Sheet Music? No Problem!

A Guide to Reading Sheet Music for Piano

Learning the skill of reading sheet music for piano unlocks the ability to play any piece of music. It does take some practice, but so did learning to read words (and hopefully you did learn to read!). So, if you’ve ever wondered how to read sheet music, check out this blog for everything you need to know about sheet music for piano! We’ll teach you the fundamentals so that you’ll be able to learn how to read sheet music as a beginner as well as give you the tools for playing more advanced piano sheet music.

The Basics

Pitch

Sheet music for piano is written on the grand staff, which looks like the image below:

It has five lines on top, and five lines on the bottom. Each set of five lines is called a staff (and if you ever want to buy a notebook already filled out like this, go to your music store and ask for staff paper). When two staffs are put together and linked with a curly brace on the left, it is now called a grand staff.

When playing the piano, the top staff is played by the right hand, and the bottom staff is played by the left hand, with few, very specific exceptions that would be notated at the bottom of the piece of sheet music.

On the left side of the staff, you will notice symbols, called clefs. Clefs tell you how to read the staff. The clef in the red square is called the treble clef, and in the green square is called the bass clef. Notes above middle C are written in the treble, and below are written in the bass. For more information on where middle C is, read our keyboard blog!

Each line and space in a staff represent one note. For example, in the treble clef, the very first line is the E directly above middle C. The space above that is F. The line above that is G, etc, etc. When trying to read sheet music at the beginning, it is easier to just memorize a couple acronyms – the spaces in the treble clef spell FACE, and the spaces in the bass clef spell out ACEG. Using these acronyms, you can find any note. Try it in this piano game!

Following this, the very first F in FACE is the F directly above middle C, and the next F (the top line of the treble clef) would be the next F key, an octave above the previous F.

The top line of the bass clef represents the A directly below middle C, and the A on the lowest space represents the A an octave below that.

If you’ve been paying attention, you’ll notice that these lines and spaces only name the white keys. Black keys are named based on their relationship to white keys – meaning that each black key to the left of a white key is flat, and the black key to the right of a white key is sharp. Check out the image below:

In sheet music, sharps and flats would be written to the left of the note it is modulating (turning sharp or flat).

Time and Duration

Music would be boring if every note had the same duration – it is only interesting because some notes are long, some notes are short, and there is variation. Sheet music does not only display the pitch of a note based on its position in the staff, it also describes the duration.

Here is a guide on relative note lengths:

Some vocabulary:

A Barline is the vertical bar dividing the staff into sections, and

a measure is the distance between two barlines – each of those measures takes up an equal amount of time.

On the left side of the staff above (in the red box), you will notice two stacked numbers (4/4). This is the time signature – how many of each note are in each measure. It works just like a fraction. In this case, there are four (top number) quarter notes (bottom number) in each measure. You can see above how many of each kind of note fit in each measure.

One more thing – dotted notes (pictured right). A dotted note means that it is held for the duration of the note plus one half of its duration – basically, a dotted quarter is held for the duration of a quarter and an eighth, a dotted half is held for the duration of a half and a quarter, a dotted whole is held for the duration of a whole and a half, etc. 

Sometimes, there are points in a song or piece where there are no notes being played at all in one hand or another. These points are designated by rests (pictured on the left), which work the same as notes and are a very important part of reading sheet music.

Key Signature

Songs and pieces are written in keys, which means that some notes are always flat or sharp. For example, the key of D major has two sharps – C# and F#. Songs and pieces written in D major do not use the notes C or F, they use C# and F# instead. Instead of constantly writing sharps next to every C or F in the sheet music, there is a key signature written at the beginning of the staff which tells the player to just automatically read every C and F as sharp.

Using the guide written about earlier, you can see that the two sharp symbols are written over the line that represents F, and the space that represents C. Note: This means that every C and F are sharp, not just the specific C and F that are written here.

More Details on reading sheet music

If you’ve listened to music before (and I assume you have), some songs or pieces are slower than others. Some parts of the song or piece may be louder or quieter than others. So where do musicians get this information?

Tempo — how fast or slow to play

The tempo marking is at the beginning of a piece, on the top left of the grand staff. Sometimes, but not always, there is a bpm (beats per minute) marking. In this case, the bpm is 40, and each beat is a quarter note, meaning that you should be playing at a speed that results in 40 quarter notes per minute. Metronomes (machines or apps that keep time for musicians) measure speed in bpm, so you would just set it to 40, no need for any math.

However, before there were metronomes, there was no way to accurately measure bpm, so instead the time markings were more general – such as slow, fast, medium tempo, etc. All these tempo markings are in Italian. This is because Italian was the language of art and commerce at the time that sheet music was becoming standardized.

If you know any Italian, you may notice that some of these words don’t exactly mean speed – they are more like “feels.” For example, the slowest speed, Grave, means serious, heavy, or grievous. Songs or pieces written with this tempo marking are usually very slow, because to give a piece or song a “serious, heavy” feel is to play it slowly.

Allegretto means cheerful, so songs or pieces written with this tempo marking would not be so fast that it would sound rushed, but not slow enough to sound sad – it would be just fast enough to sound cheerful. These tempo markings are more than just a bpm – they also tell you what mood the song or piece is supposed to evoke.

Modern printings of old music tend to have exact bpms, as over time some of these tempo markings came to have this meaning (or a range of bpms). Originally, they were just feels, and it was up to the musician to decide what speed to play the song or piece at to match the written feel.

Occasionally, the composer or songwriter will want the tempo to temporarily change. For example, a ritenuto means to slow down, and an accelerando means to speed up. It is very common to have a ritenuto written at the end of a piece, as it is quite satisfying to draw out the ending just a touch to give it a little more emphasis.

Dynamics — how loudly to play

Throughout the piece or song, you will find letters in the middle of the grand staff which tell you how loudly to play that part of the music. These are called dynamics, and they look like this:

Often, the composer will not want to have sudden changes in volume of notes, so they will write a crescendo (represented by a long <) or diminuendo (represented by a long >), which describe a gradual change in volume from one dynamic marking to the next. A crescendo means to get louder, and a diminuendo means to get louder.

Articulation — how to play each note

Composers can (and do!) get very specific with how they want their music to be played, so another level of information is called articulation. It is other information (not volume) about how to play each note. The two most common are called staccato and legato.

Staccato means to play the note short and sharp, and legato is the opposite – long and connected to the note(s) before and after it. Staccato is notated by a small dot above or below the note (not to the right – that dot means to lengthen the note as described in a section above), and legato is notated by a long slur that marks all the notes that should be played connected to each other.

Another symbol is the accent – it just means to play that specific note louder than the rest (to accent it). It is designated by a little hat (^) or “greater than” symbol (>) above or below the note.

Notes with stems pointing up will have their articulations written below, and notes with stems pointing down will have their articulations written above. There is a pattern for which direction the stems most often go – notes written above the middle line of the staff will have stems pointing up, and notes written below the middle line of the staff will have stems pointing down – basically stems should go towards the middle.

Other Symbols and Markings

You will find dynamic markings, tempo markings, key and time signatures, and flats and sharps in every piece of music that you will play. But some pieces have even more information, so here is a Wikipedia list of all musical symbols. Many of these symbols are unplayable on the piano (like pizzicato, which means to pluck a string on a string instrument with your finger instead of playing with the bow), but a lot of them are universal.

Practice & Learn to read sheet music at home

The information provided by sheet music can help you reproduce a piece of music almost exactly as the composer or songwriter wrote it. Before recorded music, there was no way to know what a piece is supposed to sound like by ear unless you went and heard a musician play it, so sheet music was incredibly useful in its ability to tell the performer how to play it, even if they lived many miles away from the composer and had never heard the piece.

In today’s era of easily accessible recorded music, you can look up almost any piece of music (and every piece of music that there is sheet music for) and hear what it sounds like. When you start to use sheet music to learn pieces on the piano, you can constantly compare your rendition to the recorded piece to learn from it and make improvements.

Though reading sheet music takes some getting used to, it’s still the best and most succinct way of visually representing sound in a way that can be read by musicians. I’d recommend starting by reading sheet music in layers. Start with pitch and duration. Then, once you have it in your fingers, add volume, articulation, and increase the tempo, until you can reproduce the original piece faithfully.

And, if you want to write your own music, there really is no better way to write it down. You can write a piece of music in your teens and use it to reproduce it in your golden years, and if you are lucky enough, other people will want to play it, and you can just hand (or sell!) them the sheet music. Practice these fundamentals, and the entire library of all the world’s music is yours, just from these relatively few symbols.