Read Sheet Music.

The staff

Music is written on a staff: five lines and the four spaces between them. A note sits on a line or in a space, and the higher it sits, the higher it sounds. Click any note to hear it and see its name. Once the staff makes sense, the rest of the page is just rhythm.

Click a note to hear it.

Clefs, what fixes the pitches

Five blank lines could mean any five pitches. A clef is the symbol at the start that fixes which line is which note. Everything else on the staff is measured from the clef, so it is the first thing you read.

The treble clef (G clef)

The curl of the treble clef wraps around one line, and that line is the note G above middle C, which is why it is also called the G clef. Guitar, violin, flute, and the right hand of the piano all read treble. Note that guitar is a transposing instrument: it is written one octave higher than it actually sounds, purely to keep it on the staff without a forest of ledger lines.

The bass clef (F clef)

Lower instruments read the bass clef. Its two dots sit above and below the line that is the note F below middle C, so it is the F clef. Its lines, bottom to top, are G, B, D, F, A ("Good Boys Do Fine Always") and its spaces are A, C, E, G ("All Cows Eat Grass").

The grand staff and middle C

Join a treble staff on top and a bass staff below and you get the grand staff, what piano is written on. The two meet at middle C, which sits on a short ledger line exactly between them: one line below the treble staff, one line above the bass staff. Middle C is the anchor the whole system hangs from.

Note values, how long each note lasts

The shape of a note tells you how long to hold it. Each value is worth half the one before it. Counting in common time, four beats to a bar:

• Whole note, a hollow oval with no stem, lasts four beats.
• Half note, a hollow oval with a stem, lasts two beats.
• Quarter note, a filled oval with a stem, lasts one beat.
• Eighth note, filled with a stem and one flag, lasts half a beat. Two fit in a beat.
• Sixteenth note, filled with two flags, lasts a quarter of a beat. Four fit in a beat.

When eighths and sixteenths sit together they are joined by a beam instead of drawn with separate flags, which is easier to read. One thick beam means eighths, two means sixteenths.

Play it and count aloud: the whole note held across "one two three four," the halves as "one two, three four," the quarters on every number, the eighths as "one and two and," the sixteenths as "one e and a."

Dotted notes and ties

Two tools extend a note past its plain value. A dot after a note adds half of that note's length again. A dotted half note is two beats plus one, so three beats. A dotted quarter is one beat plus half, so a beat and a half, extremely common in real music.

A tie is a curved line joining two notes of the same pitch into one longer sound: you play the first and hold it through the second without re-striking. Ties are how you hold a note across a barline, where a single symbol could not reach.

Rests, the silences

A rest is a note you do not play, and every note value has a matching rest of the same length. Rests matter as much as notes, because rhythm is the pattern of sound and silence. Here is the whole family:

• Whole rest, a small block hanging below the second line from the top. Silence for four beats (or a whole bar).
• Half rest, the same block but sitting on top of the middle line. Two beats.
• Quarter rest, the squiggle. One beat.
• Eighth rest, a slanted stroke with one hook. Half a beat.
• Sixteenth rest, two hooks. A quarter of a beat.

The easy way to remember the first two: the whole rest hangs down and is the heavier value, the half rest sits up. "Whole is a hole in the roof, half sits on the shelf."

Listen for the gap where the rest lives. A player who ignores rests and lets everything ring sounds muddy. Learning to stop is half of learning to play.

Time signatures, how the beats are grouped

The two stacked numbers after the clef are the time signature. Read them like this: the top number is how many beats are in each bar, and the bottom number is which note value gets one beat (4 means the quarter note, 8 means the eighth note, 2 means the half note). A bar, or measure, is the group of beats between two vertical barlines.

Simple time: 4/4, 3/4, 2/4

When the beat divides naturally into two, it is simple time. 4/4 ("common time") is four quarter-note beats a bar, the default for most pop, rock and blues. 3/4 is three, the waltz. 2/4 is two, a march. In each, you stress beat one and count the top number over and over.

Compound time: 6/8

When the beat divides into three instead of two, it is compound time. 6/8 has six eighth notes a bar, but you do not feel six beats, you feel two, each split into three: "ONE-and-a, TWO-and-a." That rolling, lilting motion (think of a jig, or "We Are the Champions") is the sound of compound time.

Counting: subdividing the beat

Reading rhythm is where most people get stuck, and the fix is always the same: count out loud and subdivide. Quarters are the numbers. Eighths add "and" between them. Sixteenths fill in "e" and "a." Say it steadily and clap where the notes fall.

Once you can keep a steady count and place notes and rests against it, you are reading. Everything beyond this, key signatures, dynamics, articulation, is detail added on top of these two skills: which pitch, and how long.

Repeats and navigation

Written music does not copy the same bars over and over. It uses repeat marks and a few road-map directions that tell you where to jump back to.

Repeat barlines

A heavy barline with two dots beside it means repeat. A start mark (dots on the right) and an end mark (dots on the left) bracket the section you play twice: run to the end mark, jump back to the start mark, play it again. If there is no start mark, you go all the way back to the beginning.

First and second endings

Bracketed numbers above the staff are endings, or "voltas." The first time through you play the bars under bracket 1. On the repeat you skip them and play the bars under bracket 2 instead. It is how a verse finishes two different ways.

Road-map words: D.C., D.S., Coda, Fine

A few Italian abbreviations send you around the page:

• D.C. (Da Capo) means go back to the very beginning.
• D.S. (Dal Segno) means go back to the sign, an ornate S-shaped mark placed earlier in the music.
• al Fine means "...and play until the word Fine," which marks the true end.
• al Coda means "...and when you reach the coda mark (a circle with a cross through it), jump ahead to the Coda," a separate closing section.

So "D.S. al Coda" reads as one instruction: go back to the sign, play until the coda mark, then jump to the Coda. These let a long song fit on one page.

Chords: notes stacked together

When notes are written stacked on a single stem, one above another, you play them at the same time. That stack is a chord. Its building block is the triad, three notes stacked in thirds, sitting either all on lines or all in spaces.

In songbooks and lead sheets you more often see chord symbols above the staff instead of every note: letter names like C, Am, or Cmaj7 that name the harmony while you read or improvise the melody underneath. Slash marks in a bar mean "keep playing this chord in time."

To turn these names into shapes on the neck, the chord library has every chord in every key, and the fretboard explorer shows which chords belong to a key.

Printable staff paper

Reading gets easier fast once you start writing. Print a sheet of blank staves and copy out a melody you know, or write the note names under each line one bar at a time. Pick how many staves you want, then print.

Where to go next

Connect it to the instrument. The fretboard explorer shows where these pitches live on the neck, the note memorization tool drills the names until they are automatic, and the music theory guide explains why the notes are arranged the way they are.