Learn to Read Piano Notes: A Beginner’s Guide to Reading Sheet Music

Last Updated on January 10, 2023 by Rebecca

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Learning to Read Piano Sheet Music

If you want to learn to read piano notes on sheet music, there are several things you'll need to learn.

Every note you see on the music staff communicates 3 different things: the pitch, the rhythm, and the articulation.

Pitch refers to what note you should play.

Rhythm refers to how long you should play the note.

Articulation refers to how you should play the note.

This article will explain how to read pitches and some strategies and tools that will help you master them. Then it will explain how to read rhythms, including note values and rest values. Finally it will explain other elements of sheet music that a good musician needs to know how to read.

Learning to Read Piano Notes on Sheet Music

When learning to read piano notes (pitches) on the music staff, it's best to chunk your learning into smaller parts so you can avoid feeling overwhelmed.

First you'll need to learn about the musical alphabet. Then you can learn about the notes on the treble and bass staves, and how these relate to the piano keys.

Musical Alphabet

The first thing you need to know is that the music alphabet has only 7 letters: 

A – B – C – D – E – F – G

These 7 letters are cycled repeatedly on the music staff, so when you get to G, the next note is A.

Learning to read these notes on the music staff is one part of your music learning, but to play the notes you read on sheet music, you'll also need to learn and practice the layout of the keys on the piano keyboard.

Treble Clef Notes

The line notes of the treble staff are E – G – B – D – F, from the bottom up. 

One mnemonic commonly used to remember them is:

Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge

The space notes of the treble staff are F – A – C – E, from the bottom up. 

A common way to remember these notes is to recognize that they spell the word face.

Bass Clef Notes

The line notes on the bass staff are G – B – D – F – A, from the bottom up.

One mnemonic commonly used to remember them is:

Great Big Dogs Fight Animals

The space notes of the bass staff are A – C – E – G, from the bottom up.

One mnemonic commonly used to remember them is:

All Cows Eat Grass

The Grand Staff

When we combine the treble staff and the bass staff, we get the grand staff.

The treble staff is at the top because its notes are higher in pitch, and the bass staff is at the bottom because its notes are lower in pitch. 

The treble and bass staves are connected by vertical bar lines that run from the top of the treble staff to the bottom of the bass staff, and by a brace at the beginning of each line of music.

Middle C and Ledger Lines

Middle C (and a couple of other notes) live in the white space between the treble and bass staves on the grand staff. When I was a young piano learner, my teacher called this white space “middle C's playground.”

To recognize middle C, you need to understand ledger lines.

Ledger lines are short horizontal lines that are used to extend the grand staff.

The grand staff only covers a portion of the notes available on the piano keyboard. But if we made the grand staff big enough to include all the notes on the piano, it would be incredibly difficult to decipher notes among all the lines and spaces. 

So the grand staff focuses only on the range of notes that are most commonly played, and ledger lines are used as needed to extend the staff when we want to include other notes. 

You'll see ledger lines used above and below the grand staff, and also in the white space between the treble and bass staves.

Middle C is most common ledger line that you'll encounter as a beginner.

Middle C is the middle note of the grand staff. It can be written one ledger line below the treble staff or one ledger line above the bass staff.

What are all the music notes on the grand staff?

If you don’t count sharp notes and flat notes, the grand staff consists of 21 notes, or pitches.

The pitch range of the grand staff runs from low G at the bottom of the bass staff, all the way to high F at the top of the treble staff.

When moving up the grand staff, you simply start at the low G and cycle through the 7 letters of the musical alphabet until you get to the high F at the top of the treble staff, alternating line and space notes as you go.

When moving down the grand staff, you cycle through the 7 letters of the musical alphabet in reverse. 

How does the music staff relate to the piano keyboard?

To understand how the grand staff relates to the piano keyboard, you simply rotate the grand staff to the right. 

Now the bass staff is on the left and the treble staff is on the right.

This is lines up with how the notes increase in pitch as we move to the right on the piano, and decrease in pitch as we move to the left on the piano.

What are sharps and flats?

The black keys on the piano keyboard are sharps and flats. Sharps and flats are called accidentals.

Every note on the music staff can be altered to become sharp or flat. A note that is neither sharp nor flat is called “natural.”

A sharp note is when we move a note up in pitch by one half step. To do this, we play the black key immediately above (to the right of) the note.

A flat note is when we move a note down in pitch by one half step. To do this, we play the black key immediately below (to the left of) the note.

If you compare the 2 diagrams above, you'll notice that every black key on the piano has 2 names. They can each be considered a flat or a sharp, depending on their musical context. 

To complicate matters further, some white keys can also be sharps and flats! 

A sharp is one half step above a note, and a flat is one half step below a note, regardless of what colour the keys happen to be on the piano. 

There are no black keys between B and C, or between E and F. 

So B can become C flat and C can become B sharp. Similarly, E can become F flat and F can become E sharp.

You won’t likely encounter these accidentals (B#, Cb, E#, Fb) in the pieces you’ll learn to play as a beginner, but it is useful to understand how they work in music.

How do you memorize the piano staff?

There are several different strategies that can help you memorize the notes of the music staff so you can read music more quickly and efficiently. 

The trick is not to rely on just one of the strategies.

A good musician is familiar with all the strategies, and mixes and matches them while playing music, depending on which particular strategy gets their fingers to the next note fastest.

Reading Music Notes Using Mnemonics

The mnemonics strategy uses the memory aids mentioned above (Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge, etc.).

This is a useful strategy because it allows you to learn and memorize the notes of the music staff quickly and easily.

It’s good for a beginner to know the mnemonics and be able to fall back on this strategy when they get stuck on a particular note. 

However, it’s not a very efficient strategy. It’s a bit like having to count from 1 every time you want to try and remember what number comes after 7. 

It just takes longer than it should, and it slows down your playing. 

If you rely only on this strategy, you’ll have to pause every time you see a note you aren’t familiar with, and you’ll struggle to play musically. 

This is why a lot of beginners become frustrated when learning to read music and play the piano. 

So although the mnemonics strategy is a good starting point, you want to make sure you learn other strategies as well. 

Reading Music Notes Using FACEGBD

I don’t remember the first time I came across this strategy. But I do remember later hearing Nicola Cantan of Colourful Keys refer to it as “Face Jibbidy” (or was it Jibbidy Face?) in a video, and hearing it out loud like that really makes the sequence of letters stick for piano learners. 

No matter what note of the piano or staff you start on, if you move up in pitch by skips, the notes cycle through the pattern FACEGBD. 

The beauty of this strategy is that it applies with literally any starting note. It works for space notes and line notes. Bass staff and treble staff. 

So if you’re on an A, skip up through ACEGBDFACEGBD, etc. 

I find it particularly helpful when reading very high or low notes that are several ledger lines above or below the staff. 

But it’s less helpful in reverse. When moving down by skips, the notes cycle through the pattern in reverse, DBGECAF, which doesn’t really stick as easily because this sequence of letters just doesn’t sound as memorable. 

Reading Music Notes Using Intervals

The intervallic strategy is a huge game-changer when it comes to reading music!

If you want to be able to read and play music smoothly without constantly having to pause and think about every note, you need to learn the intervallic strategy. 

With the intervallic strategy, you learn to recognize the relationships between notes.

How it works is that you learn what certain intervals look like in music. You learn what a step looks like, what a skip looks like, what a fifth looks like, what an octave looks like, etc. 

So if you see the notes ABCDE written in a row, once you play the A, you don’t need to read the next 4 notes because you can see that they move up by step. So you just play 4 more notes moving up by step. 

This takes out the middle step, allowing you to play the correct notes without having to first take the time to name each individual note before you play it.

The really beautiful thing about this strategy is that once you become good at it, you not only learn what the different intervals look like on the music staff and on the piano keyboard, but your hands also learn what the different intervals feel like. 

This means that you don’t have to look down at your hands as often when playing!

For example, if you play an A, and you see that the next note is an interval of a 5th above it (an E), your hand will know where that E is on the piano because it knows what a 5th feels like. So you’ll be able to play the next note without even looking away from your music.

Intervallic reading allows you to read music much more quickly and efficiently than if you rely only on memorizing and reading individual notes.

Reading Music Notes Using Guide Notes

The guide notes method (sometimes also called the landmark notes method) is a teaching method that gets beginner students started on the intervallic method. 

In the guide notes method, you start by learning a few important notes on the music staff. Usually bass F, middle C, and treble G.

You become very familiar with just those 3 notes, then you start using small intervals (repeats, steps, and skips) to read notes that are near the guide notes you’ve mastered. 

As you become more confident with this method, you expand it and learn a few more guide notes. Bass C and Treble C. Then low G and high F. 

The guide notes method is my preferred method for helping beginners learn to read music. It helps students become grounded in more than one part of the staff and keyboard, and it gets them started reading intervals.

Reading Music Using Solfège

Solfège is the method of reading music that uses do-re-mi-fa-sol-la-ti-do. 

I’m not very familiar with this method. I know what it is, but I've never learned to use it in my piano playing or teaching.

I always thought it was just for singers. But as an adult, I learned that some piano teachers use solfège to teach their students to read music for piano. 

One of the benefits of learning solfège is that it helps improve your ability to sight-sing. 

Sight-singing means being able to hear the music in your head when you look at the sheet music. 

If you can sight-sing when reading music, your ear will be able to help you know which notes to play, and know when you’ve played a wrong note. 

Solfège will be especially useful to you if you want to compose or arrange your own music, because it can help you become very good at identifying the intervals between notes you hear. This can take a lot of the guesswork out of figuring out exactly what pitch you're hearing.

Tools to Help You Learn to Read Music Notes for Piano

• Music Flash Cards
• Learn to Read Your Own Music Book 1
• NoteRush App

Get your FREE Level 1 Guide Notes Flash Cards!

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What else do you need to know to read music?

There are several other markings you'll come across in sheet music that you'll want to be familiar with as a beginner. Some of these include:

• Piano Finger Numbers
• Time Signatures
• Key Signatures
• Tempo
• Dynamics
• 8va and 8vb

Piano Finger Numbers

Sometimes finger numbers will be indicated above notes on the treble staff or below notes on the bass staff. 

You can see some samples of finger numbers on the music staff in the following excerpt from Clementi's Sonatina in F major (the first ones are highlighted in yellow to help you identify them):

On both hands, the finger numbers are as follows:

• Thumb = 1
• Index Finger = 2
• Middle Finger = 3
• Ring Finger = 4
• Pinky Finger = 5

If you play guitar or other stringed instruments, be careful not to get the different fingering systems confused! 

What are time signatures in music?

Time signatures tell us about the beat of a piece of music. You’ll find them at the very beginning of a piece of music, right after the key signature. 

A time signature includes 2 numbers stacked on top of each other. They look a lot like fractions. 

The top number in a time signature tells you how many beats are in a measure. So 4/4 time means there are 4 beats in a measure; 3/4 time means there are 3 beats in a measure, and 2/4 time tells you there are 2 beats in a measure.

The bottom number in a time signature tells you what type of note equals 1 beat. A 4 on the bottom means a quarter note equals one beat, a 2 on the bottom means a half note equals 1 beat, and an 8 on the bottom means an eighth note equals 1 beat. 

Most often, a piece of music will be written entirely within a single time signature. But sometimes a piece of music changes to a new time signature partway through. In this case, you’ll find additional time signatures in other places within a piece of music.

What time signatures should I start with as a beginner?

As a beginner, you’ll focus primarily on pieces written in 4/4 time, 3/4 time, and 2/4 time.

You’ll want to avoid other time signatures until you’ve built up a solid understanding of note values. 

This is because when you change the bottom number, the values of all the notes change. For example, in 2/2 time, a quarter note will no longer equal 1 beat, a half note will no longer equal 2 beats, a whole note will no longer equal 4 beats, etc.

This can be very overwhelming for a beginner who hasn’t yet mastered the basic note values in 4/4, 3/4, and 2/4 time. 

But although the values of the different notes change when the bottom number of a time signature changes, the relationship between the different note values will always remain the same. 

For example, no matter how many beats a quarter note equals, it will always equal half the value of a half note. 

So once you have a solid understanding of note values in 4/4, 3/4, and 2/4 time, you’ll be ready to start working on playing pieces with different time signatures where the note values change.

What are key signatures in music?

The key signature tells us what key a piece of music is written in, by indicating which sharps and flats are in the piece. 

It appears at the beginning of every line of music, in both the treble and bass staves.

For an example, look again at that excerpt from Clementi's Sonatina in F major. This time the key signature on each staff has been highlighted in yellow to draw your attention.

In the example above, the key signature tells us that the piece is in the key of F major, which has one flat: B flat.

This means that every B in the entire piece of music will be a B flat.

The composer doesn’t have to write a flat symbol beside every B. We are expected to know from the key signature that every time we see a B, we will play a B flat.

The only reason we would not play a B flat in this piece would be if the composer included a natural symbol beside a particular B somewhere in the piece.

Tempo

Tempo refers to the speed of a piece of music. How quickly or slowly should a piece be played?

You’ll usually see a tempo marking above the staff at the very beginning of a piece of music. 

On more modern pieces of music, you’ll often see a metronome marking that gives you an exact numerical metronome tempo.

Take a look at this excerpt from Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star. The tempo marking has been highlighted in yellow to draw your attention.

The tempo marking above tells you that you should set your metronome to 140 beats per minute, and that each tick of your metronome equals one quarter note.

In older music, you’ll see a word (usually in Italian) that gives you an idea of how quickly a piece should be played.

Look again at the excerpts from Clementi's Sonatina in F major and Mozart's Viennese Sontatina no. 6. This time the Italian tempo markings have been highlighted in yellow to draw your attention.

The marking “Allegro con spirito” in Clementi's Sonatina in F major tells you that the piece is meant to be played quickly and with spirit.

The marking “Adagio” in Mozart's Viennese Sonatina no. 6 tells you that the piece is intended to be played with a slow and relaxed tempo.

Although you will typically see tempo markings at the beginning of a piece of music, you may also find several different tempo markings throughout a piece, indicating where changes in mood and tempo should occur.

You'll usually see these at the beginning of a new section or movement in the piece.

Common Tempo Markings

• Grave – slow and solemn
• Lento – very slow
• Largo – slow
• Andante – at a walking pace
• Moderato – moderate pace
• Allegretto – moderately fast
• Allegro – fast
• Vivace – fast and lively
• Presto – very, very fast

Common Temporary Tempo Change Markings

You'll also come across temporary tempo change markings throughout a piece of music. These don't indicate a change in the tempo of an entire section of a piece, but rather a temporary change in a small part of the music, usually only a few measures.

This type of tempo marking is used to help you understand what kind of expression the composer intends for that part of the music.

The most common tempo change markings you’ll see are:

• rit. – ritardando – gradually slowing down
• accel. – accelerando – gradually speeding up
• a tempo – return to original tempo

What are dynamics markings in music?

Dynamic markings are used to show when and how the volume of a piece of music changes. They help create the expressiveness of a piece of music, allowing it to evoke emotions and tell a story. 

You’ll usually see these markings written in the white space between the treble and bass staves.

For an example, take a look at the excerpt from Clementi's Sonatina again. This time the dynamic marking is highlighted in yellow to draw your attention to it:

List of Common Dynamic Markings in Music

• pp – pianissimo – very soft
• p – piano – soft
• mp – mezzo piano – medium soft
• mf – mezzo forte – medium loud
• f – forte – loud
• ff – fortissimo – very loud
• dim. – diminuendo – gradually getting softer
• decresc. – decrescendo – gradually getting softer
• cresc. – crescendo – gradually getting louder

Crescendo and decrescendo can also be notated using symbols instead of text. The following excerpt from the Adagio section of Mozart's Viennese Sonatina no. 6 includes several crescendo and decrescendo symbols. Two of them are highlighted in yellow to draw your attention.

8va and 8vb

8va stands for “ottava,” which means octave in Italian. 

When you see 8va written above the staff, it tells you to play the notes an octave higher than written. 

When you see 8va written below the staff, it tells you to play the notes an octave lower than written.

8vb stands for ottava bassa. It means to play the notes an octave lower than written. So you may sometimes see 8vb written below the staff instead of 8va. But you’ll never see 8vb written above the staff.

With 8va and 8vb markings, we can write very high and very low notes without having to use a lot of ledger lines. This makes it easier to notate the music, and it also makes it easier to read the music. 

Why Learn How to Read Music?

It is definitely possible to learn to play piano without ever learning to read music. 

Maybe you just want to improvise your own music. Maybe you just want to learn chords and play from a chord chart. Maybe you like learning music by ear. Maybe you love learning from YouTube videos. 

But being able to read music has many advantages!

• You have unlimited songs and pieces available to you. You’re not limited to songs or pieces that someone has created a YouTube tutorial for. 
• If you’re proficient at reading music, it is much faster and efficient than following a YouTube tutorial because you don’t have to keep pausing and rewinding, you just look back at the part you need to repeat.
• You can play more elaborate music, compared to what you could play with only chords.
• You can compose and notate your own music and create your own arrangements of popular songs.

Related Posts

• Learn the Piano Keys (for Adult Beginners)
• Rhythm for Beginners: 8 Basic Rhythms in 4/4 Time
• Learn to Read Music: How the Music Staff Works