For many people, a piece of music looks like nothing more than lines and dots accompanied by squiggles on a piece of paper. However, for a musician, those lines and dots translate into a melody to be played. Before you can begin to learn to play an instrument or enhance vocal talents, you will need to learn how to read sheet music. In general, reading sheet music is not that difficult once you understand what all the lines and dots mean on the paper.

To start, when you look at a piece of sheet music you will see that there are five horizontal lines that cross the paper. This is the music graph. On each line you will also see vertical lines evenly spaced with notes in between; this is called a measure. At the beginning of a piece there is a symbol. One that looks similar to a detailed version of an ampersand (&); which is a called the treble clef, or one that looks like a C with a colon next to it (C:) which is called the bass clef. Most instruments use music based on the treble clef. The bass clef music is reserved for instruments that have a lower pitch or deeper sound. This includes the drum, guitar, and saxophone.

Next you will need to understand how to count time. Each measure of time is four counts. Similar to the way you would count seconds in your head (one Mississippi, two Mississippi…) is the way that music is also counted. Each group of four measures is considered a score. To count this you would say 1 – 2- 3- 4, 2 – 2- 3- 4, 3 – 2 – 3 -4, 4 – 2- 3- 4 and then back to one again. Regular time is 4/4 time. This is indicated by a 4/4 or C next to the clef symbol at the beginning of the music. Unless otherwise noted, this is the tempo for the entire song. When you learn how to read sheet music you will also learn about cut time.  Cut time, indicated by a C with a diagonal slash trough it next to the clef symbol, is where each note has half of its value. For example, instead of four quarter notes equaling one measure, eight quarter notes will equal a full measure. For cut time, a value will be shown next to the clef. The top number is the number of notes per measure. A measure may be made up of quarter, eighth, or sixteenth notes.

Now you have the basics of understanding how to read sheet music. Next you will need to learn how to play each note in a scale on the selected instrument. Then, you will learn where each note falls on the scale, how to read octaves, and how to understand note values throughout a song. Once a person has mastered how to read sheet music, it is a breeze to learn to play a variety of songs at different experience levels.