Reading Sheet Music (Mnemonics)

If you are beginning to learn to read sheet music check out my quick-and-dirty articles about getting your feet wet.

Once you understand the basic layout of the notes you can start reading a score. You will soon notice though that like any other language getting fluency in reading music takes time.

Often you will find yourself counting lines on the treble or bass clef to figure out which note to play.

Here are some simple mnemonic devices to help you quickly recognize the notes on the grand staff.

Reading sheet music made easy (Part 2)

This is a continuation from Part 1

The aim is to get to a point to be able to read the following piece:

Seeing how written music maps to the piano extremely well, leads me to believe that modern sheet music was invented first for the piano (or maybe the piano was invented with sheet music in mind... Who knows???).

This sheet music to keyboard mapping is so intuitive that it is the logical place to start (at least in my opinion :P)

Step 2 (Marching forward)

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...)