How To Read Sheet Music Piano Left Hand

Middle c lies in the gap between the staves on an imaginary line.

How to read sheet music piano left hand. When you re beginning to read music it s easiest to think of the sharps and flats as the black keys. Learning your first left hand piece. The positioning of the notes tells the reader exactly what the note name is and which key to play. The top stave shows the notes that should be played with the right hand whilst the bottom stave shows the notes to be played by the left hand.

Music is made up of a variety of symbols the most basic of which are the staff the clefs and the notes. Draw middle c on the bass clef staff. They are placed to the left of a note head and indicate that the note to follow is played a half step semitone higher for a sharp or a half step lower for a flat. Notes are written on or above or below the stave which are the 2 sets of five lines one for the right hand and one for the left hand.

Typical piano sheet music piano music tends to have 2 staves. The top staff is usually marked with a treble clef and typically played with the right hand while the bottom staff is usually marked with a bass clef and typically played with the left hand. Usually but not always the top stave is written in the treble clef and the bottom stave is written in bass clef. Reading the bass clef requires you to know where a few key notes hit the scale whereby finding the rest will be very straightforward.

Learn the basic symbols of notation. All notes written in the bass clef are usually played with the left hand on the lower registers of the piano. Open the lesson lean on me left hand or alternatively look at this score. Identify the first note by using the rhymes.

After you ve memorized all of the letter names on the lines and spaces for your right hand the treble clef you can move on to reading piano notes on the bass clef where the notes on the lines and spaces will be played with your left hand. Once again we are going to read the sheet music score for this piece. How to read sheet music step 1. Once you have had a few goes at this you are ready to learn your first left hand piece.

So your hand should be on the keyboard with your thumb on middle c. The other way to interpret how to read a lead sheet is to do the melody and harmony all on the piano. This will mean doing the melody in the right hand while the left hand fills in the harmony and bass. Depending on how adept you are the right hand can fill in some of the harmony too.

All music contains these fundamental components and to learn how to read music you must first familiarize yourself with these basics. We call the notes written on the lines line notes and notes written between the lines space notes. In this example the first note is e. The e is a space note.