; and the double/double crochet note (with two tails) will be worth half the single crochet note. When you walk, increase in rhythm is when you switch from walking (black note) to running (single crochet) – twice as fast as walking, then sprinting (double crochet) – twice as fast as walking. run.

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Bunch of nodules. As you can see in the examples above, things get quite confusing if there’s a bunch of notes like that on the page. You will feel like your eyes are crossed and completely lose track of the position of the music you are playing. To group notes into neater and easier-to-see sets, we’ll use “bundles of notes”.

Note clusters are simple: you replace the tails of individual notes with a bold horizontal line connecting the note bodies together. The notes are clustered according to certain logic rules. Complex tracks will have more complex rules. For the purposes of this article, we will only study clusters of black nodules. Compare the example below with the example above. Tap your fingers to the rhythm and see how the clusters of notes make the music easier to read.

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Learn the value of hyphens and periods. When adding a tail, the value of a note will be halved, and when adding a period, the value of the note will be halved. With a few exceptions that we won’t cover here, the red dot is always located to the right of the beginning of the note. When you see a note with a dot, the note’s value will increase by one and a half times its original value.

For example, a white note with an extra dot will be worth the same white note plus one black note. A black note with an extra dot is worth as much as a black note plus a single hook.
Hyphens are akin to exclamation points – they increase the value of a musical note. The hyphen is a curved line connecting the beginnings of two musical notes. Unlike its abstract nature, and whose value depends on the note it is on the edge of the period, the hyphen is easy to understand: the value of the musical note will be stretched to the exact value of the second note.
Another reason to use hyphens instead of periods is when the value of a note is redundant in the music cell. At that time, you just need to use one more note equal to the excess value and use a hyphen between the two notes.
Always keep in mind that the hyphen is placed between the beginning of two musical notes, in the opposite position of the note’s tail.

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Silence sign. Some people think that music is just a combination of notes, they are only half right. Music is a series of musical notes and the silences between them. Those are the “silences”, and thanks to them, music has emotion and vitality. Let’s see how they are denoted.

Like musical notes, silences also have their own symbols for each length. A rounded silence is a black rectangle just below the fourth line. The black silence is the black rectangle located just above the third line. A single silence is a broken stroke. The remaining silences consist of a broken stroke with the same ending number as the value of the note with the same ending number. The tail of silence always points to the left.

Melody

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We’ve covered some of the basics: the staff, the parts of the note, the note taking, and the silence. Take a look at the above knowledge and get to the most interesting part: reading the music!

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Learn about the C major scale. The C major scale is the basic scale in Western music. Most of the scales you’re about to learn come from here. Once you’ve memorized it, it’s easy to grasp the rest.

First, let’s see what this scale looks like, then how to read it and understand a piece of music. In the music, it will look like this. Take a look at the “C major scale” in the picture above.
Look at the first note, the bass C, and you’ll see it’s below the staff. Then, just add a separate extra line for that note – so the C bass has a small line across the top of the note. The lower the note, the more lines there are. But for now, we won’t need to worry about that.
The C major scale has eight notes. These notes are equivalent to the white keys on a piano.
You may or may not have a piano, but now it’s important to not only realize what the notes look like but also “sound”.

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You can practice reading musical notes (visual accompaniment) – also known as “phonics”. It sounds “scientific” but you probably already know it: that’s just how we sing the “Do, D, Mi” notes.

By vocalizing, your note-reading skills will be enhanced – a skill that can take a lifetime to perfect, but it comes in handy from the moment you start practicing. Take a look at the C major scale with the addition of note names. Take a look at the illustration “C major 11 scale”.
You probably already know the song “Do-Re-Mi” by Rogers and Hammerstein from the movie “The Sound of Music”. If you can sing in C major, sing while looking at the notes. If you need to learn more, listen to this song at YouTube.
This is a more advanced exercise, raising and lowering the pitch when vocalizing in the C major scale. See “Range of the C major scale 1” above.
Practice vocalization – part II several times until you have mastered the technique. For the first few times, take it slow so you can see every note as you sing. Next time, replace the letters “do re mi” with the symbols C, D, E. The goal is to sing at the correct pitch.
Remember the note value we mentioned earlier: The high C at the end of the first line, and the low C at the end of the second line are all white notes, the rest are all black notes. If you imagine yourself walking, every note is a step. The white note is equivalent to two steps.

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Congratulations! You already know how to read sheet music!

Sharps, Flats, Equals and Compounds

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Let’s go to the next step. We’ve learned the basics of rhythm and melody, and you’ve already learned the basics of periods and breaks. This should be enough for you to take the basic flutophone class, but there are still a few things you should know. One of them is the chemical markers.

You’ve probably seen sharps and flats in music: the sharp looks like the hash tag symbol (♯) and the flat looks like a lowercase B (♭). They will be placed to the left of the note, and indicate whether the note will be raised (hash) or lowered (flat) halfway. The C major scale, as we know it, consists of the white keys on the piano. The sharp and flat notes are the black keys. Since the C major scale has no sharp or flat signs, it would be written like this:

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Arc and semitone. In Western music, the notes are spaced by one step or half step. Look at the C key on the piano, you will see between it and the D key there is a black key. The pitch distance between Do and D is called an arc. The space between the C and that black key is a semitone. You may be wondering what that black key is called? The answer is: “It depends”.

There’s a very simple rule of thumb: if you’re gradually increasing the pitch, it’s the high of the previous note; if you gradually lower the pitch, it will be the flat of the next note. So if you go from C to D in turn, you will use the pound sign (♯).
In that case, the black key would be C sharp (C#). When descending the pitch, from D to C, you will use flat (♭).
Those conventions will make the track easier to read. If you were going to write three notes in ascending order, and used D♭ instead of C#, you could write a square (♮) right next to the third D.
Here, we have a new notation – the square sign. When you see the pitch sign (♮), it means that the sharp or flat of that note has been invalidated. In this example, the second and third are both D: the first is a D flat (D♭), so the second D – after being raised a half step from the previous D, right there is a symbol to return to normal pitch. The more sharps and flats a piece of music has, the more attention the musician must pay before playing.
Often, musicians who accidentally use the wrong key will add “unnecessary” comments to make it easier for the musician to understand the piece. For example, if in D major the musician used an A sharp (A#), the next A could be added to a square.

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Understand the scales. We already know the C major scale: including 8 musical notes, all of which are white keys starting from the C note. However, you can start a scale from “any” note. If you play only the white keys, it’s not the major scale but the “musical form” – this is beyond the scope of this article.

The first note, also known as the “main chord”, is the name of the chord. You’ve probably heard someone say “this song plays in C major” or something like that. This example shows: that scale starts with C and includes CDEFGAB C notes. The notes in major scales are very closely related. Take a look at the keyboard above.
Remember that most musical notes are spaced one step apart. But between the notes E and F, B and C there are only semitones. Most major scales have this rule: one – one – half – one – one – one – half. If you start a scale from the note G, it will be written like this:
Notice the note F# near the top. In order to get it in order, the F must be raised a half step to be exactly a half step away from the G note instead of one step. Such scales are usually very easy to read. But what if you start a scale from a C# note? It will be like this:
Things are starting to get complicated. To make the music less confusing and easier to read, the digitization was born. Each major scale has a fixed set of sharps and flats, and these are recorded at the beginning of the piece. Take a look at the G scale, we will see a sharp note – F#. Instead of placing a sharp next to every F note in a piece of music, we’ll put a pound sign at the very left end of the staff. That means every F note in this piece will be an F# note. It looks like this:
This piece of music has the same melody and play as the G scale without the accents above. See the Scales section below for scale types.

Intensity and Shades

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Be vibrant or mellow. When you listen to music, you will realize that it is not always the same volume. There is a very loud volume and a very smooth listening part. That’s called “intensity”.

If melody and beat are the heart of a piece of music, and notes and chords are the brain, then pitch is the voice of the piece. Let’s see the first example.
Knock on the table: 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and 5 and 6 and 7 and 8… (“and” is the word musicians often add when reading the beat). Beat at an even volume so that it sounds like a helicopter fan. Now look at the second example.
Notice the stress sign (>) placed above the fourth C note. This time tap hard on the accented beats. Instead of sounding like a helicopter fan, hear the beats more like a train. Just change the accent, the nature of the music has become completely different.

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Play softly or forcefully, or in between those two extremes. Just as you never speak with a steady rhythm, you often speak louder or louder depending on the situation, so does music change in pitch. Composers often use magnitude notation for marking.

You can see dozens of magnitude symbols in a piece of music, but some of the most common are the letters f , m , and p .
p means “piano,” or “light.”
f means “forte,” or “strong.”
m means “mezzo,” or “medium.” It will change the pattern of intensity that follows it, as in mf or mp , meaning “moderately strong,” or “moderately mild.”
The more p’s or f’s in a piece of music, the softer or more forceful you have to play. Try singing the example above (using the vocal method – the first note in this example is the dominant note), and increase or decrease the pitch as notation to see the difference.

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Play the music up or down. Another common intensity symbol is “cresendo” – play louder, and vice versa, “decrescendo – play smaller. They indicate a steady increase or decrease in intensity and look like the “<” and “>” symbols are flattened.

Crescendo indicates a steady increase in volume, and decrescendo indicates a steady decrease in volume. You’ll notice: with these two symbols, the “open” part of the symbol will represent a piece of music with high intensity, and the “closed” part will represent a lower intensity. For example, if the track shows you need to play music with a loud to soft intensity, you will see the symbol f’ , then the symbol ” > “, and finally ‘ p’ .

Advanced

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Let’s keep learning! Learning to read music is like learning the alphabet. While it will take some time to learn the basics, they are generally quite easy. However, there are still a lot of nuances, concepts and skills you need to learn, and you will have to learn for a lifetime. Some composers even get to the point of composing on spirals or oddly shaped staff, or even without a staff at all. This article will help you have a good development foundation.

Scale Table

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Learn these scales. At least one scale for each note in the scale – some people will realize: in some cases, there are two scales for the same note. For example, the note G# sounds exactly like the note A♭. When it comes to playing the piano – and also due to the limitations of this article, that distinction is not obvious. However, some composers – especially string composers – will argue that A♭ is slightly higher than G#. Here are the scales for the major scales:

C scale (or non-tone)
Scales with sharps: G, D, A, E, B, F♯, C♯
Scales with flats: F, B♭, E♭, A♭, D♭, G♭, C♭
As you can see, when using a scale with sharps, you add sharps to each note one by one until all the notes are hit in the C scale. When using a scale with flats, you add flats to each note one by one until all the notes are flat in the C scale.
The good news is that composers also often compose in easy-to-read scales. The D major scale is very commonly used on string instruments, as the loose strings often sound very close to the D. There are some string compositions written in E♭ minor or for the suite. copper in E major. However, writing and reading those pieces of music is difficult.

Advice

If you have a piece of music that can’t remember the notes, start by writing the note names below the notes. Don’t do that often. You will have to remember the names of the notes later.
Find tracks of songs you like. Head to a library or music store, and you’ll find hundreds – if not thousands – of sheet music with basic notations and chords. Read the sheet music while listening to it, and you’ll quickly understand what you’re reading.
Have fun learning music. If you don’t like it then you will be very elusive.
Please be patient. Just like learning a new language, learning music takes time. And like learning anything else, the more you practice, the easier it gets, and the better you will get.
Practice your vocal skills. You don’t have to have a good voice, but it will help you to “hear” the notes on paper.
Practice when the surroundings are quiet or find a quiet place. Ideally, you should practice on the piano because it is very easy to play. If you don’t have a piano, use an online piano software. Once you get the hang of it, you’ll be able to play other instruments. Hope this helps.
Practice with your dominant instrument. If you play the piano, you probably already know how to read a piece of music. However, many guitar players learn by listening instead of reading. When you learn how to read a piece of music, forget what you already know – learn how to read music and then play an instrument.
The trick here is to practice a lot. Learning by card or using a music reading guide will give you a solid foundation.
Memorize the following sentences while playing the piano: On the right hand: “I Call You To Go” for notes above the line; For the notes located in the slot, you can remember: “Must Eat With You”. On the left hand: “Calling you to go for a ride?” for musical notes above the line; “Eating With My Sister.” for the notes in the slot.
Common types of musical notes include: black notes, white notes, single crochet, double crochet.
The slider on the trombone is used to play sharps and flats.

Warning

Learning music can take a lifetime. Learn slowly but surely.

Steps