Learning Sheet music

[teelo17]

I'm not new to instruments, I have played saxophone, Trumbone, Flute, Drums and Guitar for most of my childhood, I am now 17 and have just got a piano for christmas, I can play 20-30 songs on https://recursivearts.com/virtual-piano/ and have many a times written my own 'sheet music' as there are none out there however it is more direct when learning, piano sheet music however I cannot get my head around, I'm a very visual learner, I've never actually played a piano before the 25th and can now play Havana, Sign of the Times, Wet Handso, currently learning Toto Africa, and can play the first 3 minutes of Beethovens Moonlight Sonata 1st Movement. I don't know if this is quick learning but I find it astronomically easier to see which keys to hit and remember them that way. I can identify which key is what note and I make mental notes of the keys in an octave with numbers to help me fingers move along in quick succession. But I still can't seem to correlate notes on a score to keys on the piano. I know this won't be an overnight thing but as much as I want to believe I can learn any piece without ever reading sheet music I would love to have the ability.

[perfect_pitch]

I want to believe I can learn any piece without ever reading sheet music

[debussychopin]

I'm not new to instruments, I have played saxophone, Trumbone, Flute, Drums and Guitar for most of my childhood, I am now 17 and have just got a piano for christmas, I can play 20-30 songs on https://recursivearts.com/virtual-piano/ and have many a times written my own 'sheet music' as there are none out there however it is more direct when learning, piano sheet music however I cannot get my head around, I'm a very visual learner, I've never actually played a piano before the 25th and can now play Havana, Sign of the Times, Wet Handso, currently learning Toto Africa, and can play the first 3 minutes of Beethovens Moonlight Sonata 1st Movement. I don't know if this is quick learning but I find it astronomically easier to see which keys to hit and remember them that way. I can identify which key is what note and I make mental notes of the keys in an octave with numbers to help me fingers move along in quick succession. But I still can't seem to correlate notes on a score to keys on the piano. I know this won't be an overnight thing but as much as I want to believe I can learn any piece without ever reading sheet music I would love to have the ability.

Ok cool, bravo. .not sure what response you want from us as you didn't ask a question.

 But I'll just say that Piano is one of the few instruments that is relatively easy to approach for everyone but quickly becomes one of the most difficult to continue endeavor in due to its immense breadth and depth. 

Almost all young newcomers will learn a few simple pieces and aspire to be a special talent in piano (especially after touching on the first couple of pages of 1st movement moonlight sonata bc it comes so easy to everyone ..but hey ..it's beethoven right ? It must be just me, bc isn't beethoven supposed to be hard? I find it so simple !)
But you say you want to learn without reading sheet music (or studying the score) ...this is like saying you want to go into the electrical engineering discipline without learning calculus/high level mathematics , bc you put a simple circuit board together.

Piano is a discipline like any other art/music/science etc discipline out there. You need to put in the homework to gain skill in the foundational basics to make any real grounded progess within that discipline. If you don't want to, well that is fine, bc you can stick to one-line melodies, chopsticks, and first few pages of 1st movement moonlight ..or putting together  DIY circuit boards for kids , and be happy with that.

[j_tour]

I know this won't be an overnight thing but as much as I want to believe I can learn any piece without ever reading sheet music I would love to have the ability.

Good.  You should try.  No, you don't need a teacher, but you do need to try.

Make an attempt.

What's the problem, exactly?  Don't want to?  So don't.  Problem solved.

[lettersquash]

Hi teelo17, welcome to the forum! I'd just encourage you to start with some simple reading of the notes - there's masses of introductory info out there.

I'm not new to instruments, I have played saxophone, Trumbone, Flute, Drums and Guitar for most of my childhood,

I'm guessing you played those without reading any music too. Is that right?

I am now 17 and have just got a piano for christmas, I can play 20-30 songs on https://recursivearts.com/virtual-piano/

I don't know that, but just had a quick look. Do you mean you can play those songs using the qwerty keyboard, or on your electric piano? Is that with your piano plugged in to the app (I don't know how that all works). What are you following - how do these pieces on the site indicate which notes to play and when?

and have many a times written my own 'sheet music' as there are none out there however it is more direct when learning,

I'm not sure what you mean here, but I assume you're not writing sheet music, and that's why you put it in quotes. So what you're writing, and saying isn't out there?

piano sheet music however I cannot get my head around, I'm a very visual learner,

That's an interesting pair of statements! Learning to read sheet music is a visual process, and associating the dot on the staff with a piano key is largely visual too. Usually it goes along with naming the note, of course, but that's only the start of finding that specific one, because of the octaves. It helps, because it's a step between seeing the dot and finding the piano key. The usual place to start is with the treble clef, with its five lines and intervening spaces. I began the way millions have, writing F A C E in those spaces, and learning the names of the keys on the piano, which isn't difficult. From there, you can move to the lines, or just find the notes inbetween (so the middle line is between A and C, which is B). Then the bass clef, which is the same set of notes but moved, so D is the middle line. You also have to learn which octave these are in, but that's not hard.

So there's nothing massively difficult about learning those, is there? The other main element is the time value of the notes, which I won't go into here, but again, there's masses of info and it's not massively difficult to "get your head around". What is difficult, IMHO, is getting any good at it, and it can seem almost impossible at first, like hieroglyphics. But it'll come. You have to be patient, but also put in some time practising.

I've never actually played a piano before the 25th and can now play Havana, Sign of the Times, Wet Handso, currently learning Toto Africa, and can play the first 3 minutes of Beethovens Moonlight Sonata 1st Movement. I don't know if this is quick learning but I find it astronomically easier to see which keys to hit and remember them that way.

Sure, but as others have indicated, easy isn't always good. You might find it useful to be strict with yourself and eschew easy methods and do the harder one that goes somewhere. I'd love it if the world embraced an easier musical script - they exist - but it's not going to, so if you can't beat it, maybe join it.

I know this won't be an overnight thing but as much as I want to believe I can learn any piece without ever reading sheet music I would love to have the ability.

Amen to that.
Atb, John.

[pianowhisper]

I see sheet music as a new language pretty much.
Playing music without even bothering to learn how to read it is like trying to speak a different language without comprehending how it works. As if you were solely speaking words out trying to imitate what a native speaker said, or trying to write phrases down solely by copying the characters one after the other (think of a language with a totally different alphabet you're not familiarized with, and you try to write words just by copying the characters instead of understanding the alphabet itself). Sure, to a certain extent, the results can be reasonable, but soon the effectiveness of this solution is lost and then you're forced to improve your proficiency in that.

With music it is similar. In my point of view, the "language" in this case is the score itself. It becomes very hard to understand music and what it is saying without... well... utilizing its language.

Best,
pw

[lettersquash]

I partly agree with what you say here, pianowhisper, but I'd qualify a few things.

I see sheet music as a new language pretty much.

I agree, but I think we might mean different things! I'm guessing you mean "a different language from English, etc.", where I would say it's also a different language from actual music.

Playing music without even bothering to learn how to read it is like trying to speak a different language without comprehending how it works.

I think that's an unnecessarily academic view. Millions of people understand how music "works" without knowing a dot of it.

As if you were solely speaking words out trying to imitate what a native speaker said,

And millions of people learn to speak a language that way. We all learn our native language exactly like that, by ear, by imitation, repetition and verbal correction, before we start adding the recognition of written words. And I'm pretty sure people often learn a second language exactly like that, especially if it has an uncustomary alphabet. Furthermore, when learning a second language, it is commonly asserted that the best thing you can do is surround yourself with native speakers and converse with them. You have probably talked to people who didn't learn to read and write English, without knowing it.

Humans had languages for hundreds of thousands of years before we invented writing, and it is reasonable to induce that illiterate peoples memorized stories, music, poetry and all manner of things by imitation, repetition and verbal correction. We should also note that our Western tradition has run roughshod over ethnic traditions, some of which will have involved complex non-literate musical forms.

Writing always invovles a sclerotic process where subtleties that are hard to encapsulate are ignored or badly approximated. How exactly would a particular regional accent be codified? We know what they sound like; we can imitate them, but it would be virtually impossible to put them on a page precisely (although linguists have symbols that approximate the sounds - without the referent to listen to, we would have nothing for the symbol to mean).

This is the sort of rich, subtle information that musical script loses, hence why there are vast differences in people's attempts to reconstruct historic interpretations of classical or other early music, and why modern composers sometimes write reams of instructions in their native language to accompany their scores, or single bars, or notes. Modern composing often involves breaking out of the binds that notation inevitably places on communicating what is essentially a vibratory experience (or the imagination of one). Of course, mainstream classical musicians forget this, because they stay within the limits of what they can read off a page, and eventually think the map is the territory.

or trying to write phrases down solely by copying the characters one after the other (think of a language with a totally different alphabet you're not familiarized with, and you try to write words just by copying the characters instead of understanding the alphabet itself). Sure, to a certain extent, the results can be reasonable, but soon the effectiveness of this solution is lost and then you're forced to improve your proficiency in that.

With music it is similar.

But this is a different scenario, the copying of different symbols. Music itself is not symbols, it is pressure waves, and the human brain has innate abilities to make emotional and - to some extent - schematic sense out of it. I would agree that writing it down and learning music theory allow a much richer analysis of "how it works", with the caveats above.

In my point of view, the "language" in this case is the score itself. It becomes very hard to understand music and what it is saying without... well... utilizing its language.

When people say music is "a universal language", it's precisely because it's not the score itself (clearly, because we could translate that into any number of other notation systems). And you can sit with a three-year-old child and sing The Wheels on the Bus, and they're utilizing the musical language.

[ranjit]

Playing music without even bothering to learn how to read it is like trying to speak a different language without comprehending how it works.

I have to agree with lettersquash that this is an uninformed opinion. How do you account for the various forms of jazz that have developed via imitation and listening? To add to the bunch, Indian classical music is an aural tradition which is incredibly complex and yet has no written "script". In fact, it is only in classical music that reading music is the norm -- I don't know of a single other musical tradition where notation is but a crude approximation of the music, as a reminder of how it should actually sound.

[lostinidlewonder]

Learning by ear or rote does work and some people are very good at it and can learn very difficult pieces. The challenge is however that communicating your problems and focusing on particular parts, these can become inefficient without the score, also learning and improving with a piece is generally slower (since for example with good reading skills you can play something immediately with mastery without any practice at all, or you can focus your efforts on particular parts much easier).

Notes allow us to put onto paper what is otherwise thoughts in our mind, or a feeling in the hands, or a sound we can hear from within. It is difficult in with muscular/sound memory to observe a piece completely but with the sheets you can see the entire landscape as a whole. It is difficult for those who play by rote or ear to start from many places from within a piece and they almost always have particular points they can only start from (some even must start from the beginning!). Understanding your fingering is much easier with the score in front of you since you can label your solutions and write comments which enforce the understanding of it. You may even become accustomed to understanding the correct fingerings by the visual representations of the notes in front of you. To be able to see technique written on paper and understand its fingering is very beneficial and is otherwise quite a difficult process to explain or monitor without.

[lettersquash]

@ranjit, thanks for that. I nearly didn't post, because everyone's entitled to their opinion and I didn't want to offend, but it was nice to hear you agree.

@lostinidlewonder, yes, those are all good points. It's encouraging to me, as a learner (somewhere between beginner and intermediate, I guess) to hear how it's possible to get to a point with reading that the notes make immediate sense, as you say about seeing fingering from their visual representation. I hope to develop some of those skills, and I have to work very hard against my natural inclination, which is to decode the script into memory as soon as possible so I don't have to read it anymore. Short term gain, long term loss.

There's a difference between "musical script is immensely useful" and "music is the script", and the thrust of most of the responses might have reinforced the latter view. I think someone like the OP might give up entirely, even playing music without reading or writing their own notes, if they're told they must learn to read or there's no point, especially at 17.

[pianowhisper]

Thank you for your comments, @lettersquash, @ranjit.

Actually, I believe we're on the same page. It was not my intention to compare music and languages (like English, Chinese, and so on) in an "exact" way as, of course, they are both completely different forms of communication. With my other reply, I only wanted to bring this comparison up to help to express my view that music utilizes a "language" that can be well described within the sheet music, and hence why, in my opinion, understanding/reading the score is an entryway for a greater level of insight and comprehension of whichever piece of music. My point might have gone off on a tangent from having mentioned "language" so many times. lol

I agree: "music" is a universal language indeed and a much broader concept. I admit I did not take all music forms or genres into consideration, rather I was thinking more about the classical form (because it was how I learned music (or how to play it)), so my comment ended up being biased. Therefore what I meant perhaps makes more sense to that type of situation.

All kinds of music learning are valid. As it's been said, we all could sing lullabies as children and that is not less significant whatsoever than fleshed-out theories from musicologists.
My point was that the score is where so much of the information you need can be found. It can make the process much more efficient and give you many more insights about a certain piece of music than if you solely rely on playing by ear. That's why I compared music with languages because the efficiency of our (or the usual person's) skill can be significantly boosted by utilizing the language to its fullest. But then again, it was never my intention to fully compare music with spoken/written languages (I'm no fancy academic musicologist or musician to even dare to make such claims or analysis, I'm solely a music lover who learned to play an instrument after all). Besides, as I mentioned above, it is true that this might be way more relevant to the classical form, and I can't really opine on all the many different genres and forms of music there are.

Best,
pw

[lettersquash]

Thank you for your comments, @lettersquash, @ranjit.

Actually, I believe we're on the same page.

That's good. It looks like I misinterpreted what you were saying.
ATB, John.

[pianowhisper]

That's good. It looks like I misinterpreted what you were saying.

Or rather perhaps it was me who misexpressed myself / what I was trying to say, probably. Thank you again for all the perceptive comments.

Best,
pw