How to read music

Welcome to our first lesson on How to read music.

In order to be able to play piano you are going to need to learn how to read music.
There are two ways of reading music:

1. Notes.

2. Chords.

First we are going to learn how to read notes followed by learning how to read chords.

In the picture above you can see the Staff, it is consisted of 5 lines and 4 spaces. The notes spread along the staff on the lines as well as on the spaces.

At the beginning of every Staff there’s a sign, these signs are called Clefs. We are not going to focus on all of the clefs that you might come across, only the basic ones, which are: The Treble Clef and the Bass (pronounced as base) Clef:

The top staff has the Treble Clef on it while the bottom one has the Bass Clef on it.

The Treble Clef is usually played by the right hand while the Bass Clef is usually played by the left one.

The picture above shows us a musical scale on the Treble Clef (in this case it’s C Major). The first note from the left is called Do the second note: Ri the third note: Mi the fourth note: Fa the fifth note: So the sixth note: La the seventh note: Ti the eighth note: Do.

If you were reading Chords the first note would be: C the second note: D the third note: E the fourth note: F the fifth note: G the sixth note: A the seventh note: B the eighth note: C.

The picture above shows us a musical scale on the Bass Clef (in this case it’s C Major). The first note from the left is called Do the second note: Ri the third note: Mi the fourth note: Fa the fifth note: So the sixth note: La the seventh note: Ti the eighth note: Do.

If you were reading Chords the first note would be: C the second note: D the third note: E the fourth note: F the fifth note: G the sixth note: A the seventh note: B the eighth note: C.

Now we got to the part where we need to use what we learned on the piano.

Every eight notes on the piano are called an octave, which is what you can see in the picture above.

the first white key is Do/C The second key is Ri/D and so on.

The last picture sums up our lesson, you can see the staff in it, the Treble and the Bass clefs, the notes, the chords and the notes placed on an octave on piano.

I hope the lesson helped you read music. Thank you for checking out our website. If you think anything needs editing or correction don’t hesitate to leave a comment and we will be reading all of your comments.

Don’t forget next week’s lesson “Scales, Chords, Sharps and Flats“