What Is Sheet Music?

Look at the staff above: five horizontal lines with four spaces between them. Every note sits either on a line or in a space. The higher it sits, the higher it sounds. Reading from left to right is reading forward in time.

The notes in the listening block are the C major scale, and the first one is middle C. It sits just below the staff, on a short extra line drawn only for that note. From there each note moves up one position, from a line to the next space to the next line, until the eighth note, C again, lands in the third space.

That is the whole principle. Everything else on a page of sheet music tells you which exact notes those positions stand for, how long to hold each one, and how to play it.

The curly symbol at the start of the staff is a clef, and it fixes one line to one note. Every other position is counted from there.

With the treble clef, the five lines from bottom to top are E, G, B, D and F, often remembered as Every Good Boy Does Fine. The four spaces spell F A C E. Piano music uses both clefs at once, treble for the right hand and bass for the left, with middle C between them. The Staff and Clefs goes line by line through both.

Through the shape of each note. Hollow or filled, with or without a stem, with or without a flag:

Each length is counted against the beat, which What Is Rhythm? explains.

Vertical lines through the staff divide the music into bars. At the start of the piece, two stacked numbers give the time signature: 4 over 4 means every bar holds four quarter-note beats. Rests have their own shapes, one for each length. Reading Rhythm takes you from counting single bars to reading a full line.

They always come in the same order: clef, key signature, time signature.

The key signature is a group of sharps or flats placed right after the clef. It saves writing the same sign on every note. One sharp on the top line of the treble staff means every F in the piece is played as F sharp, which is the key signature of G major. No sharps or flats at all means C major or A minor. What a Key Is explains why two keys share one signature.

Letters and words under the staff tell you how to play. A small p means soft and f means loud; a curved line over several different notes means play them smoothly connected. Dynamics, Articulation and Terms lists the common ones.

No. A lead sheet writes only the melody on a staff and puts chord symbols such as C, Am or G7 above it, leaving the accompaniment to the player. Jazz fake books are written entirely this way. Lead Sheets shows one.

Guitarists often use tab, which draws the six strings as lines and writes the fret number to press on each. It shows where to put your fingers and often leaves out the rhythm. Tabs and Chord Charts covers how to read both.