How to Read Sheet Music
Most of the sheet music you will buy will be arranged for piano. Piano music is written using two or three staves, with the chord symbols written above the top staff. It may also contain unfamiliar symbols and terms. At this stage you need only look at the top staff, which contains the melody line (tune), the lyrics and the chords. In some sheet music chord diagrams may also be included.
As most sheet music is arranged by keyboard players quite often the guitar chord shapes given are incorrect, unnecessary or impractical, and many piano arrangements of guitar based songs do not sound anything like the recorded version. Guitar tablature versions of sheet music are gradually becoming more popular and in many cases are very accurate arrangements of the song.
Also many piano arrangements are in difficult keys for a beginning guitarist and quite often use unnecessary chords. Piano sheet music also gives no indication of how to strum the chords. So piano sheet music is only a guide for a guitarist but is useful for lyrics and a general chord guide.
If the song contains chords that you are not familiar with you can:
- Learn how to play this new chord. Refer to the chord chart section at the end of the book. For a complete listing of chords see Progressive Guitar Method: Chords.
- Substitute an easier chord. Use the following chord table which lists the type of chord you may see in the sheet music (on the left of the table) and the simpler chord you can substitute (on the right of the table). If you know how to transpose and substitute chords you can play almost every song ever written using only a few basic chord shapes. It is recommended that you do further chord study and at least learn how to play bar chords. See Progressive Guitar Method: Bar Chords .
- Change the key of the song. Transposing (or Transposition) is the process of changing a song or piece of music from one key to another.
There are two reasons for transposing into another key:
- If the song is too high or too low to sing, the song can be changed into a lower or higher key. Changing the key of a song does not change the sound, pattern or timing of the melody but simply changes how high or how low it is sung.
- If the song is hard to play or contains difficult chords you can transpose it to a key with easier chords. For example, if a song is written in the key of Bb (which many songs are) it would contain chords like Bb, Eb and Cm which may be difficult for a beginning guitarist. If the song is transposed into the key of G major the chords would then be G, C and Am, which are easier for a guitarist to play.
