How to read Piano music sheet?

Last updated: Feb 27, 2023

How to read Piano Keyboard music sheet in 2023?

Playing the piano is an activity that in order to learn it and carry it out you have to spend a lot of time in your practice. So learning to read the scores is very important if what you want is to be a musician, many experts qualify the reading of the scores as a new language, or what is the same, the language of the musicians. But before reading a score, you have to know some basic elements.

Basic elements to read piano music sheet

If we look at a score for the first time, the language will seem very strange to us, but if we take into account certain basic elements we will learn in an easy and simple way. These elements will be detailed in the following sections.

Staff

The first basic element of the scores is the staff. It is composed of five lines and four spaces that are used to place the notes. Its position indicates the tone in which each one of them will be played. To know what the note to play will be, we must take into account the key to the score itself. Specifically, to play the piano, the scores are usually divided into 2 by 2, in this way we will have one for the left hand, which is usually the one below, and the other for the right hand, which would be the one above .

But you have to keep in mind that you can place more lines or spaces above or below the staff, but they will be short lines to reflect the note.

The musical key

The key is one of the most important elements when reading a score. It is placed at the beginning of the staff to indicate the line or space of each available note. The keys are large and occupy at least the five lines, so they are very recognizable. There are several keys in music, but only for our need to play the piano, you only need to learn two. They would be the treble clef on the one hand and the fa treble clef on the other hand. Now we will expand more on the subject.

Treble clef

It is the best known key in the musical world. Using this type of key, the staff structure would be represented as follows:

– Lines, from bottom to top: Mi, Sol, Si, Re and Fa.

– Spaces, from bottom to top: Fa, La, Do and Mi.

This key has a reference point that musicians usually use in a very fast way, something that you can also do, is the note Sol. It is the note that appears in the center of the key, or what is the same the second line starting at the bottom.

Bass clef

This key in much less known than the previous one, especially if you are a beginner. It is characterized by having a c-shape with two spikes in the arch. Form the following notes:

– Lines, from bottom to top: Sol, Si, Re, Fa and La.

– Spaces, from bottom to top: La, Do, Mi and Sol.

With this key, the Fa note is usually used as a reference point. It is the note that appears in between the two points, that is, the second line starting at the top.

Key armor

It has to do with the notes that are going to be played differently from the way it theoretically appears in the score.

They are sharps or flats. They are the black keys inside the keyboard itself. The meaning that each one has is, the sharp one increases the half tone note, while the flats also lower the initial note by half tone.

These symbols appear at the beginning of the score and will indicate the tone, lines or spaces where it is applied. Also, there are many occasions in which these symbols can be added additionally, for a specific note.

The signature of the compass

The compass is another of the fundamental parts of the score. Indicates the pulse and rhythm of the song. They usually appear in the form of numbers at the beginning of the score and after the key. The number below indicates the pulse and the number above indicates how many pulses at home you measure.

On many occasions you will find some horizontal lines dividing the score, that is done to divide the song into different sections and thus play it better.