As Plain as the Notes on Your F.A.C.E.

Having read a few of my recent blog posts (I think she reads all of my blog posts, actually), my sister-in-law, Teresa, one of the great pianists I'm fortunate to be related to, taught me a few tricks to help me be able to read sheet music - and they work!

They most eye-opening thing she taught me is that the notes don't move up and down the staff. All this time, I thought that the key of a piece determined which lines of the staff represented which notes, so I had to count up and down the lines to find out which lines represented which keys on the piano, but that isn't true! The lines and the notes they represent are constant. For example, if you look at a hymn book, you'll see that there are five horizontal lines above the words to your favorite hymn. If there's a black dot on the middlemost of those five lines, that dot represents a B above Middle C. Always. Now, it might be a B Flat above Middle C sometimes - you'll have to look out for special symbols to be sure, but it'll never be an F or a C. That means that I can start memorizing which lines on the page go along with which keys on the piano, so I can tell which key a note is just by looking at where it is on the staff!

And there's a trick for that, too! Looking at those same five lines from earlier, you can see that there are four gaps between those lines. The notes that those gaps represent are, in ascending order, F, A, C, and E. So if you see a dot between the two bottom lines in the staff above the words, that's an F. If you see a note between the middle line and the line second from the top, that's High C. Again, there might be some Sharps or Flats involved (actually, neither of those notes can be Flat, so never mind about that part), but you can still tell, within about half a note, which key you need to strike on the piano to play the note you see on the staff.

I still need lots of practice, both at correctly identifying the notes on the staff and at accurately hitting the right keys on the piano, but at least I know a lot more about how to play music than what I knew before. This is awesome, and it's even starting to sound okay. So I just want to say Thanks to Teresa for teaching me those tricks and for lending me a book with even more great tips. She really helped me out a lot.