Reading Sheet Music: Part 1

The Staff

First thing you should know is what a blank music staff looks like. Behold:

Just five horizontal lines, as you can see. Music is read left to right, just like written English.

Clefs

The first thing we draw on a blank staff is a clef. There are two clefs that we’ll usually use. The treble clef, aka the G clef, is associated with higher-pitched notes, and thus melodies:

The treble clef is famous. You’ve probably seen it in artwork, on wrapping paper, tattooed on bodies, etc. Not only does the treble clef symbolize melody, it’s also curvaceous to look at. Why hello there, treble clef. You come here often?

The bass clef, aka the F clef, is associated with lower pitches. Bassists, tuba players, cellists, and other low-register musicians read this clef.

Tempo & Time Signature

At the top left of a piece of music, you’ll see a marking that indicates the tempo, or speed at which the piece was intended to be performed. There are several different ways this can be noted; a score may simply say something like “Slowly” or “Moderately Fast”.

It may also use fancy Italian words or use an exact metronome speed—we’ll revisit these in more detail later; I don’t want to weigh you down with the specifics just yet.

Another thing to be aware of is a marking called the time signature, which appears right after a clef at the beginning of a piece of music:

How many times have you heard a drummer yell “1, 2, 3, 4!” at the beginning of a song? It has to do with these stacked numbers just after the treble clef. For now just take note of them and we’ll move on.

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Say hello to your new alphabet

The musical alphabet uses the letters A through G to name its notes. Here we’ve labeled the white keys of a piano with their letter names:

If you look closely at the picture above, you’ll notice that after reaching G, the pattern starts all over again from A. The distance from the A at left to A at right is called an octave, and the A to the right is exactly double the pitch of the A at left. So the A to the right vibrates 880 times per second, while the one at left vibrates 440 times per second.

So although the two A notes look far apart on that keyboard above, octaves actually sound very similar to our ears. See for yourself:

[sound file of A and A goes here]

This pattern continues on in both directions quite far beyond the frame of the photograph: A, B, C, D, E, F, G, A, B, C, etc.

The Treble Clef

To read music, we match pitches in sheet music to wherever those pitches are found on our instrument. One of the first steps is to learn the letter names of notes.

Here I’ve placed a note on every space and line of the treble clef (aka the G clef) and written the letter name of the note underneath the staff.

So the vertical position of a note on the staff tells us its pitch: low notes hang low on the staff, while high notes hang out in the higher portions of the staff.

To read and write music, we need to train ourselves to be quite fast at identifying the letter name of each line and space on the treble clef. Fortunately there are some very easy ways to memorize the staff.

Naming the Lines and Spaces of the Treble Clef

Here’s a little memory trick to help you remember the letter names of staff lines. From the lowest line to the highest, the notes spell out:

E G B D F

Elephants Got Big Dirty Feet

All I’ve done is draw notes on all the lines, skipping the notes that live in the spaces between. Whenever you see the treble clef, remember that Elephants Got Big Dirty Feet and you’ll never have trouble naming the lines.

But what about the spaces between the lines?

Simple! Check this out:

F A C E

From lowest to highest, the letter names of the spaces spell “FACE”.

[more soon]