How to Read Sheet Music: A Complete Beginner's Guide

The following is an authorized transmission from the ghost of Herr Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart to his beloved apprentice, you.

Dear apprentice, I'm so sorry to hear that you're a hopeless musical illiterate. It's a common problem among non-geniuses. But I'm thrilled to be able to help you. I have a lot of spare time now, you see.

Learning how to read sheet music will lay great groundwork for picking up any instrument. Sheet music is the most universal format for notating and sharing music, having won a brutal (but musical) game of thrones against hundreds of competing notation systems. (Yes, I watch Game of Thrones.)

Throughout this guide, you'll find interactive examples you can listen to and play along with. If you have a digital piano, you can plug it in for real-time feedback, then tap the player (TODO: Amadeus devs, fix this!) you want to interact with. Of course I never had any of this and I could read music fluently by age 3, but what are you...did you say 40!? Sweet Mary, I was already dead at your age! Yeah...you're going to need all the help you can get.

Ahem, not to worry. By the end of this guide, you'll be able to read notes, understand rhythm, and play a complete piece. I'm just going to assume you know nothing...which can't be too far off.

Falling notes mode:

My dear apprentice...may I call you appy? My dear appy, if your goal is to learn a specific piece right now, your inspiration could vanish by the time you're a sheet music pro, like a fart in hurricane.

On the other hand, learning how to read sheet music will help you pick up new pieces much faster, especially as they get more complex.

When you have a choice between two things, choose both: learn specific pieces when you have the inspiration and build reading skills on the side.

Two Mainstream Ways to Read Piano Sheet Music

Below you'll see the same notes represented in the two modes:

• Sheet Music: Traditional notation, what I'm about to teach you
• Falling Notes a.k.a. Piano Roll: Notes fall from top to bottom onto a virtual piano, like in Guitar Hero

Still here? I guess you're ready to learn how to read sheet music after all. Let's start with the basics: the staff and the symbols on it.

By the end of this section, you'll be able to map any note in a piece of sheet music to a key on your piano.

Sheet music is written on a staff: five horizontal lines on which notes are placed in the form of circles with stems pointing up or down. And I gotta say, notes are way rounder than in my day, circle technology has really progressed.

Piano sheet music uses two staffs stacked together to form a grand staff. The top staff is for your right hand and the bottom is for your left hand. There's an invisible line between them that you can see if you close your eyes and ask nicely. Just promise me you'll see a doctor if you start seeing an invisible 11th finger between your two hands.

Remember: no matter how far apart the staffs are drawn, there's only ONE LINE between them.

The staff has two axes:

• Moving vertically up on the staff is the same as moving to the right on the piano, which takes you higher in pitch, and usually to the next letter in the musical alphabet (letters A through G).
• Moving left and right on the staff takes you backward and forward in time.

Please take care when moving backwards, I am not responsible for any time travel paradoxes.

Notes can't just go anywhere on the staff, this isn't kindergarten (although by the time I was in kindergarten, I'd already written my first opera). They can either be placed on a line or in a space between two lines.

Let's see some examples. Focus on the relationship between the notes (circles with stems) and the staff (lines and spaces). Ignore the other symbols for now.

If you already know what these are, skip to the next section.

You can mostly ignore the other symbols for now, but in a nutshell:

The leftmost symbols are called clefs and tell you what staff you're looking at, top or bottom. In all the examples on this page and in most piano sheet music, you'll see the treble clef on the top staff and bass clef on the bottom staff. For now, just think treble clef = top staff = right hand and bass clef = bottom staff = left hand. And that's probably the last you'll need to care about clefs for a long time.

The 4⁄4 symbol is the time signature and has to do with rhythm and time-keeping. We'll figure out if you have rhythm later.

The lightning bolt shaped symbols are rests. They tell you that a given hand should be silent. Like notes, rests have durations. More on that later.

For now, stay focused on the notes.

If you already know the names of notes, like C4 or A♭3, and what those names mean, skip to the next section.

You need to learn to go from any note in sheet music to a key on your piano, and vice versa. It's time for you to learn the names of notes. Brace yourself, put on a diaper, whatever you need to do.

The name of any note and its corresponding key on the piano, like A♭3, consists of 3 things:

1. A letter: A through G. In the case of A♭3, this is A
2. An optional symbol: # or ♭
3. An octave number. In the case of A♭3, this is 3. Only seven letters A-G are used represent all notes in Western music. Can you count from 0 to 100? Really? Okay, well then you know that you first count from 0 to 9, then bump the tens place and count to 9 again, and so on. Similarly in music, every time you cycle through letters, you end up one octave higher or lower, except there are 7 letters instead of 10 digits. On the piano, these repeating patterns are easily visible, for example, the note to the left of the centermost island of two black keys is always a C. Can you find all the C's?

Three C's in different octaves (C3, C4, C5), played simultaneously:

C1 through C8 on the piano, played in sequence, lowest to highest:

The distance between any two neighboring keys on the piano is called a "half step". Two half steps make a "whole step". As my old man used to say: the meaning life is whole whole half whole whole whole half. More on that later.

An octave, say from C4 to C5, is 12 half steps, which we'll see in a bit.

Hm, with two staffs of 5 lines each and 1 invisible line between them, that's 11 lines on and around which to place notes. Adding in 9 spaces between the lines, that's 20 different notes. Each of these positions corresponds to a specific key on the piano...

Wait a second, you say! The piano has 88 keys, and there are only 20 notes on the staff?

My dear apprentice, you're smarter than you look.

First of all, while most pieces have a small range and fit within the grand staff, you can draw additional lines above and below it as needed.

Then there are sharps and flags, represented by # and ♭ symbols, respectively. Have you noticed you've only been playing white keys so far? # and ♭ symbols unlock the black keys. You're welcome.

A sharp (#) tells you to move one key to the right on the piano, so C# is one key to the right of C. A flat (♭) tells you to move one key to the left on the piano, so E♭ is one key to the left of E. Easy, simple and trivial.

An example of a sharp and a flat:

Let's find what's called middle C. It's the note that lies on the invisible line between the two staffs and roughly in the center of the piano, to the left of the centermost island of two black keys. Now play every single key, white and black, up to the C above it. Don't worry if it sounds weird.

Every note from C4 to C5:

These exact same notes can actually be represented differently. A C#4 is the same as a Db4. Why? Because from C to D is a whole step. Going up a half step from C takes you to the same note as going down a half step from D. Why have two names for the same note? Good question, but save it for later.

C4 through C5, with flats instead of sharps:

Hint: if you can't hear that the two examples above are identical, switch both to falling notes mode where it's more obvious.

You may have noticed in the last two examples that there was no E#, B#, C♭ or F♭. This is again easier to see on the piano than on sheet music. Sharps and flats normally correspond to black keys, but there is no black key to the right of E and B, and no black key to the left of C and F.

However, if you do see an E# in a piece of sheet music, it just means what a sharp always means: play a half step higher than E, which turns out to be F. Similarly, a C♭ means you go down a half step from C, which lands you on B.

Once you can find middle C on the piano (the note on the invisible line between the two staffs), it's easy to find any other note by counting half steps up or down. But in practice, here are some shortcuts and mnemonics I came up with in kindergarten that can help you locate notes faster.

The top staff (right hand):

• The notes on the lines spell EGBDF: "Every Good Boy Does Fart."
• The spaces spell out "FACE". If you can't remember FACE, just remember, "Farts Are Considered Elegant."

The bottom staff (left hand):

• The notes on the lines spell GBDFA: "Good Boys Do Fart Abundantly."
• The notes on the spaces ACEG: "All Composers Emit Gas."

And as you already know, if you only play the white keys, you'll be playing the notes A-G with no flats or sharps.

Dear apprentice, you made it through something longer than a tweet. Well done! You should now be able to map any note on the staff to a key on your piano. There's a lot to remember, but it's all worth it. When in doubt, find your home base - middle C on the invisible line between the two staffs, just left of the island of two black keys, and count half steps from there.

Next: Now that you know how to find the notes, I'll teach you how sheet music represents note duration and rhythm.