How to Read Sheet Music for the Violin

If you are picking up the bow to play the violin, then you also know there are some essential tools to pick up along the way. One that every violinist should learn is how to read music. By understanding how a staff works and getting into how to read the notes, you can be on your way to playing any type of music.

Difficulty: Moderate

Instructions

1. Pick the song you want to learn. If you are a beginner, find a song that you can work up to by reading and by learning how the melody goes.

2. Look at the guidelines. Music for violin will always begin with the same concepts. The first of these is the clef that it is in. This will always be a treble clef, also known as the G clef. This looks like a stem with a circle that goes around towards the bottom of the staff. The place where the circle stops is where the note G is.

3. Know the essential ingredients. By the G clef, or treble clef, will be a set of extra guidelines to help you through the piece. The first of these is the time signature and will have two numbers, one on top and one on the bottom. The one on the top is how many beats are in a measure, and the one on the bottom is the note value that gets one beat. The second part of this is the key signature, which will let you know if certain notes are sharp (raised by a half step) or flat (lowered by a half step).

4. Learn the notes. After you understand what the songs guides are, you can find what you are going to play as the melody. The staff is divided into 5 lines and 4 spaces. These will signify the notes that are played on each line. The lines will be E, G, B, D, F. You can remember this by the acronym, Elvis's Guitar Broke Down Friday. The spaces will be F, A, C, E, which you can remember by saying "space spells face."

5. Find the notes on the violin. Each of the notes that are on the staff line will be played on the violin. For instance, the E that is on the staff will correspond to the E that is on the violin, which is one E above the open E string. This will work up by steps on the violin as well as on the staff. You can find the notes by following the staff and the parallel notes on the violin.

Tips & Warnings

• Work towards putting everything together. When you read the sheet music, start by learning the notes and where they are on the violin. Then, add in the rhythm to make the song sound complete.
• Give yourself time. The best way to learn how to read is to memorize where the notes are and develop the skill of automatically finding this on the violin. It will take practice in order to get everything right.