How Read Music

For some people learning to read music comes naturally while for the majority it can be quite hard to do. But like many things in life it can be very rewarding to do. Either way like many other things in life it will require some effort, patience and practice to get to grips with it properly.

Once you have mastered it people will see a big difference in the way you perform. A person’s ability to read music well is the difference between an average player and being a world class performer that always has the audience mesmerized with their skill. Of course like many things you cannot master it until you have a firm grasp of the basics. As the old Chinese proverb goes a journey of a thousand miles starts with the first step.

So let’s get to the basics!

Learning how to read music is very similar to learning to read and write there are some basic rules that you need to follow that everyone does. Straying from this basic foundation can lead to problems later on. Music is not formatted the same as writing, where this is on a single line musical notes are displayed over five lines and contain a treble clef.

There are various clef types with the two most common being the bass clef and the treble clef. One way of remembering these is that the treble clef is the right hand on a piano and the bass clef is the left hand. I realise that you may not be playing the piano but this is the easiest way to explain it. There are other types of clef and you should not let this worry you too much at this stage as you can play excellent sounding music with just the notes that are on these two types of clef.

The way to read notes is dependent on their position on the five lines or between them. The following are read from the bottom to the top…

This article is an excerpt from How to read Music by M-Audio Direct, the UK’s leading supplier of M-Audio electronic music equipment.