Reading music is much like reading a book--to a reader, it's second nature, but to a person learning, it can be very difficult. Learning to read music itself isn't hard, but it does take time to make it second nature. Aside from reading rhythm and pitches, there really isn't much to music.

Reading Pitches

Treble (G) Clef

Music is represented on paper using a staff, which is a set of five horizontal lines. At the beginning of the staff there is a symbol called a clef. The clef indicates to the musician where a particular note is. Trumpets play in G, or treble, clef.See picture. Treble and Bass clefs are the most common, but there are also more, such as tenor and alto clefs. The winding part of the treble (G) clef centers on the second line of the staff, so it indicates that the second line is G. From there, you can write in all of the other note names, going up and down from the second line G. Include every line and space, just like this:

An easy way to remember the names of the lines on a treble clef is my using these acronyms:

For the Lines-

Every Good Boy Does Fine  E-G-B-D-F
This is the order of notes on the lines, going from bottom to top.

For the Spaces:
F-A-C-E spells "face"
This is the order of notes in spaces, going from bottom to top.

In addition to these seven notes, there are notes in between most of them. These are called half steps. To indicate for a musician to raise or lower a note a half step, a sign is placed in front of the note. A note that has been raised or lowered is called an accidental. To indicate down one half step, "" is used, and to indicate up one half step, "" is used. Every note can have a sharp or flat sign in front of it, and once an accidental is used for the first time in a measure, it stays in effect for the rest of that measure only for that pitch. If the natural pitch of the written pitch is desired, then a natural sign () is used.

Use of Ledger Lines

What would happen if you wanted to play the C below first line E? There are no lines on the staff for it! This is solved by using ledger lines, which are small lines that are added to the staff to play notes above it and below it.

Composers often wish to change the key signature of a piece of music. By changing the key, they are telling the musician that indicated notes will always be changed as indicated, unless indicated otherwise with another key change or an accidental marking.

The key signature is indicated by placing sharps or flats immediately after the staff, in an assigned pattern. These patterns are the opposites of each other:

    Music would be nothing without rhythms, which are the duration of the notes. What good is a note if you don't know how long to play it? To solve this problem, the duration of the note is indicated by the appearance of the note. The system of note values are all related, with a whole note receiving the most duration (four beats in common time), and the half note half that of a whole note, and a quarter note half of a half note, and so on. It may be easy to think of the note values as a large pie--just like the one pictured in the illustration to the left.

These rhythms can be combined to gether as well.