Trouble Reading Music

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It's weird; I've never had a ton of trouble reading words, but music or anytrhing involving dot codes is hard for me.

Has anyone else found that when they read music, the notes jump to different heights or flip upside down?

I play keyboards, bass, guitar and drums, and have played in bands since the mid-'70s. While I know what the names of the notes are, sheet music may as well be hieroglyphics for all I understand about it. I play entirely by ear (from memory). I can't make the relationship between dots on a page and where my fingers are supposed to go. By the time I figured out a measure's worth of chord clusters, e.g. this note is C, it's *here* on the piano, I play it with *this* finger. The next one is, um, E, which is *here* and so on, the band would be done the song and have gone out for a drink.

But if I hear a song, I can play it back to you exactly the way it goes, by feel and memory. There's also math involved, and I have an inability to process math in my head, especially while I'm doing something else at the same time. It's too much to think about. I just play it, and it comes out fine. Just don't ask me what the name of the chords I just played are. I don't think about it in terms of major/minor/suspended/diminished/augmented, and I couldn't really tell you which they were. I can show you, but not tell you.

Edited to add: I don't understand how to decipher guitar tablature, either. That seems even more complicated to me.

I always felt that the notes on the page didn't convey quite enough information to be able to play the tune, that I had to know how the tune went before being able to read the music. But I never experienced any difficulty with notes moving about, though, that doesn't sound like fun.

It is complicated, but I am slowly learning to read music for the Piano.

Do the lines seem overly-contrasted (like the white in between the lines being overly bright) or sort of like they're shimmering? There's a thing called scotopic sensitivity, that can cause some visual effects (especially noticeable with arrays of parallel lines), though it's existence is controversial.

Anyway, some people find that colored overlays help with that. The color seems to be differ with different people. You might look up "Irlen" and "scotopic sensitivity."

The majority of the legends are unable to read music. They learned by ear and never bothered with it. Van Halen, Slash, Abbott... just to name a few. Even Paul McCartney, who can play a s***load of various instruments and can master a new one within minutes of picking it up, can not read a single note on a page of sheet music. (in fact, he had to use some sort of electronic synth that recorded notes on to a computer in order to compose the scores for a movie).

I wouldn't worry.

I would never compare myself to Paul McCartney, but I feel the same about it as he does. He has said that although he doesn't read music, he doesn't want to learn how to read it because knowing the theory and mechanics behind it would take all the magic out of it.

The music I play just comes out of my fingertips. I know not from where, or why, only that it does. My only hope is that it never stops.

Same here. My first teacher (when I was 9) used to play at least the beginning of something so I could hear how it goes, but even now I have a terrible time finding tunes from a printed sheet.

I didn't know that. A really interesting bit of trivia, thanks.

I initially did learn to read music, though I was just alright with it. I eventually quit, but then it was a pain when I recently tried to learn piano out of a self-teach book.

I'm getting better with my ear but the main problem I have is deciphering a song while memorizing the notes I am hearing before trying to get it onto the fretboard of my guitar. I have to slow the tempo of the song considerably with Audacity or something.

I have experiences similar to you, leejosepho. I stymied the two different piano teachers I had when I was a kid. They would play the piece for me, to show me how it was supposed to sound. Then I would play what I heard them play. But I couldn't make heads nor tails of the sheet music.

I wasn't doing this to be devious, it's just how my brain works. One of the teachers got the idea that I might be doing this, and he set out to prove it by playing a piece for me with an intentional mistake in it. I played it back to him with the mistake intact. It was at that point that he realized that he didn't really know how to teach me to play the piano by the standard methods, and he gave up. I could play by ear pieces which were much more advanced than my lessons in the Thompson Piano Method books. He figured that if he tried to break my natural abilities it might screw me up for life, as far as playing was concerned. So he basically showed me how to operate the piano properly, and I did the rest.

When I was in my twenties, I was serious about learning to play guitar better (I had already been doing it for over a decade). I went for one evaluation lesson with one of the top guitar teachers in Toronto, who would only take you on if you were worth it. He was playing note-for-note with Eric Clapton on the "John Mayall & The Bluesbreakers" album when I walked in to meet him. (Never saw anyone do that before, or since!) He turned away from me so I couldn't see his fingers, played some figures and asked me to play them back to him. I did. He told me I didn't need lessons.

My wife, on the other hand, is a classically trained pianist. She took lessons for most of her life, then went to university and got a Bachelor's degree in Piano Performance and then a Master's degree in Piano Pedagogy (teaching). She can play so well it'd scare you to death. But only from sheet music. She has been so indoctrinated by The Method that she can't make herself improvise or make up songs. She says she can't think of what to play. If she had the paper with the dots, she could play it back impeccably. But on her own, she flounders, and is afraid to look like an amateur, since she is decidedly NOT an amateur. And that's a drag, because we can't jam together.

I have a really hard time reading music notes.

I used to have lots of trouble reading sheet music, but all you can do is practice, practice, and practice a bit more. They say it takes 1,000 hours to master a skill, it's up to you how you divvy the hours out. At least, I think that's how the saying goes

Yea, I've never learned how to read music, so I only made it to second chair at school, because my band teacher knew I was playing by ear. But I was good at it.

Also, I should mention I never practised, which may have something to do with my inability to read music. But still, second chair of four with never practising... not to shabby I suppose.

I have discovered a way to write music the way that my
brain sees it and also in a way that a computer can play it.
I think that when I finish that, almost everyone will be able
to write music, even if they have to keep erasing it to make
it better. It is even more than that, so that one person if they
think of how it should sound, if they keep trying then it will
eventually be playable and sound like a band, even your
favorite one, singing a song that you made up and never
was sung or played. I hope that my way of writing music
will help people make and play their own favorite songs
all by themselves, even if they don't know anything about
music.

I can understand notes but not fast enough to read and
play them at the same time. My previous idea was to
print them on the keyboard but that wasn't good enough.

I taught myself to read music when I was 9. It came to me pretty intuitively. I can read in all three modern clefs, piano music, choral, ensemble and symphonic scores, guitar tab, 3 different lute tabs, and Gregorian chant notation. I find it all quite logical, efficient and pleasing to read, actually. But I am very good at spatial intelligence stuff, which is different from verbal intelligence.

The problem the OP seems to be having is with spatial thinking. This sounds like a learning disorder if it is causing her this much difficulty and hindrance. She may want to get this evaluated so she can get help with learning coping skills to overcome the problem. It's likely that it isn't limited to just reading music, but anything that relies heavily on spatial thinking, like some sports, certain area of math and science, and even ordinary things from personal organization to reading maps and chart to driving a car.

I play guitar. I also have trouble reading music. Well, I actually don't know how to read music so I just look at tabs. :]