Reading music is essential, if you want to be a good pianist. Learn the basics.

1. How To Read Music For Piano
Is it important that you learn to read piano music? Yes it is, it's essential.
It is extremely beneficial to your overall understanding of music and the
instrument that you want to learn. The whole new world of musical
possibilities can open up for you.
This document will go over the basics on how to understand piano tabs,
piano notes, and piano chords. Let's get started, then.
Reading Piano Tabs
Before we go any further, you should understand that tabs are not a
substitute for standard notation. Yes, they are and can be very helpful, but
they also have some serious limitations.
With that out of the way, let's learn piano tabs. First, what exactly are they?
Simply put, they are instructions on how to play specific songs. They are easy
to read and simple to understand. They tell you what key to hit and when to
hit it.
This is how a piano tab looks like:
4|e--dc-d-|e-e-e---|d-d-d---|e-g-g---|
This is actually a tab for Mary Had a Little Lamb. How do you make sense of
it? It's not that difficult. Tabs are always made out of ordinary ASCII
characters and numbers.
The number at the beginning indicates an octave. Mary Had a Little Lamb is
played in the fourth octave. The vertical lines “|” separate measures. Dashes
represent half steps and letters correspond to the notes. If there is any capital
letter that means it is a sharpened note. There are no sharpened notes in our
example. Also remember, there are no flats in piano tabs. Flats are always
written as sharps.
Now look at the tab above and try to play Mary Had a Little Lamb. OK, on to
how to read piano notes.
How To Read Piano Music

2. Learn To Read Piano Notes
Sheet music is written on a staff, 2 staffs actually - treble and bass staff.
The upper staff (treble clef) is played with the right hand and the lower (bass
clef) with the left. This combination is called a grand staff.
Here is how treble and bass clef look like:
Each staff is made of five lines and four spaces. Each line and space
represent different note.
In the treble clef the notes from bottom to top are E, F, G, A, B, C, D, E, F. You
can use mnemonics to remember where each note is. Letters on the lines are
E G B D F, letters on the spaces are F, A, C, E.
How To Read Piano Music

3. And here are the notes for the bass clef:
You will encounter different types of notes. The 3 most common ones are
quarter note, eight note, and sixteenth note. This is how they look like:
Learning Piano Chords
Piano chords are also very useful. What exactly are they? A chord is a
combination of three or more notes played together. All chords have roots in a
specific note, after which they are named.
If you want to learn how to read chords, you must learn what the letters,
symbols and numbers mean. Basic chords come in two forms, major and
minor.
Chords have to do with scales. Let's take a look at C major scale. It has the
following notes: C,D,E,F,G,A,B,C. All of the notes are natural, no flats or
How To Read Piano Music

4. sharps. Major chords are made of the 1st, 3rd and 5th note of the
corresponding major scale. So, to make C Major you take the first note – C,
the third note – E, and the fifth note – G. C Major is: C E G. Minor chords are
made of the 1st, lowered 3rd, and 5th note. The bottom line, if you know the
scale, you can learn any chord.
Major Chords
Here is a list of basic major chords and the notes they are made of. Major
chords are written as the uppercase letter of the root note. C major, for
example, is simply written as C. The symbol # indicates a sharp note, while
the letter b indicates a flat note.
C-CEG
D - D F# A
E - E G# B
F-FAC
G-GBD
A - A C# E
Minor Chords
Minor chords are basically just majors with a flat. All you have to do to get
from major to minor is move the middle note down one half step.
Cm - C Eb G
Dm - D F A
Em - E G B
Fm - F,Ab,C
Gm - G,Bb,D
Am - A, C, E
How To Read Piano Music

5. Okay, these are the basics. There is, of course, a lot more to be learned, but
this is a good start. When you're ready for more, visit Learn And Master
Piano.
How To Read Piano Music