Step 1: Learn the Basic Symbols of Notation

Music is made up of a variety of symbols, the most basic of which are

the staff, the clefs and the notes. All music contains these
fundamental components, and in order to learn how to read music,
you must first familiarize yourself with these basics.

The Staff
The staff consists of five lines and four spaces. Each of those lines
and each of those spaces represents a different letter, which in turn
represents a note. Those lines and spaces represent notes named A-
G, and the note sequence moves alphabetically up the staff.

Treble Clef
There are two main clefs with which to familiarize yourself; the first is a
treble clef. The treble clef has the ornamental letter G on the far left
side. The G’s inner swoop encircles the “G” line on the staff. The
treble clef notates the higher registers of music, so if your instrument
has a higher pitch, such as a flute, violin or saxophone, your sheet
music is written in the treble clef. Higher notes on a keyboard also are
notated on the treble clef.
We use common mnemonics to remember the note names for the
lines and spaces of the treble clef. For lines, we remember EGBDF by
the word cue “Every Good Boy Does Fine.” Similarly for the spaces,
FACE is just like the word “face.”

Bass Clef
The line between the two bass clef dots is the “F” line on the bass clef
staff, and it’s also referred to as the F clef. The bass clef notates the
lower registers of music, so if your instrument has a lower pitch, such
as a bassoon, tuba or cello, your sheet music is written in the bass
clef. Lower notes on your keyboard also are notated in the bass clef.

A common mnemonic to remember note names for the lines of the

bass clef is: GBDFA “Good Boys Do Fine Always.” And for the
spaces: ACEG, “All Cows Eat Grass.”
Notes
Notes placed on the staff tell us which note letter to play on our
instrument and how long to play it. There are three parts of each note,
the note head, the stemand the flag.

Every note has a note head, either filled (black) or open (white).
Where the note head sits on the staff (either on a line or a space)
determines which note you will play. Sometimes, note heads will sit
above or below the five lines and four spaces of a staff. In that case, a
line is drawn through the note, above the note or below the note head,
to indicate the note letter to play, as in the B and C notes above.

The note stem is a thin line that extends either up or down from the
note head. The line extends from the right if pointing upward or from
the left if pointing downward. The direction of the line doesn’t affect
how you play the note, but serves as a way to make the notes easier
to read while allowing them to fit neatly on the staff. As a rule, any
notes at or above the B line on the staff have downward pointing
stems, those notes below the B line have upward pointing stems.

The note flag is a curvy mark to the right of the note stem. Its purpose
is to tell you how long to hold a note. We’ll see below how a single flag
shortens the note’s duration, while multiple flags can make it shorter
still.
Now that you know the parts to each note, we’ll take a closer look at
those filled and open note heads discussed above. Whether a note
head is filled or open shows us the note’s value, or how long that note
should be held. Start with a closed note head with a stem. That’s
our quarter note, and it gets one beat. An open note head with a
stem is a half note, and it gets two beats. An open note that looks like
an “o” without a stem is a whole note, and it gets held for four beats.

There are other ways to extend the length of a note. A dot after the
note head, for example, adds another half of that note’s duration to it.
So, a half note with a dot would equal a half note and a quarter note; a
quarter note with a dot equals a quarter plus an eighth note. A tie may
also be used to extend a note. Two notes tied together should be held
as long as the value of both of those notes together, and ties are
commonly used to signify held notes that cross measures or bars.
The opposite may also happen, we can shorten the amount of time a
note should be held, relative to the quarter note. Faster notes are
signified with either flags, like the ones discussed above, or
with beams between the notes. Each flag halves the value of a note,
so a single flag signifies 1/2 of a quarter note, a double flag halves
that to 1/4 of a quarter note, et cetera. Beams do the same, while
allowing us to read the music more clearly and keep the notation less
cluttered. As you can see, there’s no difference in how you count the
eighth and 16th notes above. Follow along with the sheet music for
“Alouette” to see how beams organize notes!

But what happens when there isn’t a note taking up each beat? It’s
easy, we take a rest! A rest, just like a note, shows us how long it
should be held based on its shape. See how whole and quarter rests
are used in the song “Here We Go Looby-Loo.”
Step 2: Pick Up the Beat
In order to play music, you need to know its meter, the beat you use
when dancing, clapping or tapping your foot along with a song. When
reading music, the meter is presented similar to a fraction, with a top
number and a bottom number, we call this the song’s time signature.
The top number tells you how many beats to a measure, the space of
staff in between each vertical line (called a bar). The bottom number
tells you the note value for a single beat, the pulse your foot taps
along with while listening.

In the example above, the time signature is 4/4, meaning there are 4
beats per bar and that every quarter note gets one beat. Click here to
listen to sheet music written in 4/4 time, and try counting along 1,2,3,4
– 1,2,3,4 with the beat numbers above.
In the example below, the time signature is 3/4, meaning there are 3
beats per bar and that every quarter note gets one beat. Click here to
listen to sheet music written in 3/4 time, try counting the beats, 1,2,3 –
1,2,3.
Let’s look again at the above examples, notice that even though the
4/4 time signature in “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” calls for 4 beats per
bar, there aren’t 4 notes in second bar? That’s because you have two
quarter notes and one half note, which added together equal 4 beats.

In addition to your note values and time signature, the last piece to
feeling the rhythm is knowing your tempo, or beats per minute.
Tempo tells you how fast or slow a piece is intended to be played, and
often is shown at the top of a piece of sheet music. A tempo of, say 60
BPM (beats per minute) would mean you’d play 60 of the signified
notes every minute or a single note every second. Likewise, a tempo
of 120 would double the speed at 2 notes every second. You may
also see Italian words like “Largo,” “Allegro” or “Presto” at the top of
your sheet music, which signify common tempos. Musicians use a
tool, called a metronome, to help them keep tempo while practicing a
new piece. Click here to see an online metronome tool, and click on
the circles next to the BPM values to see how a tempo can speed up
and slow down.
Step 3: Play a Melody
Congratulations, you’re almost on your way to reading music! First,
let’s look at scales. A scale is made of eight consecutive notes, for
example, the C major scale is composed of C, D, E, F, G, A, B, C. The
interval between the first note of your C major scale and the last is an
example of an octave. The C major scale is very important to practice,
since once you have the C scale down, the other major scales will
start to fall into place. Each of the notes of a C major scale
corresponds with a white key on your keyboard. Here’s how a C major
scale looks on a staff and how that corresponds to the keys on your
keyboard:

You’ll notice that as the notes ascend the staff, and move to the right
on your keyboard, the pitch of the notes gets higher. But, what about
the black keys? Musically, whole tones, or whole steps between the
note letters, would limit the sounds we’re able to produce on our
instruments. Let’s consider the C major scale you just learned to play.
The distance between the C and the D keys in your C scale is a whole
step, however the distance between the E and the F keys in your C
scale is a half step. Do you see the difference? The E and the F keys
don’t have a black key in between them, thus they’re just a half step
away from one another. Every major scale you’ll play on a keyboard
has the same pattern, whole-whole-half-whole-whole-whole-half.
There are many other types of scales, each with unique sounds, like
minor scales, modal scales and more that you’ll come across later on,
but for now let’s focus just on major scales and the major scale
pattern. Look at the C major scale again on the keyboard below.

Semitones, or half-steps on the keyboard, allow us to write an infinite

variety of sounds into music. A sharp, denoted by the ♯ symbol,
means that note is a semitone (or half step) higher than the note head
to its right on sheet music. Conversely, a flat, denoted by a ♭ symbol,
means the note is a semitone lowerthan the note head to its right.
You’ll notice on the keyboard picture and notated staff below, showing
each half step between the C and the E notes, that whether you use
the sharp or the flat of a note depends on whether you’re
moving up or down the keyboard.
There’s one more symbol to learn regarding semitones, and that’s
the natural,denoted by a ♮. If a note is sharp or flat, that sharp or flat
extends throughout the measure, unless there’s a natural symbol. A
natural cancels a sharp or flat within a measure or a song. Here’s
what playing C to E would look like with natural symbols.

Finally, in order to read music, you’ll need to understand key

signatures. You actually already know one key signature, the key of
C! The C major scale you learned above was in the key of C. Scales
are named after their tonic, the preeminent note within the scale, and
the tonic determines what key you play in. You can start a major scale
on any note, so long as you follow the whole-whole-half-whole-whole-
whole-half pattern. Now, following that pattern in keys other than the
key of C will require you to use sharps and flats. Since that’s the case,
we place the sharps or flats for your song’s key signature right before
the meter, after the clef, on your sheet music. That tells you to
maintain those sharps or flats throughout the music, unless of course
there’s a natural symbol to override it. You will begin to recognize the
key signatures of pieces based on what sharps or flats are shown.
Here’s a quick glimpse at some key signatures using sharps and flats: