What can help you learn how to read music for piano?

One of the biggest challenges for beginner piano students is to learn how to read music! If you are taking piano, violin, voice, or flute lessons, knowing the note names is a must. You can get by without it, but your progress in playing your instrument will be significantly slower.

Before we talk about the best ways to speed up note reading on piano, let’s review a few methods that the instructors at Riverside Music Studios do not recommend.

1. Writing in the notes on your sheet music is not a long term solution for learning to read music.

When you do that, you encourage yourself to look at the letters rather than the notes. This is a complete dead end scenario – you are only giving yourself information on what the note letter is, and not which octave it is in, which rhythm it is, which fingering, and which articulation. So you will have to look at the letter you wrote down, and then still figure all this other stuff out by looking at the printed music note again. In the end, you spend a lot of time writing down the letter names (and beginners make mistakes with this ALL the time) and you don’t give yourself the very basic understanding which notes are higher and which are lower as the music goes on.

Does this work as a short term solution? Somewhat. Does writing notes in to your music work in the long run? Absolutely not. 

There is one exception to this recommendation: it’s totally fine to write down very high and very low notes. For any notes higher than two ledger notes in treble clef and lower than two ledger notes in the bass clef – go ahead and write them down. Don’t feel guilty about doing this!

2. Do not put stickers or piano note strips on your piano keys.

We do not recommend this because it creates a complete dependency on visually looking for this info rather than memorizing the patterns on your instrument. While this may be an easy process for beginners, those piano students will find themselves right back at the beginning once the letter stickers are removed, because they never really memorized them in the first place!

When your pieces become more challenging (and therefore more fun!) you will not have time for extra steps such as looking down at your hands while you play to find the letter names.

3. Avoid mnemonic phrases to memorize the lines/spaces on the musical staff.

Many music teachers use simple phrases called mnemonic devices to “help” students find the letter names on the lines and space of the staff, such as “Every Good Boy Does Fine,” “Every Good Boy Deserves Favor,” and “All Cows Eat Grass.”

Imagine if, when you are reading a book, you would have to do some sort of an extra step to figure out each letter of the word?

Thinking “All Cows Eat Grass” (that one is for the spaces in the bass clef) is an equivalent of a toddler looking at letter A with a picture of an Apple next to it. It works at the very early stages of learning to read, but then you surely have to move on!

This is sort of a last resort if you are having trouble learning your notes with better methods.

What are the best ways to learn how to read sheet music?

Use an app or browser based method to memorize music notes through games and competitive activities

At the bottom of our list is using digital technology to learn your piano notes. SWhy not put digital resources higher on the list in the age of advancing technology? The reason is that music education is still very much a niche industry where technology hasn’t caught up to a good quality yet. It’s quickly moving in this direction, but everything is still a little clunky.

The design, timing, clarity of information and presentation – all of this has to become much better in order for people to be successfully learning from it.

At our school, Riverside Music Studios, only a very small portion of the students were able to find useful digital resources for learning music theory and then they have always, ALWAYS, stopped using them after hitting a dead end with what they can learn.

Music theory books, both for kids and adults, are a truly great option to learn how to read music notes!

The best musical minds have been at it for centuries by now. Everything is worked out: it’s logical, it’s smooth, you can proceed at your own timing, you can go back to anything at any point, it’s just great! You will find many music theory options on the book market, and if you do your research, any method book that has a couple of decades under its belt will do a good job for you. Different publishing houses compete for price, design, and usability, but honestly, they all deliver the same information and all do a great job with it. 

When you enroll in piano lessons, your instructor will be able to guide you to physical resources that will work best to help you learn how to read music.

Practice reading notes using flash cards

It’s basic, it’s simple, it goes directly in your memory uninterrupted by any extra processes. We’ve all used flash cards for studying and they are as effective for music as they are for anything you’ve used them for. A few hours of pain and voila, you just know all your notes. It’s that simple!

Learn to read using landmark notes and distances (musical intervals) instead of letters

The highest type of knowing and reading notes overall is called “intervalic” or “directional” reading. This is how professional pianists read music and you can use this method from the start to learn how to read music.

Start with Memorizing “Landmark” Notes

Most piano teachers have their students start with memorizing 4 landmark notes (notes that are easy to find and used a lot in beginner piano music), and building upon those over time:

• middle C in treble clef
• middle c in bass clef
• Treble G
• Bass F

Once you have memorized these landmark notes, you never have to question this knowledge.

After the first set of landmark notes are memorized, we like to do all C’s and G’s in the treble clef and all C’s and F’s in the bass clef.

Compare the Landmark notes in order to read the other notes

After that you read other notes by comparing them to your landmark notes: are they lower or higher and by how much? This system starts with having non-landmark notes just a step above or below the landmark notes, then a single note skip apart, and then more. And then you start adding other landmark notes to memorize firmly and forever.

Notice how in this system you don’t have to mentally process the letter name of each note as you read music – you find it relative to the landmark notes that you know.

Music teachers who teach other instruments often approach the first notes you learn in a similar way. For example, a beginner violinist usually starts with learning where their open strings are (G, D, A, E) on the treble clef. You just memorize how they look and where they are on the piano or another instrument you are learning, and you don’t have to ever question this knowledge again.

Eventually, at a higher level your brain will have to register just the first note of every passage and you will know the rest by looking at the directions and the distances between the notes.

Musical phrases will form notes into “words” where you don’t register every individual letter and read them as whole words and even sentences. The pros know all their individual notes, of course, but in real time, the action of registering each individual note becomes unnecessary.

You simply start reading music as you read written text!

If you’re interested in taking piano lessons in NYC and becoming better at reading music, contact us! Our teachers can help you find the best way for you to understand and read sheet music.

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