How to Read Sheet Music
The majority of sheet music for popular music is arranged for piano and voice. The piano part is written using two staves, and above it is the vocal stave with lyrics and chord symbols.
This can include symbols and terms that you may not have seen before. 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. If you want to learn more about reading music and tablature see Progressive Complete Learn to Play Guitar Manual.
Piano arrangements can often use unnecessary chords or be written in keys too difficult for beginning guitarists. In addition, they don't indication how to strum the chords. However, guitarists can still find them useful for lyrics, song structure and general chords. If the arrangement contains chords that you are not familiar with, try any of the following suggestions:
- Learn how to play this new chord as shown in this book.
- Change the key of the song (see Transposing later in this section)
- Substitute an easier chord.
Use the following easy 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. As your knowledge of chords increases, you can gradually add in all the other chord types.
