I've been trying to learn how to play piano sheet music, but I just can't seem to get it. Last summer I was taking piano lessons and I had trouble reading the music. One of my biggest problems is I play by ear and I use the notes as a guide, but I'm not really reading the notes. I informed my former piano teacher of this and he said it wasn't a problem. However, it is a problem. I'm not trying to get rid of my ear, but it's getting in the way cause I'm using it as a crutch! On the treble clef I know FACE and Every Good Boy Does Fine, but when I read them it's like a little kid trying to sound out a new word! I started learning the bass clef, but I don't see how I can get the bass clef and I haven't even gotten the treble clef. Luckly this is my last week of classes so I'll have more time on my hands to learn to read notes!
What strategies did you use to learn how to read sheet music?
Printed music is a kind of graph -- like a business chart. It represents a "picture" of the intended sound. As the note heads get higher on the page, the pitches get higher; as they get lower, the pitches get lower. On a business graph, as the points are plotted higher on the page, you've made more money, as they get lower you've lost money. If two points are fairly close together, then the change isn't that great, if they are far apart, the change is substantial.
If the note heads move from a line to the next space, the sound goes up just a little (a step). If a note head is on the bottom line and another on the top line, the sound leaps up a 9th (an octave and a 2nd).
When reading music, you are actually reading two notations -- the note heads, which indicate the particular note to play, and the stems, dots, flags, beams, etc. that indicate the duration (rhythm) of each sound. Only the color (or lack there of) of the note head has any bearing on the rhythm (and none whatsoever of the pitch.)
Good readers do not read "notes" By that I mean, they don't think every individual note name. They actually read direction and distance.
Consider, you see a series of 8 notes moving up line - space - line - space , etc. What do you have? An ascending Scale. To read that, you will need to know the starting note and any #'s or b's required from the key signature.
(I wish I could simply give an actual notated example instead of trying to do this through text.) Say the first note is on the second line of the treble staff and the last note is the space on top of the staff. We know that the first is some kind of G (nat. # or b depending on the key signature) so we have some sort of G scale.
One thing to try is look through a hymnal and first, just look for groups of notes that are scales or almost scales (I start here because they are easier to see then individual intervals.) First look at "Joy to the World" and "Away in a Manger". Both start with a descending scale - "Joy to the World" is mostly scales or a large parts of scales.
Then there are hymns like "Jesus Shall Reign" (tune name "Duke Street") that start by skipping the second note of the scale and then continues on.
Another thing to work with is a book of folk songs and children's songs.
Since notation involves two different systems (the note and the rhythm) start concentrating on one or the other (practice reading note patterns or rhythm patterns, but don't worry about them both together at first.) Even on the simplest music ("Mary had a little lamb" or "London Bridge" or some such tune) look for the patterns.
I hope this helps. Again, it would be easier to be able to show what I mean if I could display actual notation, but, such is life.
