A beginner’s guide to music theory teaches the most important basics for anyone wanting to learn more about how music works, and the tools you need to learn how to read music.

Read the rest of this article for explanations of the various symbols used in sheet music, and how they work together.

Now, let’s get right to the basics.

This entertaining TED-Ed video by Tim Hansen shows how once you’ve gotten the hang of a few simple elements like notes, bars and clefs, you’re ready with the basics you need to read music:

Here you will find your starting point in learning how to read music.

Notes are written on the staff, which consists of five horizontal lines and the spaces in between. Two staves (plural of staff) can be combined to create the grand staff which is a bass and a treble staff connected by a brace, with the note middle C in between them.

(Multiple staves can also be connected by a bracket when representing multiple instruments playing together.)

Leger lines and spaces are used to extend the staff upwards and downwards. Consider that the higher a note is placed on the staff, the higher its pitch or sound. Moving from left to right represents time, just like a timeline that tells a performer when to play each note.

Grand staff with clefs, brace and leger lines (left); staff for multiple instruments with bracket (right):

Clefs are placed on the staff to indicate the range and location of the notes. The most common clefs are the treble clef (a.k.a. G-clef) and the bass clef (a.k.a. F-clef). Different instruments use different clefs, depending on their range.

The range is simply the distance from the lowest to the highest note payable on an instrument. Some instruments, like viola, use the alto clef (a.k.a. C clef) although you aren’t likely to see many of these.

Certain instruments, like guitar, bass, saxophones, trumpets, and clarinet, transpose to a different range, meaning the notes sound at a different pitch than they are written. Piano, voice, violin, and flute are non-transposing instruments, meaning they sound exactly where they are written.

Treble, bass, and alto clefs:

I learned to read music as an adult, and I remember telling myself that if a young kid could learn to read music, so could I. Now, I get to teach other beginning readers, and we use these simple mnemonic phrases to remember where the notes lie on the staff.

For the treble clef, the five lines from bottom to top are E, G, B, D, F (or Every Good Boy Does Fine), and the spaces are F, A, C, E (which spells FACE).

For the bass clef, it’s G, B, D, F, A (or Good Boys Do Fine Always), and the spaces are A, C, E, G (or All Cows Eat Grass).

Easy-peasy. The more you practice recognizing the notes on the staff, the quicker and easier it becomes.

This video is a complete easy lesson for a beginner about reading sheet music. It shows you how to read and practice music notes on both the treble and bass clef, as well as the ledger lines on both clefs, and relates everything to the piano keyboard.

Here’s an note-recognition exercise you can try: Look at an unfamiliar piece of sheet music and just speak the note names that you see in the order they appear on the staff. See how quickly you can name them. You don’t need an instrument or to play or sing the notes, just name them in both treble and bass clef. Do this for a few minutes each day to improve your ability to recognize notes on the staff quickly.

Grand staff with note names:

Accidentals are the symbols placed in front of a note, that raise or lower the pitch, or return it to the original pitch after it was altered (the word altered simply means changed). The most common are the sharp, flat, and natural.

The sharp raises the pitch by a half-step (a.k.a. semitone) and the flat lowers it the same amount. A natural, when applied to a note previously sharped or flatted, will return it to its original pitch.

Accidentals are canceled by a barline.

There is also such a thing as a double-sharp and a double-flat though they are not nearly as common.

Accidentals:

Where a note begins and ends in time, or its duration, is called the sound envelope. The basic rhythmic note values we see most often are the whole note (which lasts four beats), the half-note (lasting two beats), the quarter-note (lasting one beat), the eighth-note (lasting one-half a beat), and the sixteenth-note (which lasts a quarter of a beat).

Adding a dot after a note increases its duration by one half. Ties also extend the duration of a note.

This video shows how to count basic rhythms and explains time signatures, 4/4, measures, and how to count quarter notes, half notes, whole notes, quarter rests, half rests, and whole rests. It also provides helpful practice examples.

We use stems, flags, beams, and ties to indicate the duration of a note.

Notes on the staff with stems, flag, beams, and ties:

It’s important to understand that a rest is also a note, except the note is played silently. Yes, we actually have to “play” rests! This is such an important concept to grasp because we won’t know when to play the next note unless we know when a rest ends. Like notes, rests have a beginning, duration, and end.

Rests use the same divisions of time as the notes in relation to the beat, but they are written differently. In reading, we learn to emphasize the value of the rests internally to compensate for there being no sound during the rest.

Rests:

In this video, legendary music teacher and YouTube celebrity Rick Beato shows you how to break down and read common rhythms.

Reading rhythms is a challenging part of learning to read music properly. After all, to play a note correctly, it must sound at exactly the right time. It’s useful to work on reading rhythms separately from the individual pitches. Drummers do this. If you’re not a drummer, you can practice reading rhythms by tapping the notes, or by playing (or singing) them on a single pitch.

Below are other foundational musical concepts that relate to the reading rhythms.

Meter is a recurring pattern of stress in an established pattern of strong and weak beats.
A meter of 3 will have the first beat stressed with the 2nd and 3d beats having less stress.

A meter of 4 will have recurring groups of 4 beats where the first beat has the primary stress, the 3rd beat a secondary stress and the 2nd and 4th beats have the least stress.

Meter of 3 and 4:

A measure is a single complete pattern of the beats (or meter) which is framed by bar lines. A measure is the exact same thing as a bar. See the image above.

Time signature is the arrangement of 2 numbers placed vertically in the staff following the clef and key signature. The top number indicates the number of beats in the bar, while the bottom number indicates the note value of each of the beats.

Time signature:

Simple time means there is only one primary kind of beat, for example, 2/4, 3/4, or 4/4.

Compound time, as the name implies, has an underlying grid, usually of three 8th notes per beat. Thus, 6/8 would be 2 groupings of three 8th notes each, 9/8 would be 3 groupings, and 12/8 would be 4 times three 8th notes. Each 3-note grouping can be felt as a single beat, or as a separate triplet.

Below are some basic examples of simple and compound time.

Simple time (left) vs. compound time (right):

Here’s a good explanation from World Drum Club of time signatures and meter, and what the numbers mean:

Tempo markings are found at the very beginning of a piece of music, or sometimes at the start of a section where the tempo changes. The tempo can be stated in subjective terms, using terms such as brightly or slowly, medium, medium-fast, allegro, andante, or they can be indicated using beats per minute.

Sometimes a stylistic rhythmic feel is indicated, such as swing or ballad.

Tempo and feel markings:

Music uses mostly Italian terms, as a convention. Accelerando is an instruction to the player or Conductor to increase the tempo gradually, while ritardando (usually marked as rit…) means slow the tempo down. The tempo change is in effect for as long as the dashes or dots last after the term is used.

Accelerando and ritardando:

The fermata looks like a little birds-eye (sometimes we call them that) and means the music should pause for a moment. The length of the pause may be left up to the players or Conductor.

Fermata:

The term A tempo or a tempo means the players should return to the previous tempo before the change that was indicated by the fermata, accelerando, or ritardando.

A tempo marking:

Before learning and memorizing the key signatures it is important to understand the circle of 5ths.

A key signature is placed at the beginning of the music on the staff, after the clef, and before the time signature. It’s a series of flats or sharps which ensure that notes written on the staff conform to the major scale in the key, or sometimes the relative minor. The key signature defines the tonal center, or the key of a piece of music. Most, but not all music is tonal, meaning that the harmony is centered around a key.

Learning your key signatures is important to learning to read music, and the place to start is the circle of fifths. For each new key in the cycle, there is an order that the sharps or flats occur in order to maintain the 7-note sequence of the major or minor scale.

Circle of 5ths:

If you look at the image above, you will see the clockwise direction starting from the top cycles through the seven sharp keys. A new sharp is added to the key signature for each key in order, up to seven sharps, the key of C#.

If you look at the image above, you will see the counter-clockwise direction starting from the top cycles through the seven flat keys. A new flat is added to the key signature for each key in order, up to seven flats, the key of Cb.

Note that there are a total of 15 possible major keys and that some are enharmonic, for example, G flat is the same as F sharp. (I’ll explain what enharmonic means in a moment).

Also looking at the image above, you will see the relative minor keys listed inside the circle. Note that there is a relative minor key for each major key based on the 6th degree of the scale, or a minor 3rd below the root.

In this video lesson, the circle of 5ths is explained as a unique pattern of the 12 pitches in music theory which provides information and insights about key signatures, harmony, intervals, transposition, and chord structure:

Chord symbols are a kind of shorthand notation to indicate which chords are to be played for each bar or beat of music. Chord symbols use note names and numbers to provide full information about the harmony. They include triads, sixth chords, seventh chords, and the possibility of using added tensions (color tones representing the logical upward extension of the sixth or seventh chords, usually indicated as 9, 11, #11, 13, b9, #9, b13). They also indicate the chord quality, for example major, minor, augmented, and diminished.

Chord symbols:

This video explains every single chord symbol you could possibly encounter so you know what to do when you’re learning your next song:

Dynamic markings are used to indicate the intensity of the music, generally thought of as volume. They comprise a spectrum from pianissimo (very quiet, marked as pp) to fortissimo (very loud, marked as ff) and are specific to an instrument.

For example, a solo violin marked ff could actually be lower in volume than an electric guitar marked pp. Different instruments can play at different levels at the same time. Gradual increases or decreases in volume are marked by a crescendo or decrescendo, sometimes called “wedges.”

Articulations are added to notes to indicate how the note is to be attacked, and the relative duration, emphasis, or phrasing of each note compared to others. Common articulations in use include the accent, staccato, tenuto, slur, bend, and fall markings. Articulations can also be used for an effect.

Dynamics and articulations:

The term sheet music could refer to various kinds of written music. For example, many songbooks contain music written for the piano, vocal, and guitar.

They usually have a double-staff with piano accompaniment written in an arrangement to support the melody which is written above the lyric on a separate staff, with the guitar chord symbols placed above.

There is also sheet music for choirs and chorus written in four parts: soprano, alto, tenor, bass (or SATB for short). These types of sheet music are very different from a lead sheet which often shows only the chord symbols and melody written on a single staff.

Lead sheets are usually the simplest solution for learning a song with a band, mainly because you can get a lot of information into a very small space. I always prefer a lead sheet to piano/vocal/guitar sheet music because I avoid many page turns (the music takes up fewer pages), and can more easily create my own arrangement of the song, instead of having to play someone else’s arrangement.

I also don’t prefer tablature (for guitar and bass) because it’s actually much easier and less confining to just read the music once you learn how.

This topic is more intermediate level, but I think many beginners can grasp it. Some music is modal; that is, based on a specific mode of the major scale. The mode might be indicated for an entire section or a few bars, meant to guide the accompaniment (chords, bass line), or for an improvised solo.

In this case, it’s assumed that the reader will be familiar with the mode, which most musicians are. For example, there might be a section of the music showing a number of bars with D Dorian indicated.

In this example, the performers should limit themselves to only using notes or chords from the D Dorian scale, a mode based off the second degree of the C major scale. Note that Dorian is a minor scale because the 3d is flatted in comparison to a D major scale (F instead of F#).

D Dorian mode:

Here’s a 5-minute explanation of the modes of the major scale:

A section of music marked with the notation ad lib means the performer is literally “at liberty” to create their own part for the music. This is usually in the context of a specific harmonic setting (as indicated by a chord symbol), and could be part of the accompaniment, a solo section, or a short fill (improvised run or cadenza) anywhere in the music.

Sometimes you will see ad lib marked on an ending (usually with a fermata) which means the musician can use their imagination to freely play what they want on the last hold of the piece. Keep in mind that whatever is played ad lib still needs to honor the specific context, whether stylistically, harmonically, or melodically. It’s a special kind of musical freedom, but with some limits.

Ad lib marking on a part:

A note or a chord can have more than one name. For example, a Db (D flat) is the same note as a C# (C sharp). We call this an enharmonic spelling.

There are times when it is more appropriate to use an enharmonic note or chord since it fits in a certain key. Enharmonic spelling is something to be aware of because we sometimes see errors that could confuse us in a piece of sheet music. For example, while B natural and C flat are (enharmonically) the exact same note, it would be incorrect to write a C flat when spelling a G major chord, since B is a note in the key of G. In the key of C flat, there is no written B natural note, so it would be correct to use only the C flat in this case.

Sometimes you will see some special instructions written on a part, as it seems the Composer or Arranger couldn’t find the exact musical symbols to express the sound they wanted. Your imagination should get engaged, as you read that you are to negotiate a passage playfully, perform a note with a growl, or aggressively attack a chord or series of notes.

Using a written word can sometimes uniquely express the intended sound. Performers are often asked to interpret descriptive terms, and a skilled musician learns how to be creative when reading music from a page. After all, it is the musician who must breathe life into the music.

Musicians traditionally learn to play “by ear”–copying sounds they hear–and only later learn to read. So don’t worry if you haven’t yet learned to read sheet music. It’s always possible to learn.

It’s probably better that you don’t start grappling with learning to read until you are ready for it, since the process also comes with a certain amount of frustration and takes patience and persistence especially at the beginning. If it feels difficult at first, don’t give up, just keep at it and you will see the progress you want.

Learning to read can sometimes seem confusing due to variations in how music is conventionally written. Different musical styles, geographic regions, and cultures may use musical symbols differently. The more music you see, the better you will get at interpreting what is written.

Some music students begin reading from day one. Most will start reading after they have some performing skills already in place. Do what feels right for you, there’s no “right” time to get started with learning how to read.

There are many advantages to learning how to read sheet music, for example, the ability to play with a group or to play music written for another instrument on your own instrument. Learning to read music isn’t as hard as it seems, and it’s totally worth it for the benefits you will receive!

Whether you decide to do it on your own or to study with a teacher, once you make up your mind to learn to read music, rest assured with the knowledge that you will do it.

This video shows how to read sheet music from beginner to advanced in seven levels: