Reading sheet music made easy (Part 1)

The above is the opening from "Für Elise" ('For Elise' in English) which is one of Ludwig van Beethoven's most popular compositions. The above lines contain all the information required for a pianist to be able to render this well known extract of the timeless melody written more than 200 years ago in April 1810. 

The skill required to render this music as a balm for the soul, takes years of practice. However, getting to a point where one is able to understand that these unfathomable glyphs are  part of the tune is easy. 

The ability to read music allows us to start practising and play the millions of scores from Pop, Rock, Classical, Jazz etc genres which get published as sheet music. 

This is the first in a series of tutorials (and by series I mean 2 maybe even 3) about the basics of reading sheet music. At the end of these tutorials you should be able to make sense of most of what is written on this opening lines from For Elise. 

A note of caution for everyone! I like to figure out most things myself and am not classically (or infact even otherwise) trained. So whilst this is an easy way to learn reading music it might not be the correct way of going about things.  

Step 1 (Lets start from the very beginning...)

Before we look at the more technical stuff I want to take a moment to state the obvious. Sheet music is read left to right and then top to bottom like the English language. 

Also as the music is read from left to right the melody moves forward in time. The Image below has the written music as well as the lyrics to demonstrate how the melody moves forward. 

Notes written vertically in line (as shown in the image below) are to be played together at the same time.

Three notes played together

The next note written immediately to the left of a note is played after it (as in the image below).

Three notes played sequentially 

Music is written on Staff paper which looks like this:

Each staff has has five lines and the pitch is shown by the placement of the note on the staff (more on this later). 9 notes can be written on each staff with five notes on the lines and 4 notes in the spaces between the lines. One extra note each can be written immediately above the top staff line and below the bottom staff line (bringing the total notes that can be written on the staff to 11).

If more note pitches are to be shown on a staff then ledger lines are drawn (Look at the first note in the Auld Lang Syne tune; its written beneath the second ledger line, The second note is written on the first ledger line and so forth).

All melodies are made up of notes and rests if you have to play something its a note if you have to pause its a rest. The following images shows five common note and rest durations and how they are written onto the staff.

The Whole note has a duration of 4 beats and the Quarter note a duration of 1 beat. (easiest to imagine 1 beat per second)

By combining the number of notes and the note types we can get the beat or the meter of the music.


**In musical notation, a bar (or measure) is a segment of time defined by a given number of beats of a given duration. Typically, a piece consists of several bars of the same length, and in modern musical notation the number of beats in each bar is specified at the beginning of the score by the top number of a time signature (such as 3/4).

The word bar is more common in British English, while the word measure is more common in American English, although musicians generally understand both usages.**


For example a beat with 2 Quarter notes per measure is written like this:

In the above image '2' stands for the number and '4' for the duration (in this case quarter notes) so we know that each measure will be of the total duration of 2 quarter notes. 

(If you look closely at the second measure in the image above you will notice that two quarter notes are equal in length of 2 eighth notes plus 4 sixteenth notes)

The most common meter is the one with 4 quarter notes and it looks like this:

When you get into advanced music you will see crazy things like this next meter which has 9 eighth notes and looks like this:

You may notice that the three notes in the first measure above have a dot after them. This dot adds the next lower note value, making it one and a half times its original duration.

In the image above the dotted note is a Quarter note held for the extra duration of a eighth note.

This is all I intend to cover in part 1. Read more in Part 2 

Note: The definition between ** and ** was copied shamelessly from Wikipedia.