How to Read Sheet Music - Violin Note Reading for Beginners

[00:00] Learning how to read sheet music can open a whole new world for you on the violin. Just imagine how amazing it would be if you would just get a piece of sheet music and you could start playing and just listen to how it sounds and let the song unfold like that. It is truly a

[00:16] magical feeling and definitely a feeling that I found so special when I was able to side read myself for the first time. That is why in this video I would like to give you an overview of the steps how to start learning sheet music and how you can achieve that yourself. Step one, learn the stuff

[00:34] layout. The first step to learning sheet music is to understand all the basic symbols on the stuff. So let's get started right away and let's have a look at the stuff ourselves. The stuff in sheet music is the foundation upon which you can draw the notes. So you have five lines and four spaces and

[00:51] that is where the notes are putable. Each line or space of the stuff represents a note. Let's first have a look at all the lines. The lowest line represents an E. The line above a G, then a B, a D, and an F.

[01:07] An easy way to remember all of these notes is to remember the phrase every good boy does fine. Now let's have a look at all the spaces between the stuff. F is the lowest space, then we have an A, a C, and an E.

[01:24] Otherwise, face. That is also easy to remember. The next step to understanding sheet music is to understand the bar lines. Let's have a look at the sheet music again and let's have a look at the bar lines. The bar lines divide the stuff into measures or also called bars. And here you can see an

[01:42] example of a stuff that is split into two measures by one bar line placed in the middle. Bar lines help us to keep track of where we are in the music and to keep the right timing. Now let's move to the treble clef. The treble clef is the violin clef. It is sometimes also called the G clef because it is

[01:59] formatted as a stylized G. You can still imagine that once this might have been a G. There's other clefs as well next to the treble clef, but luckily we don't have to learn them because as violinist we are only making use of the treble clef. That's one point for us. If you look at the treble clef,

[02:14] you also see that the G wraps around one line and that is the G. So that's easy to remember. The point where the treble clef starts is the G or the G clef starts at the G. If you know that that is

[02:26] the G, you can fill out all the other notes because the music note system is pretty easy if you think about it. Music notes are named after the 7th verse that is of the alphabet. So we have A, B, C, D, E,

[02:39] F and G. After the G, there's again the same set of another 7 notes. So each time it goes A, B, C, D, E, F, G and so it goes on and on like that. So let's fill out the notes on the clef that we've just

[02:52] seen. If we know that it first notes a G, the note that comes after is the A because the G is the latest letter in the alphabet and after that comes the A again. And then we can fill out all the lines

[03:04] in spaces. Every line and every space represents one note. So we have G, A, B, C, D, E, F, G. When looking

[03:16] at this you might think, wait a second, the stuff is almost full. So we can only play like I don't know, 10 notes. Luckily we have more space and musicians have thought of a solution for that. It is called

[03:28] letter lines. Letter lines allow you to play a ball for under the stuff. For instance, let's have a look at the following sample. See how we added a letter line for the A. So after the G comes the A

[03:40] and we just add the extra little stuff line to represent the A. You could also add several letter lines at one time. So you could basically add as many as you wish until of course the instrument

[03:55] doesn't go any higher. In the beginning of each piece you will see a key signature. A key signature is a set of sharps, a set of flats that you can find in the beginning of every line. So I have a look at the key signature and the key signature will tell you where exactly to place

[04:10] your fingers. Well the theory behind this is a little bit more complicated and I don't want to go into this in this video because it would take another video to explain the key signature. And if you wish me to make this video please let me know in the comments. I would love to make another video

[04:25] about key signatures. But for now you can just remember that the key signature will show you where to place your fingers. If you have for instance to play a low first finger or a high first finger or

[04:37] low second finger or a high second finger. Now you know the basic musical symbols that you can find in sheet music. You have to learn the first four notes. The first four notes that you should learn are the open strings. The G, the D, the A and the E. You can do simple exercises in order to learn

[04:56] the G, the A and E. And you can find those exercises on my blog where I made a fun video for you where you can practice and look at the video, see what note it is within a certain amount of time.

[05:09] It's like a note quiz. Practice these notes very very often until you know exactly where these notes are. You can also make use of my courses in Julia's violin academy. There I offer complete notes reading

[05:22] course with daily exercises to learn how to read notes. You will find a lot of exercises only about the open strings so that you can practice them so well that at some point you could dream the places

[05:35] of the open string on the stuff. After you've learned all the open strings it is time to move to the first finger. Also the second finger and the third finger. So what I recommend to do is to learn them all separately. That is just a way in which you can slowly and gradually get used to all

[05:52] the notes. And this is also how I teach it in a note reading course. But you can also do it by yourself. It's a little bit more complicated because you would have to make your own exercises, but just first make a sheet of music with G, D, A and E and try to read it and then add first

[06:07] fingers to it. So one note above the G, one note above the A, one note above the D and so forth. So then you would add the B and the E and the A and the F. And each time you add one note above

[06:22] of course you could also try to learn all the three fingers at once. If you've been following me for a while you might have noticed that I often provide violin tabs with the sheet music. That means that I'm providing the finger numbers. So the numbers of the fingers that you should play on the finger

[06:38] and also the strings on which you should play the fingers for those who cannot read notes yet. An easy way that you could start practicing notes is to just grab some easy songs that you can already play and remove those markings for yourself, for instance, with a little bit of black pencil

[06:55] so that you can try to practice, for instance, removing all the open strings and removing all the first fingers and see if you could still play the song. And so on, you could remove more and more. Another thing that will help is that if you know any song by heart that you keep looking at the notes

[07:11] when you're practicing it so that you subconsciously start learning the notes even though you already know the song. The third step to starting to read notes is to start to learn rhythm and I will make a separate video on rhythm because it is again a bigger topic that I should cover in another video.

[07:28] Another step is to learn all the bowing symbols and I already made a video about that. You can find it if you look for violin inspiration, bowing techniques and you can find a video with all the bowing symbols and the techniques that belong to the symbols. I hope that this video helped you with a

[07:44] quick overview of how to start reading notes and if you're interested in my full course also visit julia's file in academy.com to check it out. There's a 30-day money back guarantee so if nothing to

[07:56] lose and maybe you will just love it and learn how to read sheet music like so many of my students who are now sight reading their sheet music and loving it. Thank you so much for watching. Please get this video a thumbs up if you enjoyed it and subscribe for the next lesson next week. Bye bye.