How to read sheet music

Music is written on five lines with four spaces between them. This is the staff. Every line and every space is one note. The higher a note sits on the staff, the higher it sounds and the further to the right it is on the keyboard. You read from left to right, like a sentence.

Upright lines called bar lines cut the staff into bars, also called measures. Every bar holds the same number of beats, which is what makes music easy to count. A thin line followed by a thick one marks the end of the piece.

A note that moves from a line to the space just above it has gone up one letter name. On the white keys, that is the very next key. A note that jumps from one line to the next line up skips a key.

The symbol at the start of each staff is the clef. It tells you which note each line stands for. The treble clef is a curly letter G: its inner curl wraps around the second line from the bottom, and that line is the G above middle C. The bass clef is an old letter F: its two dots sit either side of the second line from the top, and that line is the F below middle C.

Piano music uses both clefs at once. The treble staff on top usually holds the right hand, the bass staff underneath holds the left, and a brace joins them into the grand staff. In the score above, the right hand plays the tune in the treble staff and the left hand holds two notes at a time in the bass staff.

Each clef has its own page with every line and space and a note-naming game: treble clef notes and bass clef notes.

Notes are named with the first seven letters of the alphabet, A B C D E F G, and then start again at A. On the keyboard, every C is the white key just to the left of a group of two black keys. The C closest to the middle of the piano is middle C, your first landmark.

Treble staff, from the bottom line up: the lines are E G B D F, and the spaces spell F A C E. Bass staff, from the bottom line up: the lines are G B D F A, and the spaces are A C E G.

You do not have to recite those lists to find a note. Learn three landmarks, middle C, the treble clef G and the bass clef F, and count up or down from the nearest one. In bar 1 of the score above, the right hand starts on E, the bottom line of the treble staff, steps down to D just under the staff, then to middle C.

Some notes are too high or too low for the five lines. They get short extra lines of their own, called ledger lines, which extend the staff for that one note. Count them the same way as the lines and spaces of the staff.

The ledger-line note you will see most is middle C. It sits on one ledger line below the treble staff, or one ledger line above the bass staff, and both are the same key. One ledger line above the treble staff is A. One ledger line below the bass staff is E.

In the last bar of the score above, the right hand holds middle C on its ledger line for the whole bar.

The shape of a note tells you how long to hold it, counted in beats. The two numbers after the clef are the time signature. The top number is how many beats are in each bar. The bottom number says which note counts as one beat: 4 means a quarter note.

A dot after a note adds half its length again, so a dotted half note lasts three beats. Every note value has a rest of the same length. A rest is silence, and you keep counting through it.

The score above is in 4/4. Count 1 2 3 4 out loud in every bar: bar 1 is four quarter notes, bar 2 is two quarter notes and a half note, and the last bar is a single whole note. The next time signature you will meet is 3/4, three beats in a bar, as in Happy Birthday or the Minuet in G major.

A sharp (♯) raises a note to the very next key on the right, usually a black key. A flat (♭) lowers it to the very next key on the left. A natural (♮) cancels either one.

Sharps or flats written right after the clef, at the start of every line, are the key signature. They apply to that note in every octave for the whole piece, so the music does not have to mark each one. A sharp or flat written in front of a single note is an accidental, and it lasts only until the end of that bar.

No key signature, as in the score above, usually means C major or A minor. One sharp, F♯, means G major or E minor. One flat, B♭, means F major or D minor. Each scale page shows its key signature on a playable staff: start with C major, then G major and F major.

Start on this page. Press Play on the score above and follow along, then switch to Wait for note and play the right hand yourself at 50% speed.

Play the C major scale to read eight notes in a row and find each one on the keyboard.

Before you play a new piece, count it out loud and clap the rhythm. A wrong note sounds wrong straight away. A wrong rhythm often does not, so it is the mistake that gets practiced in.

When this score feels easy, move on to easy piano sheet music for beginners: pieces in the order to learn them, from three notes in one hand to short classical pieces.