How to read sheet music? Start here.
Reading sheet music is undoubtedly one of the skills that can benefit you the most throughout your musical career.
You can learn to master a style or an instrument, but knowing how to read music can give you the tools to dream of a musical career on the instrument you want to master.
The first thing you need to understand is the purpose of sheet music in music and why it’s so important to learn how to read sheet music.
Let’s start with the purpose: the score is a document that lets you know what should be played at each moment of the music, whether it’s a note, with what figure, how much intensity that note should have, at what speed, with what instrument, and even what form of execution.
All of this information is just a fraction of what the score tells us about the music we’re playing, so we can replicate exactly what composers in the 1600s wrote as if it were whispered into our ear.
In this video, we give you a brief summary of what a score is. If you’re interested in going into more detail on this topic, we’ve created an article explaining each element of a score and the types of scores you can find.
How to read sheet music from scratch
We can talk for hours about sheet music, but you’re here to learn how to read sheet music from scratch, starting with the basics and working your way up to where no sheet music is a challenge for you to interpret and perform on your musical instrument.
The first step in reading sheet music from scratch is to identify the musical key, since knowing the key will allow us to know the names of the musical notes that appear.
How to read the musical staff?
The five lines of the staff are nothing without the musical clefs, which is why they are so important for beginning to read the staff.
Each line of the staff represents a pitch, that is, a musical note, which allows us to locate not only which note, but also how high or low that note will be.
For example, if we have a treble clef and we see a note on the first line of the staff counting from the line that is lowest on the sheet to the one that is highest, we can identify that note as an E4, which is different from the E3 or the E2 or the E5 because it has double or half the frequency of one and the other.
That is to say, the higher the frequency (of the sound), the higher the note will be, while the lower it is, the deeper the note will sound.
This is why identifying the keys allows us to begin determining the notes we will play because we will already know the pitch of each of them.
If you’ve already identified whether it’s a treble clef, bass clef, or alto clef and on which line, you can now continue reading the next important item in a score: The key signature.
Here you will identify the accidentals that this score will have, whether they are sharps, flats, or no accidentals, meaning that all the notes are natural.
You can also find accidentals throughout the staff, but we call these accidentals and we don’t need to focus on them until we get to that section of the score.
You’ve already mastered basic sheet music reading, including notes and their accidentals. Now it’s time to review the figures to identify the rhythm of the score, moving from reading only notes to reading music, thanks to combining pitches with rhythm.
Learn music theory with exercises for reading sheet music
Learning music theory can sound like something ugly, or at least boring, that’s why at Arthaus Music School we believe that you can replace music theory with solfeggio.
Solfeggio doesn’t have to be a bad thing; it’s simply a way of learning to read sheet music, which, as you’ve probably learned throughout our articles and on this page, is an essential skill for all musicians.
That’s why we want to help you with these exercises so you can learn to read sheet music in a way that makes music theory less boring.
Exercises to learn to read sheet music quickly
First, look for scores of works you’re familiar with. That is, we’ll try to only look for works we’ve heard many times. You can even check out YouTube channels like this one, where you can follow along with well-known works by listening to their scores while the music plays.
If you’ve started with these videos, the next step is to try it on your own and pick up a piece of sheet music to follow along with the music playing. This will allow you to learn to read sheet music very quickly by following the notes and figures in real time.
Don’t expect to be able to identify which note each one is playing, just try to follow where the music is playing at that moment through the figures and notes.
Then we will fine-tune further so that we can identify note by note what we are reading.
The next exercise to start reading sheet music faster is humming the notes, selecting note by note as we hum.
That is, let’s take Mozart’s Little Night Serenade as an example. You have the score for it, and you’ve already tried to follow along with the music, like in this video.
Now take just the sheet music, without the music, and start humming the main melody following the sheet music and point with your finger where each note you are humming would be.
For this, it is important that you know the melody well so you can hum it without memory problems.
If you were able to complete this exercise without any problems, now it’s time to start naming those notes.
The following exercise is called prayed solfege, which consists of naming the notes as we read them but without their corresponding pitch, that is, instead of saying G, D, G, at the beginning of the little nocturnal serenade as if we were singing the note, we are only going to say G, D, G, but without singing it.
Like someone who reads the lyrics of a song but doesn’t sing the song.
That’s why it seems like we are praying the notes and that is called prayed solfeggio.
If you can do it without any problems with this, now we’re going to include the pitch of the note, that is, we’re going to sing the name of the note while we read it.
This is the final step to help you speed up your sheet music reading process.