How to Read Easy Piano Scores

Introduction

The biggest difficulty that you usually have to face when you want to read easy piano scores is that of reading. How nice it would be to know how to read a score as you are reading the words of this article… ! Of course this would allow you to play a lot, a lot of music. All you need would be a keyboard and a musical text, the first available on Amazon (I leave you my advice below), the second very often with a simple Google search.

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The path to learning to read music, even the simplest, is gradual: you need the right method. In this Blog you will find a lot of material to start, you can start from any article, including the present, and click on the highlighted terms to expand your knowledge from time to time:

How to get started

A general tip that I can give you, if you have already read the articles of this blog and you are starting to read easy piano scores is to start touching, without yet playing, the keys of the piano in correspondence with what you read on the very first easy piano scores, such as the Beyer.

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From this you can move on to more difficult texts, such as cramer or Czerny's more advanced texts. I play you something below from the volumes that you can face, with a small additional technical preparation on scales and arpeggios, immediately after the Beyer. Perhaps now they will seem difficult to you, but if you study in depth the text that I have indicated above I am sure that, as happened to me, you will soon change your mind.

During your early studies, the note name and its position on the pentagram should always lead you back to the position of a single precise key on the piano. At this stage you will have to practice a lot to touch the keys without looking at the keyboard, with your eyes on the score.

Of course, the first reference to get an idea of where you are touching you can take it by looking at the keyboard, but continuing to read the score you should try to orient yourself with the black keys and only later you can check with your eyes, once you touch the key that you think is the right one, if you are on the point of the keyboard that the score has indicated to you.

Easy piano scores and computer keyboard

Do not be afraid, over time it will happen exactly what happens for the keyboard of a computer, on which many are now accustomed to writing at speed. When you write to the computer you do not focus on this or that key saying its name every time to press it, but rather on the mental image of the word you have to write, as a whole. If you are familiar with the keyboard of a computer, you are that to write in speed "music" do not press the keys with your fingers saying, looking or thinking individually to each key, to each letter of this word, but on the contrary go back directly to the position of the letters on the keyboard: in a similar way, over time and if you follow the advice I gave you, it will happen at the piano.

As we said, the process is not mechanical. It takes a lot of sensitivity and concentration to work on this first phase! Later you can start to bring together more names of notes in groups of meaning, something that at this time of the studies is not yet possible and which will be dealt with in subsequent articles. Right now you are like someone who is learning to write the letters of the alphabet, and who certainly cannot yet understand how these, by binding together, determine the charm of a novel. This being the case, you can begin to implement, with humility and without haste, small tricks to deepen and speed up the learning process: rather than the name of the note I can start thinking about the key to which I will have associated a certain height in the pentagram, its position inside the piano. On the piano, in fact, there is no indication of the function of a key.

Piano Keyboard and Computer Keyboard: Differences?

Unlike a computer keyboard that has letters written on its keys, a piano keyboard does not have names of notes written on its keys, so initially you will have to get around this lack by mentally associating a precise do with a single precise white key. The names of the notes are in fact repeated at different heights on the pentagram, but they all correspond to a different frequency of sound, associated with a precise piano key. When we talk about sound we will refer in every article of this Blog always to an acoustic phenomenon associated with only one of the eighty-eight keys of the piano: the only key that, if lowered, is able to produce the precise sound through the mechanics of the instrument itself. It is therefore evident that there is a huge difference between a note name and a sound: the first is associated with more octaves of the white keys, for example the C meets in several places of the keyboard; the second corresponds to a single, unique, irreplaceable key, which as you will see is not necessarily a white key.To start practicing in this first phase, as an extremely general rule I recommend that you start reading all the notes that need to be played simultaneously from the bottom up. Usually to start you choose rhythmically simple exercises, such as those of the Beyer, understandable in light of what has been said so far: this phase of study is important only to become familiar with the keyboard and with the positions of the names of the notes taken individually, without playing.

Conclusions

I have only one recommendation to make: do not dwell too much on this point of your piano career. Once you have become very familiar with the names of the notes and their positions on the pentagram and keyboard you should continue deepening your studies, since reading the names of the notes taken individually can prove dangerously counterproductive if taken as a habit. It could forever prevent the development of a smooth reading. In the next articles we will see in what relationship are the reading of the names of the notes taken individually and the study phase that we have indicated in this article, and I will point out that in some cases it will be necessary to circumvent it. If you want to continue to deepen the discussion on the reading of easy piano scores, I suggest you read our manual, dedicated to this topic: I leave it to you below. Click on the image, see you there!