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A Beginner's Guide: How to Read Music

Hello. This article is designed to teach you how to read basic sheet music. It is not required to be able to play an instrument to read music.

We will start off with the standard musical staff show in the below diagram.

As you can see a standard staff has five lines. Each line represents a single note while each space also represents a single note.

First off this is just the basic staff. There are notes above and below the standard staff.

Each line and space represent a different note. I found out that using a little rhyme helps to remember what notes are on the lines and the ones that are in the spaces. The line rhyme goes like this starting from the bottom up. Every Good Boy Does Fine.

Each space on the staff represents a different note too. The notes the form the spaces create the word FACE.

As you look at the notes together you notice a pattern emerging.

As illustrated in the picture above the E is shown twice. There is a pattern to the notes. If you start on the bottom line of the treble clef it goes EFGABCDE then the pattern repeats it self as show below. It goes even higher above the staff but you do not need to be concerned about that considering that if you go high you just keep following the pattern.

This pattern also applies to below the staff as well but it goes in reverse order. EDCBAGFE and so on.

Now as you can see this is pretty ridiculous to have that many notes below the staff. That's where the bass clef comes in.

This top line of this clef is the second line below the treble clef.

This clef enables lower instruments to play their parts without having to learn what all the notes mean on and below the treble clef. The notes on the bass clef go as follows. The bottom line is G and going up it goes ABCDEFGA. A being the top note of the bass clef which can also be show as an A two lines below the treble clef.