How To Read Guitar Sheet Music

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In this lesson, I’m going to give you some basics of how to read sheet music.

The first thing you’re going to need to know if you’re going to start learning to read sheet music are the names of the lines and the spaces on a staff.

My guitar is based on a treble clef so that’s all we’re going to worry about here. If you look at a piece of sheet music, you’re going to notice that each system of staves has 5th lines and four spaces. The bottom line is an E note and it goes in alphabetical order from there up. So, the 1st space would be an F, the next line would be a G, the next space would be an A and so on all the way up.

Now, there’s an acronym that everybody and their mother and their brother and father has learned probably if you’re going to learn how to read sheet music and the names of the lines and the spaces are these right here. If you have your spaces, you’re going to have to think about FACE. So, the name of the 1st space is going to be F. the name of the 2nd space is going to A, with the 3rd space is going to C and the last space on top is going to be E.

Now, the names of the lines are a little bit different. It’s going to start on the E and you’ve probably heard that before, every good boy does fine. So, E-G-B-D and F are the names of the lines on a sheet music. So, with that in mind; if you saw a whole note on the 1st measure of your piece of sheet music on the very 1st space that would indicate that you needed to play an F note, all right?

So what you’d do, there’s just one place you could play this you would take your 3rd finger and put in on the 3rd fret of your D string—

[Demonstration]

Play that note for four counts if the music in the piece you’re doing was in for four times. With that active with that note on the 1st base would be as F right here—

[Demonstration]

Now, you could play it up here as well in this F on the 8th fret of the A string—

[Demonstration]

It doesn’t really matter for now, just so you will understand what the name of the lines and spaces are and how to match them up on the neck of your guitar.


Transcription by: Scribe4you Transcription Services