How to Read Music Like a Musician: 5 Ways to Read (and the One I'd Pick)

Hi everyone, this is Jason Zach from Nathaniel School of Music. Now what does reading music mean and what is this thing called site reading as a process? Is it the only thing that musicians need or is it one of the many things that you know musicians need and not just that one of the many things in the field of reading music which there exists. So site reading by default means the treble cliff, the bass cliff or the drum cliff or the ukulele cliff or the alto or the tenner cliff whatever it might be. You read that and you have these notes which are written basically on a x and y axis. The x-axis is not just doing points. It's giving you the symbols, the whole note, the half note, the the dotted quarter or the um triplet which is a pack of three or maybe a quintuplet. So this ecosystem will show off itself in the horizontal in the x-axis while the yaxis is basically showing you pitch changes. Is it higher? Is it lower? As it goes really low, you get into maybe the ledger lines territory. high also will have ledger lines because the default standard is music is written on five lines or it's evolved that way. So if you go really low or if you're a two-handed player like a pianist, then you might want to have two sets of things to read. Or if you're a pipe organ player, you might want to have three sets of things to read, which would be the treble, the bass, and even what your pedal is supposed to play if the composition has it. Otherwise your pedal will basically read one of the existing cliffs that are there. Okay. So reading music to me at least over my years of being part of this field means a lot of things and I found different applications and different use cases and different things that have helped me become a musician as I've gone along in the process. So first of all I'm going to give you all the methods of site readading in this particular lesson or all the ways you can involve yourself with written sheet music or anything written for that matter. This is also coming from the fact that I started my journey without really knowing reading. I started off more by just singing in a choir and figuring it al along the way. Then I was part of a couple of ac capella teams and a few lot of rock bands actually. And I think I have never been part of a band for at least the first few years maybe almost a decade where the musicians in my group were actually or actively using site reading with notation. Yes, some of us knew and we were kind of learning from each other. Maybe they had a teacher, but no one really knew. So, if you're playing in an ensemble like a blues band or a rock band, I don't think the odds that more than 50% of people in a band, I guess across the globe who know how to read music probably is is zero. It's not going to be the case. And also reading if you think about it is not needed you know it's it's only an option and it's [snorts] not really music theory it's not really ear training and if you think about it for folks who can't see or who choose not to see or you know a written form it can get confusing and daunting to read this stuff you don't have to you can memorize why not what's you can memorize and then visualize so some sometimes you can memorize the sheet music and kind of visualize it in your own brain. Why do you need the paper anymore? Anyway, so that's going to be this sort of rant and I'm going to nominate my best form of using sheet music for any kind of activity to help you grow as a composer, a pianist, a singer, an improviser, an arranger and every and a theorist and yeah that's everything. So, you have to stay tuned till the very end where that's going to be talked about. You'll have a nice study guide waiting for you on our Patreon. Do consider getting yourselves a copy. And uh that's about it. Let's get cracking. And don't forget to hit this like, share, subscribe. The moment you find this lesson useful or if you've been following us for a while, hit that button. It'll be nice to hit that button now. That's what really helps our channel. And if I think that's literally the only way this channel can ever grow if you hit those buttons or at least one of them. Okay, thanks. Let's get cracking. So, first off, what could you do if you did not have reading? If you didn't have notation, if you're in a musical family like I have been, you basically learn by watching your family members, your seniors, your elders. So I would I have learned a lot by watching my mom my granddad and I've had you know two two granddads one being a western musician one being an Indian classical musician now I've seen both of them play the western classical musician would always kind of rely on the notation but then use the notation to conduct or orchestrate or dictate terms or you know decide things and I would see that he would also So use staff notation to write down his own compositions, which I think is the point of staff notation in the first place. It's a tool to help you remember your compositions. And back in the day with no internet, with no uh recording equipment, how else would you document your compositions if you did not have a a concept of notation? So notation the advantage is you document your work but then you can also share your work with others so that others can kind of actually see it and enjoy and also collaborate with others. In this case with with uh one of my granddads it was to conduct an orchestra or a choir with his own composition. So that I thought was really cool. He could also conduct or lead some other [clears throat] person's composition. It could be a bach song or a a a a coral piece with fourpart harmony. Now the other granddad who played karnatic music, it seemed to feel like it was more intuitive. So you have a teacher who's constantly singing the suare, singing patterns and then on the violin you just find it and you just go with the flow. almost trial and error you know but very clever uh setup for trial and error you know you're not trying everything you're trying only the notes in the raa so it felt like that as a [clears throat] kid growing up and I thought both methods were fascinating and either ways what matters is the end product you want people to enjoy the final result right and [clears throat] you can learn music by watching or sometimes I also call it pariting. So if you're in a choir or if you're a singer and if you learn a song, you're kind of just learning the song, you're not learning what those notes are, what those intervals are. And if you're a keyboard player, one classic way to learn music is by watching and playing. And in this day and age with keyboards especially, you have YouTube which has these visuals floating around and some stunning technology to to literally learn by watching. But are you going to ensure musicality? Are you going to ensure dynamics, playing on time, um improvisation, going out of the script? That might need reading, that might need other methodologies. Okay? So you can watch and copy very easily in this day and age at least for instruments and but it's not a very scalable appro approach because you're not understanding what you're doing. So you're only as good as the last song you learned so to speak. So now let's look at methods of reading that you look at the notation and then learn or grow accordingly. The first will be the read and play method which is basically called site reading. So, it's eyes to fingers. So, you you probably are not going to look at your piano cuz you have the book or the sheet or the score to look at and that's it. Your eyes are there. You read it and you play almost like reading a poem or a journal. And the cliffs are basically going to be needed. You'll have the treble cliff, the bass cliff, the alto or the tenor. You might even have a percussion cliff, a drum cliff. So believe it or not, even drummers site readad and site readading a drum kit is not easy. I would say it's a bit tougher than site readading for piano. It can get quite tricky because the rhythm aspect of drums is huge. When you're reading the challenge is not only to read pitch, it's also to read rhythm, right? So the combination of both and then the ornaments the dynamics the rhythm all of that adds to the the party and knowledge of site reading is very important for your specific instrument like for trumpet for or saxophone what you read it might look like it's on C but it's actually concert B flat you know or concert E flat so it might annoy another musician if you're playing with others and it also comes with the challenge of you know actual challenges of reading that's the dots the tide notes the triplets the triplets and then reading the ledger lines up and down you know all that can be a challenge so pianists generally have to read two at a time the melody in the right hand harmony in the bass below in the left hand it's just a convention not a rule it ends up happening so the honest limit I found with uh reading and playing is you're you're just detecting patterns and you have to just play the page accurately, but you don't necessarily know things like harmonic modulation. You don't know what those accidentals mean, what tension and resolution is basically about, and you're just playing because you're a damn good reader, which you will become over the years of reading. So it's generally pattern recognition improving your motor skills and your ears tend to sit the whole thing out. So that's my concern with just only site reading in the world of reading. There are so many other ways of looking at reading. Right? So the challenges of site reading are generally obviously the notes, the rhythm and of course the signatures. You have to always know uh what key signature you're in and what time signature you're in. So moving on to the other kind of uh reading we call it a rhythm reading. So you read the thing and then you have to clap it or count it or say it or speak it. So it's a system where whatever is printed in front of you you don't care much about pitch. So reading rhythms is what the note duration is. Is it four counts, three counts, two counts? Then what? 1 and 1/2 counts, one count, 75 counts,.5.25 and then what about the triplet world where it can become 66 of a beat or 33 of a beat and so on and so forth. You have all these things to read and to deal with in the rhythmic department. So when we look at a rhythm, first of all, the job is not to play it because there's nothing specific to play. Instead, we need to vocalize it. We need to clap it. We need to tap it, drum it even, and then get inspired by that rhythm. The advantage of then reading rhythms is it sticks with you pretty much for life. For example, tuck. [snorts] So if you read this rhythm once called the song clav, you kind of that's it. You you feel it now. It's in your body. While if rhythm is combined with pitch, it might be a bit confusing. So you won't cut to the chase and actually remember that one rhythmic entity or that one cell. Okay. So moving on to probably an aspect of reading music that you might not know if you've done the traditional site reading courses or you know grade exams and things like that. It's basically the ability to read chord charts. To read a chord chart is not only to just read, hey, it is a C major 7th chord or it is an E7 sharp five chord or it is a G minor 7 flat 5 chord or you have a chord with a certain symbol, a jazz symbol like a five or a degree. You know, we have done a lot of lessons on chord chart reading. Do check it out in our channel. We'll put a few links in the description. But the point is, are you just reading it and [clears throat] that's it? What's the point of knowing that it's a C minor 7 flat 5? Number one, the symbol itself should inspire you. You should interpret something from that symbol. A C minor 7 flat 5 could mean it's a 251 progression where that is the two. It could mean improvise over maybe a Lorian mode. which works really well over that chord. Or if it's a minor major 7th, could improvise over the melodic minor scale. Or if you're doing [music] a C7 flat 5, [music] you can do a Lydian dominant or a mode. So just reading a chord symbol is actually like reading the scale because you've interpreted that you can play that scale over that chord or you could have a system where you can decide the scale on your own [music] like over a major 7th. You could play a Lydian scale or regular pentatonic [music] major or so many other things, right? The harmonic major perhaps, [music] things like that. So to read chord charts, it'll really improve your knowledge of intervals. You'll have to know major 3rd, minor 3rd, sharp 5, flat 9. So just looking at C major means a lot. Looking at G7th means a lot. And it's also been a great tool in the recording studio. That's probably where the chord charts started. It's also a great asset if you're doing musical theater or if you're playing jazz standards or if you're just improvising. You have the original melody kind of stuck into your subconscious and you improvise around that melody with due respect to it, of course, but that's the whole point of jazz improvisation, right? You've had so many versions of Summertime or Autumn Leaves or Fly Me to the Moon. So that's the point of improvising to so the audience knows that song, they're familiar with it, but then you go away from it melodically and harmonically, but you retain the chord charts. The charts are the same for everyone. So it's a very important skill to read chord charts. A lot of the reasons why people don't bother reading it is it's not covered in any of the courses and it doesn't feel like a topic to practice reading with because the teacher or the system has to get into composition, improvisation and interpretation. Okay. So, moving on to I guess what used to be my most favorite form of using notation but now it's been taken over by another one which I'm going to tell you at the very end. This is called as transcription. So transcription is basically reverse engineering the process. The song plays in front of you or the melody is hurled at you or whatever the drum groove is played at you. And what do you have to do? You have to interpret it. You have to know what's going on. You have to know which are the on beats, the subbeats. Uh is it a dotted note? Is it a triplet feel? Is the whole grid triplet from a rhythm system? Is it a poly rhythm if it's advanced? And then you have to notate that. Or if the singer is just humming a melody. So let's take somewhere over the rainbow. What's happening there? There are huge melodic leaps and there are melodic kind of stepwise motions as well. So there steps and leaps. somewhere a leap of an octave over sa that's 1875 that's basically a ladder or a stepwise climb. So you have to first of all know what's going on melodically. You have to know the shape of the notes. Then you have to know what intervals they are. And then of course you need to know the notes themselves. Then you have to know the rules of notation and then you write it and then you read what you wrote so to speak. So that's if you want to or you can just end there because even if you get it onto paper, transcription has done its job. It's taught you so much that you will never learn in a classroom or a course structure or a YouTube video. It's very tough to teach transcription also in YouTube because how would us as teachers play that song? If I have to teach you to transcribe Beatles, how do you do it? I I my the channel will get demonetized or we'll most likely we'll get a copyright strike, not just demonetized. So, it's very important to keep this as part of your study routine and Nathaniel School has a dedicated classroom to transcription called music factory. You'll find it on the learning portal. Do reach out to our course advisor if you are interested in transcription as well as the last method which I'm going to talk to you. It's not that Nathaniel doesn't do site reading. We do that as well in other classrooms. And all of these classrooms are live. If you can come into the class, play, listen, brainstorm with people like me and get better at the song one step at a uh at a time or rather get better at the process of transcription and other things one step at a time. So your transcript you're transcribing everything and a start of transcription would just be hey what am I listening to in this song? sort of like you're even reverse engineering the DAW or the recording software. How many tracks is there? Is it eight tracks or 24 tracks and so on. And at this point I also want to mention that the staff notation is not the only way of you know vocalizing music or notating music or just calling out music. If you take the western soulf systems dor mifa solati that's been around for I think far longer than site reading or notation and the the the karnatic suare saramai I think has been there before sort of known civilization before I think it's it's about 5,000 years old or something correct me if I'm wrong in the comments please those of you who are historians and think about guitar players. Guitar players can rely on fret numbers. You can say seventh fret on the D string. And that's a form of notation which we have to follow. Like I said, you have drum notation which is not pitchwise but it's showing you hit the kick there, hit the snare there, you know. And each form of notation has its ornaments which are unique to that instrument. You might find another form of notation for horn instruments to show you maybe the slide position or to show you the buttons that you're pressing in the case of a sach or a trumpet. Right? And I'm pretty sure I'm not sure of other uh cultures but every part of the world I'm sure will have their own form of sulfage or saras or whatever it might be. So we have to [clears throat] kind of respect every culture. Whenever you visit a part of the world, do consider, you know, going for some of the local concerts, not just popular artists, and you'll definitely learn a lot about their culture. The last point I wanted to mention is arguably, in my opinion, at least my current favorite, and it'll probably be my favorite for a few more years, I'm sure. It's called sight singing. Sid singing is where you have to read the notation and sing what you read. Now, you might say, "I'm not a trained singer, blah, blah, blah." But who cares? What matters is you're training your mind, your ears, your compositional ability, your interval recognition, and so many other things. And I think the only way to train your ear is to sing. How else? Yes, you can hear and detect and make tactical guesses. But if you want to be a street smart player, play with a bunch of artists in a rather, you know, real world environment like a recording session or a rehearsal. It's very good to have a good set of ears to quickly have that instinct to say, "Yeah, it's a second. It's not just a second, it's a minor second or a major second." So, a great way to train your siding ability is to practice intervals. If you take a root like a, you can do things like major 3rd, perfect fourth, perfect fifth, u minor 6, major 6, minor 7th, major 7th, octave, minor 2, major 2. We've done lots of these singing videos on our channel. We'll check out a couple of them. But what's really cool with sight singing at least at Nathaniel now is we have our own app which we've built to teach students this specific chapter also to teach myself because even I like to learn it. is basically going to give you ancient exercises for sight singing from the melodia series as well as a lot of my own exercises that are more structured that cater to more rhythmic concepts than the classical one. So we've kind of combined both. It's a very good repository and you'll also get patterns for sight singing standard patterns like la things like that. And what's also nice about the sight singing app is you have a jazz lab. In the jazz lab, you're going to basically sight sing chord charts. So you you're kind of combining chords with singing and ear training. And the [clears throat] technology is built with the focus of testing whether you're singing well on pitch as well as on time. So what it'll give you a score. It'll tell you your 80 marks or uh 65 marks or whatever it might be. And that's the basic goal and you can keep improving from there. And do consider uh being part of our YouTube channel and our general Nathaniel ecosystem. join our subscriber list or our mailing list. All you have to do to be part of our mailing list is just be a Patreon member. You'll be added in by default. uh or consider a module or a workshop at the school or just reach out to us and [clears throat] uh ask us uh you we are available on WhatsApp and the best way to learn the technology that we offer is to actually do it in the classrooms cuz what we are finding is the teacher's job is kind of to inspire and to educate and to give concepts in the class that you the student can practice kind of on your own after the us. So to avoid getting distracted or bored [clears throat] and to have a lot of fun and to kind of be your own teacher, it's a great age now with the technology that is out there to, you know, explore that world or that avenue to practice on all 12 keys. So in one YouTube video, I can't really teach you the same concept on all 12, right? But that's where our apps come into play and things like that. So, so do stay tuned to our channel for more updates. You can get these updates by all you have to do is hit the subscribe button, turn on the bell for notifications, but the like, share will also help our channel go a long way and do leave us a comment. Do let us know your thoughts. Do give us your suggestions of things you'd like to learn in the future. And that's about it. This is Jason Zach from Nathaniel School of Music. Cheers.