Here’s great free video music lesson I found. Learn how to read music, why you should learn to read music, the major benefits of learning music theory and musicianship as well. Enjoy!

Take a few months to learn the basics of a second instrument.  Find an instrument that is completely different from the one you now play.  If you play a melody instrument, develop some keyboard skills.   Basic keyboard skills become essential if your musical studies involve any theory or composition.  If you are a keyboardist already, try a wind or string instrument.

Finally, enjoy the learning process with a long-term perspective on your studies.  Making music is rewarding lifetime pursuit whether as a professional or as an educated fan.

Learn How to Read Music

You can gain new insights into a piece that you are working on by studying the score.  Outline and note its form, themes and the different  keys that the piece moves through.  You can also plan out your next practice session by identifying a particular section that needs work, or dividing the composition into different parts to aid in its memorization.

Spend time working on ear-training.  Learning to sight sing, take musical dictation, and identify  intervals and chords develops your internal ear, improves your sight reading skills, and facilitates learning new music.

Read Music Notes Fast and Easy

Your choice of listening material should  be quite diverse.  Include pieces that you are practicing, and those that you are not.  Explore many genres, instrumentations, composers, and style periods to broaden your understanding of music and help you generate new interpretations for your music.

You can enhance your concert experience by doing a little advanced preparation.  If possible, listen to some recordings of the performers, and pieces on the program.  Find out a little about the performers themselves such as their personal biographies, musical specialties, and musical training.

How to Read Piano Music

The foundation of our musical training is the practice time we spend with our chosen instrument.  Musical study away from our instrument, however, develops our level of sophistication and understanding of the music we are playing.  Many activities that we already participate in can be opportunities for developing our musical knowledge.  We will explore some these activities, and how to integrate them into the learning process.

We probably cultivated our interest in music through listening to recordings and live performances.  As musicians we want to engage ourselves in listening to music in the same way we would read a book or watch a movie.  We can accomplish this by following along recordings with the score in hand.  If you haven’t attempted  this before,  it may take a while to be able to perform this kind of active listening, but is well worth the effort.  You may wish to start by just keeping track of the measures as they go by rather than focusing directly on the pitches.  With time your overall music reading skills will improve.

We can construct similar patterns with first and second inversion triads. The next example starts off two of these patterns for you.  Go ahead and write out the complete patterns.  The combination of writing out music and playing it will aid in developing your reading skills.

 (picture here but still having photo uploader problems…)

Take a look at some of the music you are playing.  Identify different types of passages in the melody:  scales, simple intervals and, of course, triads in various inversions.

Learn How to Read Music Notes Here

Here is a similar pattern, but it starts on the fifth of the chord, and arpeggiates downward:

Now, we will combine the above two examples:

Once this variation is familiar to you, you should be able to start to recognize root position triads in the music that you are playing.  Take a few minutes with some of your sheet music, preferably melodic in nature, and see if you can identify some root position triads.

***My photo uploader seems to be having trouble so I can’t update the post. I’ll figure this out and get back to you, sorry!

Let’s explore some simple patterns to help you learn to read music that contains triads:

Simple Triad Patterns - How to Read Music Notes

This first pattern arpeggiates through all the triads in C major in root position in a scale-like fashion.  Practice this pattern, and the other ones presented here at your instrument, slowly and steadily.  Start to use a metronome as you gain familiarity with the pattern.  Transpose these exercises into some of the other keys that you are currently working on and you’ll be reading music with triads in a hurry!