Read Sheet Music on Piano Easy: With Workbook!

1. About This Course: Hi, my name is Jacob Lam. Welcome to this course on reading sheet music for the piano. Now, this course covers all levels, from introductory concepts to intermediate understanding to an advanced pro level of playing sheet music. As you progress through the course, you should come out of it with a well rounded and thorough knowledge of being able to play and write songs on sheet music. We're going to start by talking about the staff and clefts and what they actually are and how to navigate around them. Then we'll move into placing notes. Placing two notes. Timing chords, symbols, signs, song form, and all the little nuances you need to be able to pull up and play sheet. Music We're going to go through this in a fun and understandable way, and there's also a booklet with a lot of exercises for you to download and use. I'm really looking forward to starting together. Let's jump in. 2. Why Learn Sheet Music?: Now before we start, we should discuss why sheet music is important in the first place in a world of Youtube videos and tutorials. Why would we ever need sheet music? It's like asking in a world of movies, why would you ever need to read a book? There are a few reasons why sheet music is a great skill to have. First of all, it will naturally make you a better pianist and it's enjoyable. There are so many little nuances in sheet music that you can't get anywhere else. All these symbols and signs that are difficult to communicate in a Youtube video, and I know I make these Youtube videos, but it's difficult. And sheet music fixes all of those issues. Another great reason to learn sheet music is that it's not exclusive to the piano. See, you could read sheet music for other instruments and understand what they're doing. Or you may even get a whole piece of sheet music with multiple instruments on one piece of paper. Being able to read sheet music will unlock the language of music more for you. So that you can not only understand your instrument and other instruments, but even how they work together. And that will make you a better songwriter and a better player. In the end, there are 500 reasons why being able to read sheet music makes you a better musician, but those are two of the ones I think are wildly important. Let's jump into it. 3. Introducing the Staff!: Now to start our understanding of sheet music, we need to understand something called the staff. Now the staff are these lines and spaces, this is where we put everything having to do with our song onto. You can think of a staff like a blank piece of paper. In the music world, of course we've got lines, but we've got nothing on those lines. Now on the staff, we're going to put things called clefts and time signatures and sharps and flats and notes, but this is where we start from now. The way we count on the staff is that every line and every space is going to be a note. When we're counting up the staff, we would count line space, line space, line space. Every other note is going to land on a line. Every other note is going to land on a space. 4. Notes on the Clefs: Now, without any direction, a staff is pretty useless. On top of the staff, we put things called clefts. You can think of a clef as dictating what portion of music a staff is looking at. Now there are two primary clefts for piano is the treble clef, which is shown by this symbol. The base clef, which is shown by this symbol. Now the treble clef is the higher notes when we're playing piano and we're playing some of the higher keys, we would think about that in terms of the treble clef. The bass clef is the lower notes. If we're playing in the lower register of the piano, we would think about that down in the bass clef, both of these clefts work together to create music, Just like our hands work together to create music on the higher and lower parts of the piano. Now you'll get some songs that are two treble clefts or two bass clefts, or one of each. What's really important is to know where the notes are on the treble clef and where the notes are on the bass clef. Let's see what this looks like on the treble clef. Our bottom line is an E note. Now remember we count up the clef or the staff, every other line space, line space, line space. That's how we count notes. E, F, G, A, B, C, D, E. We can also use a sentence to help us easily remember the lines and the spaces, so that we don't need to count so much as we get familiar with it. In the treble clef, the sentence for the lines is, every good boy does fine. The sentence for the spaces, it's actually a word, it's just the word face. If we can remember, every good boy does fine and face, we're able to read the entire treble clef. Now for the base clef, we've got the same idea, but the notes are moved a little bit. Now our bottom line is a note. We count up the exact same way, A, B, C, D, E, F, G. But we also have a sentence for the lines and for the spaces this time through. The sentence for our lines is good, burritos don't fall apart. That is enormously true. The best burritos aren't going to fall apart for the spaces, our sentences, all cows eat grass. When we're looking at these two clefts and there are so many notes, it can seem really confusing and daunting. But we really only need to remember three sentences and a word. Every good boy does fine and face good burritos don't fall apart, and all cows eat grass just like that. You should be able to read every single note on both clefts, which is incredible. 5. Two Extra Notes: Now there's something really important to mention here. There are two notes that these sentences don't cover on the treble clef. We can go a little bit lower than on the base clef. We can go a little bit higher than you're going to see how these connect in just a moment. I like to think about it as putting together two sides of a puzzle and then they meet in the middle. These are the middle pieces that connect everything together in the treble clef. Moving down from E, we have D and we have C. Now you'll notice that C is off of our clef completely. We can help extend the cleft by adding a line. We have five natural lines, and we've just added a short line specific to this C. Now on the piano, that would be middle C in the base clef. It's the same thing. In the opposite direction, we can go above A with B and look at that middle C is the bridge where these two clefts connect. This isn't 100% rule, but for the most part, if we're playing above middle C, we can write it out in the treble clef. If we're playing below middle C, we can write it out in the base clef. 6. Placing Notes: With just that little bit of knowledge, we already know what we need to to start deciphering sheet music. Look at this, we'll put our letters right here on the left side. These won't always be here when we're looking at a song, but they're great training wheels as we're getting comfortable. Now to place actual notes on the sheet music or on the clefts, we're going to put these dots. If I wanted to write down a melody that I just made on the piano, here's how I would do it. Let's say I'm playing and I just played G, C and I go, that's the best song that's ever been written in the history of the world. And I need to write it down right now. Well, I could write out the letters on a piece of paper, G, C. But this tells you nothing about which E and which G to play, because there are many on the piano, or how long to hold down each note. Let's bring it over to sheet music. I played all of that above middle C, so I'm going to put it in my treble clef. I'm going to take a dot and I will put it on the line all the way to the left, because that's my first note. Now after that, moving left to right, I have a note right after my. I'll put the same dot now on the line that says, now again I've got an E. I'll put it on the same line. I've got two notes on the same line, but moving left to right. We're moving forward in time. We know this is E, and then C. Now I've got my little melody written out, which is really cool when we're looking at sheet music exercises, these letters won't be here. It would look more like this. But now we should be able to decipher what these letters are and play them on the piano. Now let's say I had the same exact melody, but I was using my left hand to play them below middle C, one octave, well, I would take this same exact pattern and I would move it to the lines for E, G, E, C, just down in the base clef. 7. Time Signatures: Now we mentioned in the last video that when we wrote out notes on a piece of paper, we can't really write down the timing or how long we hold down a note sheet. Music does solve that issue. The question is how well, there are a couple things we want to understand to get the timing of a song down. First of all, we should know that music is broken up into things called measures, which are actually just measuring the music into smaller chunks. When we place these vertical lines, every single space between is one measure. Now, songs can be measured in clicks or beats, which is really just a tap or a clap. Now, these taps or claps can be really fast, or they can be really slow. As an example, let's say we have a measure that has four beats in it. Well, if I have a really fast song, that measure would go by really quickly. 1234, that was one measure already. When we're reading sheet music of a fast song, we would fly through the measures, but the click can also be much slower. 1234, and all of a sudden, that measure lasts for much more time. Now at the beginning of a song, you're going to see a picture of a note. It equals a number. That's going to tell us how fast a click is or the tempo of our song. For example, if I see a note that equals 120, I know that my song is going to be played at 120 beats per minute. Now, that may sound fast, but we can work our way up to it. The way we'd figure out how fast 120 beats per minute is, is with the metronome, we can set a metronome which clicks for us to 120 and we've got the tempo of our song. Now of course, when we're practicing, we can slow a song down. Or if we're really good at a song and just want to have fun, we can speed it up. But when we're playing songs with other people, knowing the tempo and all being in the same tempo is crucial. Now the final question is, how do we know whether a measure has four clicks or three clicks in it? There are other times there might be five, there might be seven, but 4.3 are the most common. How do we know? At the beginning of sheet music, you're going to see a couple of numbers. The top number tells you how many beats are in each measure. If I see a song and it says 44, I know I can count each measure as 12341234. If I see the number 34, then I know I'd count each measure as 123-12-3123 Now the bottom number here is going to change a lot less frequently. All that it tells us is that the common standard note equals one beat or click when the bottom number is a four. You can think of that as everything's normal. 8. Song Practice #1: Now we know that there are measures and beats. And that notes go on these lines and spaces. And we've even got the sentences. We need to count notes on these lines and spaces. Let's take a moment and let's actually put this to practice. I'm going to place a couple of different notes in our Trevel cleft. We know the sentence here is every good boy does fine and face, we remember that middle C has got its own little line through it. Now I can start a metronome and I can play something like this. Okay, that's not too bad. And that song will be in your PDF so you can practice it. Let's take a look at the same idea in the bass cleft, but we'll change the song a little bit. Both of these songs, and more songs to practice are in your notebook. Take them at your own pace. Don't worry about a metronome and the timing right now. Just work on getting the notes down When you're more comfortable with the notes, then we can start thinking about playing along with a click. 9. Note Timing 101: Now we can write notes on the same exact line or space, but depending on the style that we write the note in, the timing of the note will change. This is how we write rhythm into our sheet. Music Each of these three notes in front of us is an note, but I would hold them down for different lengths. Let's go ahead and take a quick look at each of them. The first note is the standard note that we've been working with. It's a filled in with a stem. Now, a really important note before we move forward is that if the note is in the lower half of the clef, the stem points up. If the note is in the higher half of the clef, then the stem points down. This isn't for any reason, except that it just fits on the clef, a little neater, a little tighter. Now, the first note here is called a quarter note. It lasts for one beat. It's called a quarter note because it takes up a quarter of a 44 measure, right? So we can fit four of them into a measure with four beats, or three of them into a measure with three beats. Now again, beats can be fast, or beats can be slow. But I would play a measure of quarter notes like this. 1234, okay. That's one click each. Now twice as long is the half note, because it takes up half of a standard measure. The half note is almost the same, but it's not filled in. Now these last for two beats. What it looks like for a note to last longer than one beat is we just hold it down while we count for a measure of half notes. I would play 1234. I've been able to play two notes, and I hold them down for longer. This whole note takes up a whole measure. It's a monstrous four beats long, and it's written like a thick circle with no stem. If I were to play a measure of a whole note, I would simply hold it down 1234. Now in a three beat song, we wouldn't be able to fit two half notes or one whole, not. 10. Chord Markings: Sometimes on the top of sheet music you're going to see some letters and they'll typically be gray letters. Now don't be fooled, these letters actually aren't telling you the name of the note underneath them. These letters are for people playing along or for you if you want to simplify your sheet. Music. These are chord markings, something like this. We've got a C, E, G, and C note above it. It's telling us that we can play a C chord in our left hand, or whoever is playing with us may be on a guitar, could play a C chord to play along with us. Let's see if that sounds any good. I've got C, E, G, and C, and a C chord in the left hand. 11. Dynamic Markings: Now sometimes as we're playing sheet music, we're going to see some lower case letters in between the clefts. What are these? Well, now we're talking about a word called dynamics, which has to do with how soft or how loudly we play. All of these are dynamic markings to help you understand how loud you should be playing in that section of the song. Now these can change for different sections of the song. They're really useful because if the whole band quiets down, you don't want to be slamming on the piano like you're playing a metal song. Vice versa, if the whole band is playing really loudly, you don't want to be playing soft and pretty. You might get overshadowed by everyone else. Now we have six markings here that we want to run through. The first is pianissimo, which is notated by a double, and this is the most quiet you can get. This is going to be soft and delicate piano with one is going to be quiet. Meso piano is an MP, is quite quiet. Meso forte with is quite loud. Now forte with one is loud, and fortissimo with two s is very loud. Now I know that seems like a lot. Hopefully you didn't click away while I was going through those. There's actually a really easy way to remember in your head what's happening. Just think about P and F will always be quiet, will always be real loud, will be somewhere in the middle. You'll recognize that the S go away and drift into the category. Then the S start to arrive. That's a quick little cheat way to think about these dynamic markings and when you see them on the sheet music, just think to yourself that's a lot of, so it's going to be really quiet or that's a lot of, it's going to be really loud. 12. Symbols and Signs 1: Staccato and Legato: This is the last learning lesson of the beginning section of sheet music. Then we'll dive into some intermediate concepts and advanced concepts. This last section, we're going to talk about some symbols and signs. Now when we're playing sheet music, we have a lot of symbols and signs that can seem daunting, but we're going to break these into two lessons. There's this 1.1 further on. By the time those two lessons are over, you'll be amazed how easy sheet music really seems right now, we're going to go over two symbols and signs called staccato and legato. Now both of these words actually sound like the concept they're portraying. Staccato has a lot of hard sounds in the word staccato. What it's actually telling us to do is to play notes quickly. If I'm playing C, D, E, F, just normally I would play it like this. If I'm playing CDE, F as staccato notes, I would play them quickly and let go like this. Now the way we mark staccato notes on the page is just by putting a little dot above them. This would be the normal measure, this would be the staccato measure. The opposite term is legato, which flows very well. And that's exactly what it's telling us to do with the notes. Legato is the opposite. We're going to make sure that every note flows into the next one. Here I'm playing my same four notes. Normally now I would play them more legato. It's very nuanced, but you can hear them roll over each other just a little bit. Legato is notated a little bit differently. However many notes we want to encompass in our legato section, we're going to draw a line above it, from the first note to the last note. This is how we would not our regular measure. This is how we would not our legato measure. 13. Song Practice 2: Let's wrap up our beginner concepts by putting them all together in one song. This song is in your PDF, but you can listen to it here and go practice it on your own. 14. Sharps and Flats: Now we're going to jump into our intermediate sheet Music by talking about sharps and flats. Now, if you came into this course with a little bit of piano knowledge, you'll probably know that sharps and flats are on the black keys of the piano. But so far we only know how to write out notes on the white keys, write the open letters. How would we write sharp and flat notes on our sheet? Music Well, a sharp note is going to be this hashtag symbol. This just means we're going to take a note and we're going to move it up by a half step. Let's take a look at our note. If I put a sharp symbol next to this note, it automatically moves up by a half step to F sharp. A flat note is written by this squished up lower case B. Now if I took an A note and I put a flat next to it, well now it would become an A flat sheet. Music Really quickly becomes messy if you put a sharp and a flat next to every note that needs it, the easiest way to fix this is if we just said at the beginning of the song, which notes were sharp and which notes were flat. That's exactly what sheet music does. At the beginning of a song, you're going to see a whole bunch of sharps or a whole bunch of flats, or maybe only one or two of each. These are telling you, hey, the line that these sharps or flats are on will always be sharp or flat throughout our song. If we see the beginning of a song and it's got a sharp on this line here, we can use our sentence and say, okay, that's an F note. Well, every that I play, even if it's the down here is going to be sharp. Now, what if most of our S are sharp, but we don't want one to be sharp? How would we write that out? Well, we can start our song and we can put a sharp on an F and say, okay, now all of the notes, even if they don't say sharp, will be played as an F sharp. But we do have one, we want to be natural. We would place this natural symbol next to that. Now, there are a couple important rules here. When we put a sharp or a flat in our song, when it's not typically there, when it doesn't agree with the beginning of a song. These are called accidentals. They're out of the key. Now let's say I have a measure and I've got four S. These are natural, just the white key, F. If I put a sharp on the third, it would count for the after it changes the rest of the, after it, in that measure. Now I would play. Now once the measure is over, my goes back to normal. If I only wanted this third F to be sharp. Well, I would fix that by putting this natural symbol on the fourth F. 15. Reading and Writing Chords: So far we've talked about playing single notes and writing them on the clefts. We've talked about if we need a chord, there can be a chord symbol or letter at the top of our sheet. Music. But what if we wanted to write chords in the sheet music as notes? Well, we can do that as well. Time in sheet music moves from left to right. Any note on the right side is played after the note on the left side. Now, it doesn't just need to go left to right. If we want notes to be played at the same time, we would put them in the same space on top of each other. Let's think about a C chord as an example. If I want to play a C chord, well, the notes I need are C. And I would write those three notes out on top of each other on the sheet. Music Now I've got a C chord written out. This would sound something like this. Chords can be written with the same rhythm rules as single notes. We could write out a C chord using notes, a C chord using half notes, or a C chord using whole notes. 16. Using Both Clefs: Now when we write out notes on top of each other, they don't even have to be in the same cleft. As long as they're in the same space, they're going to be played together. We're going to see that in this lesson by playing chords with our right hand and root notes with our left hand. Maybe I want to play back to C and I want the root note to follow each of those chords. Well, I'm going to write out the three notes in a C chord. The three notes in, the three notes in a chord. Then again, the three notes in a chord. Now I'm going to make my root note follow. That would be a bale and back to C. Now I've got some left hand base clef and right hand treble clef being played together. 17. Ledger Lines: We've mentioned that the treble cleft can be played with the right hand, the base cleft can be played with the left hand. But there are definitely times where we want the left hand to go above middle C. There are times where we want the right hand to go below middle C. How is that something that we can write out on the sheet? Music Well, we can start using something called ledger lines. And believe it or not, this is actually something we've already been using. Ledger lines are extra lines that we add onto a cleft to extend it. If I want my right hand to go below middle C, I can continue to add special lines for notes that extend the treble clef down into the same range that the base clef is at. For example, I've got middle C next to the treble clef. If I want to move it down, I could put a B note here on the base clef. Or I could put a B note here in the treble clef. And an A note and A note, and an F note in an E note. It can keep extending down. Now we can put ledger lines above or below the treble clef. We can put ledger lines above or below the bass clef. Now, something really important before we keep talking about these ledger lines is that music is a science, but it's also an art If there's a point in a song where it just makes way more sense for you to use your left hand for a treble clef part. Even though there aren't ledger lines, I want you to do that. I want you to use finger economy really wisely to play songs in the easiest, most comfortable way possible. So let's take a look at each of these sections of ledger lines. The ledger lines below the treble clef or above the base clef are really easy to memorize because they're the exact same notes as the clef they're spilling into. For example, if I'm playing the base clef and I start adding in these ledger lines, I've got C, E, G, B, D, F. Wait a second. This is every good boy does fine, because it's the same notes as the treble clef just written out in the base clef. It's the same thing. Moving down from the treble clef, I could add lines below, and I've got a D. You're noticing here we're writing out the lines of the base clef. Now, above the treble clef, really high notes. Let's see what we've got from. I've got a well, hold on a second. Those are the spaces of the base clef. Underneath the base clef, I've got a and which are the spaces of the treble clef relating these two clefts to each other, especially when we're talking about ledger lines, is the easiest way to memorize what the ledger lines actually are. 18. Song Form 1: Believe it or not, when we read sheet music, we don't always read it left to right and top to bottom like a book. There are certain symbols here or certain markings that would have us go back, start apart over, or change the measures we're playing. Now we're going to talk about song form in two videos, song form one and song form two. This is song form one, where we're going to talk about repeats and first and second endings. Repeats are pretty straightforward. We're playing a song and at a certain part we see this symbol. It looks like a sideways face. This symbol here means go back and repeat. Now, there are two ways a repeat sign could go if there's no other markings, just this ending one. This means we're going to go back and we're going to play again from the beginning. If there is a sideways face going the other way, that's where we repeat from, that's the start of our repeat. Let's look at two examples. In this song, we would play the first line, second line, and repeat first line, second line, and then move on to the third line. If we had an opening repeat sign, then we would play first line, second line, repeat back to the start of the second line and then move on to the third line. The other song form marking we want to talk about is first and second endings. Now we mark these out really simply with this bar on top and a number one and number two. These will come along with a repeat sign. Here's how this works. We play our first line, our second line. Since it's our first time through, we would play this first measure. Then we go back and repeat. First line, second line. But wait, this is our second time through. Now, we would skip over the measure dedicated to the first time through. We would play the second ending here, the second measure when we're repeating. These are just saying, play this the first time through, Play this the second time through. Those are the basics of navigating a page for song form. 19. Note Timing 201: We know quarter notes, and we know half notes, and we know whole notes, and that's amazing. But you'll notice we don't have any markings for anything over four beats. We don't have three beats, we don't have anything quicker than one beat. What if we need to fill in these spaces? Well, let's talk about some intermediate note timing. Now, right off the bat, let's talk about eighth notes. Eighth notes look like quarter notes, but they have one small change. If there's just one of them, they're written with this little flag. If there's two or more of them, then we bar them at the top. And eighth notes are twice the speed of quarter notes, which means we can fit two of them into one beat. Here I've got an example of a quarter note, two eighth notes, quarter note, and two eighth notes. Let's hear how the sound with a metronome. Well, okay, we also have 16th notes. Now these look like eighth notes, but they have either two flags if there's one of them, or 2 bars if there's more than one of them. These, you can fit a shocking four notes into one beat. Here's a short little song. We've got two quarter notes, eighth notes, and eight 16th notes. These all take up the same amount of time. Let's start with our quarter notes. 11, eighth, eighth note, 16th note. Now again, remember beats can be really fast or really slow if they're really fast. 16th notes get difficult to play so quickly. Now what about if we wanted to get three or even six beats? We now we're going to talk about a note for a dotted note, we write a dot after a note. What the dot does actually changes. It adds half of the notes value to itself changes depending on what note we put it after. If we put it after a quarter note, well, half of one is a two. This now lasts for a beat and a two. If we put it after a half note, well half of two is one. This now lasts for three beats. If we put a dot after a whole note, well half of four is two. This now lasts for six beats. That's a special case note. We can't even fit that into a regular four beat measure. Now what do we do if we do want a note to last for six beats, but it doesn't fit in our measure. The last timing thing we're going to talk about in this lesson is called a tie. Let's say I have this measure here and I want to hold a note down for six beats. But I only have three beats available in my measure. Well, I will fill those three beats. And in the following measure, I'll write another three beat note on the same line. Now I need to tie these together. I need to say we're only playing this once, and we're holding it down for both of these lengths. Now this looks like a legato line, but instead of being on top, it's going to be between them. I'm going to draw a line between these two notes with a little hoop. And now they're tied together. And I would play it, 123456. Now we want to be really careful to be able to tell the difference between a legato line or a slur and a tie. Here's really the main difference. A tie will go between two notes, sometimes three notes. If the context is right and it will be the same note, we can't hold a note down while we change it. A tie will be between notes and it will be the same note. Now, a slur, the legato marking won't be between notes, but it will cover over notes like an umbrella. And an easy way to tell if it's legato is that it's going to cover a bunch of different notes. Right now, we can change notes. 20. Symbols and Signs 2: We know the basic and the intermediate concepts for sheet music. Now let's talk about some of the nuances or some of the more difficult concepts. And I know you've got this. If you need to watch these over twice, absolutely, do it. Come back to them for reference if you need it. But this video, we're going to talk about more symbols and signs. And there's a few of them. The first thing we're going to talk about are grace notes. Now, grace notes look bizarre, but they're actually really easy. Grace notes are a smaller note before a main primary note. Now, all that this means is that we play that small note really quickly before we hit our primary note. For example, here's a D note. If I were going to play this, it would sound like a D note. If I've got a grace note in front of it, like a C, Well now I would play something like that. Or maybe I'll try it an octave higher. A real quick small note that we roll up to our primary note. Now we might also see a trill. Now a trill looks like this. It abbreviates the word trill and shows us this wavy symbol. A trill just means that whatever note we play, we're going to also play it quickly, either a half step or whole step above the note. I could do a half step trill between this and F, or I could do a whole note trill between E and F sharp, which is a whole note apart. So we've got grace notes and we've got trills. Now we might also see an accent, and out of all of these, accents are probably the easiest to understand. All that this means is, hey, give this note some special attention dynamically. Right? We talked about the S, and the S, and the S, and how loudly to play. Accents are just saying, give this one some special attention, maybe some extra volume here. If I've got these four C's and my middle one has got an accent. We've got two more that we're going to cover in this lesson. We're just rapid speed going through these symbols. We might see pedal markings and this has to do with the piano pedal that your foot is on. Now we would see petal markings underneath a song, and it abbreviates the word petal. It also gives us when to hold the petal down and these little arrows up, or when we would lift the petal and place it back down. Now, not every song has got this. This certainly, again, doesn't mean you can't use your own ears and figure out when the petal sounds best. But if we're going to play a song properly and know how to interpret sheet music, petal markings can be enormously useful. Finally, in the Symbols and Signs lesson, we have eight VA, eight V B above a song, you might see eight VA and a line sticking out. What that means is that every note that's written out is going to be played an octave higher than it's actually written. This is a lot easier to interpret in play than something like this where all the notes are written an octave higher. It also just makes it neater. We don't have to count ledger lines as much. We've got eight VA above or underneath. We might have eight VB, which you may guess means the opposite. This is played an octave lower than it's written. In some cases you might even see something like 15 VA, which would be two octaves higher. Now each of those symbols you will probably come across as you use sheet music, they're really useful to know. 21. Using Both Clefs Part 2: Now the only time we've combined treble and bass cleft is when we're either playing them separately or we're playing chords. But most songs that you find in sheet music are going to put these clefts together. They're going to be playing different notes, and they're going to be playing different timings. It's really important to be able to separate our hands to each do something. The question is, how do we practice that? How do we work our way up to that? When we come across a song, the best way to do it is to practice the right hand by itself, just the notes. Focus on notes, not rhythm. Then when you get the notes comfortable, you can work on the rhythm. Then bring in the left hand, right. Again, just the notes. Don't worry about the metronome, don't worry about the rhythm. When you've got those comfortable, you can bring in the rhythm and then take both hands really slowly. Mentally draw a line between the notes that are in the same space and just focus on playing those together. You don't have to think about doing it in time. Just play notes together and notes separate to make these two parts happen. And as you get comfortable with it, you can start doing them together with a metronome and speeding it up, and all of a sudden you're playing sheet. Music. Let's practice a really simple version of this. We're going to take a chord in both hands, and I'm going to break up the notes. Both hands will be playing C, E, and G. But the hard part is, while our right hand does quarter notes, our left hand is going to do eighth notes. For every one note in the right hand, we'll have two notes in the left hand. Let's do this really slowly and then speed it up. It would sound something like this. Now let's speed that up a little bit. If you can get that down, that's a really good route for the fruit of playing sheet music to grow out of. 22. Song Form 2: Earlier in this course, we had a song form lesson, and we mentioned later on we would do song form two. Welcome to song form two. We know how to use repeats and first and second endings. But there are some other form directions here that we want to know how to understand. First of all, when we're playing a song, we might come to a symbol that says to coda, great. So we know we have to go to the coda, but what is it? Well, the coda is a special piece at the end of the song. It's sort of like a little island off the rest of your sheet music. It's how we'll finish a song, and it's got this special symbol. So here is our coda. Now we might also see markings that say DS, DS is telling us to go back to this special symbol. It's like a repeat. But instead of the repeat symbols, it says go back to this symbol. And then we'd play from there and pass that marking if we've already done it. Now these two things that we've just learned actually work in unison. The reason is, you'll sometimes see DS to coda. Now, what does that mean? That means that we would go back to this symbol. We would repeat until it said go to the coda. Between repeats, first and second endings, codas, and the DS. There's a lot of movement either in a song that you're learning or in a song that you're writing. 23. Mid-Song Changes: We've learned so much together. As a last lesson, we're going to talk about when the concepts we've talked about change mid song, sometimes they do typically in a song. The rules you get at the beginning, like what notes are sharp and flat and the clefts and the time signature, those count for the whole song. But every now and then, you'll find something change in the middle of a song. Really, the only point of this lesson is to tell you to be aware of it. Look here in the middle. Let's look at a few different examples. At the beginning of our song, we see what the tempo is. We see that we've got a treble and a bass cleft, and we see what notes are sharp. Now we play that for a while, but then here we see a change, we see a change in what notes are sharp. That's a change in the key. We see a change in the tempo. We even see a change in the clefts that we're using. That's a big one, because remember the sentences for the base clef and the treble clef are different. Now all of a sudden we've got two treble clefts. We know that we're moving up, everything is now above middle C. Both the left hand and the right hand will be above middle C. For both clefts, we use the sentence, every good boy does fine. And the word face, as we're playing a song and you see these changes happen in the middle of it. Just be very aware of what's happening and think about how it's going to change how you're playing. 24. Final Project: You've made it to the end of the course. Congratulations. Now as a final project, we're going to do one of two things. We're going to either find a song for sheet music that we want to play. You can challenge yourself, but don't make it overwhelming. And then we would practice it and share it. Or we would create a little song on the sheet music. Now one of the songs that we could do is maybe a song from the PDF that's included. Those are great to practice and get comfortable with sheet music and we'd love to see you share one of those songs. If you're not able to record or you're a little recording shy, that's okay. You can just write out maybe the piece you chose or what song you chose from the PDF or notes that you wrote, if you made your own song and then how it went, what you found difficult, what you found easy. I'm really looking forward to seeing it. 25. Congratulations!: Congratulations on making it to the end of this course. Being able to play sheet music on piano is amazing. If you have any questions or comments, you can always reach out to me at Jacob at Lamblessons.com I love hearing from you guys. Or you can visit me directly at Lamb Lessons.com Congratulations, you worked so hard and I'll see you in the next one.