Many people think of musical notes as some mysterious alternative language. The truth is that musical notation is not all that sophisticated or complex, it just requires some memorization before you're fluent enough at piano note reading to read the notes faster than your fingers can touch the keys. For those who struggle with memorization, consistently performing practice exercise can greatly improve piano note reading skills.

The basics of musical notation are the placements of notes on the five lines and the four spaces the lines create. The design on the beginning portion of these lines and spaces is the clef. Mainly for piano note reading, there is a bass clef and a treble clef. The treble clef holds the octaves found to the right of middle C on your piano. The treble clef design looks somewhat like the ampersand symbol. The bass clef, on the other hand, looks like a backwards facing "C" with a pair of dots. This is fitting because the bass clef points to the keys that are to the left of middle C on your piano. It is important to note that notes can continue on beyond the lines of the two clefs with note location being in the same relative proportion of those on the clefs. Middle C, for example, occurs two spots below the bottom line, and thus has a line drawn through it whenever it appears below the treble clef to denote that it would be the next line below the bottom line if there were a line below the bottom line.

The Treble Clef

The notes on each clef range from lower notes at the bottom to higher notes at the top. The five lines of the treble clef from bottom to top are E, G, B, D, and F. You've probably heard the piano note reading mnemonic used by piano teachers that "Every Good Boy Does Fine." In contrast, the notes in the four spaces of the treble clef are F, A, C, and E. This group of letters is easy to remember because you have to "FACE" the music. For simple beginner piano pieces, the right hand will play the notes of the treble clef, though the left hand will often have to play these notes as you advance to more diverse pieces.

The Bass Clef

The bass clef also has five lines, but these lines are represented by different notes than the lines on the treble clef. The notes of the bass clef lines are G, B, D, F, and A. For these lines of the bass clef, piano teachers usually use the mnemonic "Good Boys Do Fine Always," which is similar to the treble clef mnemonic. You may also see "Grizzly Bears Don't Fear Anything" used as a mnemonic for the bass clef. The spaces of the base clef represent the notes A, C, E, and G. The mnemonic used by piano teachers to help students with piano note reading of these bass clef spaces is "All Cows Eat Grass." For simple beginner piano pieces, the left hand will play the notes of the bass clef, though the right hand will often have to play these notes as you advance to more diverse pieces.

If you see a bass clef, you'll know that the five lines represent different notes. In this case, they're GBDFA. The spaces are ACEG. There are plenty of ways to remember these, too. "Good Boys Do Fine Always" and "Grizzly Bears Don't Fear Anything" are sometimes used for the lines. For the spaces, you'll often hear "All Cows Eat Grass." Most of the time, you'll play the bass part with the left hand, and the treble with the right. However, sometimes you'll need to cross over if there's a note that's too hard to reach with the usual hand.

Piano Note Reading Flat and Sharp Indicators

All of the notes we've covered so far are those found on the white keys. The black keys on your piano keyboard are either flat keys or sharp keys, based on their relative positions to the note being played. For example, a note with a "b" indicates to play the black key to the right of the white key representing the note. A note with a "#" indicates to play the black key to the left of the white key representing the note. Also, if the "b" or "#" appears at the beginning or end of the clef, all notes represented by that line, regardless of octave, should be played as if they had a "b" or "#" next to them, unless otherwise individually indicated.