How to self teach myself sheet music reading (for piano)?

Question

I am a self taught pianist, I play mainly by ear and I look for tutorials or synthesia on YouTube. However, sometimes some pieces do not have a synthesia and are really subtle to play by ear (ex. Fides Tua by Tigran Hamasyan). This is why I want to learn how to read sheet music and I ask for your recommendations on how to do so.

My goal isn't to become a really fast sight reader or to understand every single detail on the sheet music, neither to be able to play a piece only by reading the sheet music (and not having listened to it prior to that). Instead I want to use my music reading skills to figure out how to play a piece after I have listened to it.

Also, I wish that you could also recommend me some techniques by which I can teach myself some good amount of music theory !

Answer 1

Use pencil to write proper note literals (C, D... etc) in the score papers. Use software for sight reading, and stickers for keys. After you will mark a 1000 pages, recognize and mark with a pencil only the altered notes. When you will cope with another 1000 pages I am sure you will read any score better/faster than many conductors. Play guitar and violin scores on piano. Learn harmony/structure pattern recognition and rewrite favorite scores with a pencil and software. Train your ears to recognize sounds and their written appearance. Transpose music to different keys with software and in handwritten way. Hope it helps.

Answer 2

As like when you learned to read and write, you need a great deal of exposition to scores and sheet music to read it well after a time.

If you don't read a single note on staff, you can discover the mechanics even on wikipedia. There's plenty YouTube videos on this. It's is fairly easy and straightforward system - but can escalate rapidly to complexity on both rhythms (horizontal axis) and pitches/chords (vertical axis). A little sight-singing along reading training will do a greater good, by the way.

John Mortensen, on his channel, have lots of videos on sight-reading that may be very useful here, even it's not your wish to be an sight-reading beast. Check "cedarvillemusic",

, the second advice: "sight-reading at least 20 min. a day"

You can start with very very easy tunes with only one hand playing from children music books and improve to reach Mikrokosmos vol. 1 (Bartok) and church hymnals or choir books. In 60 days, you will be amazed by how much ability in reading you'll gain.

Answer 3

On a grand piano there are 88 notes. At first memorizing positions of notes around middle C can help. Later you can start to find relations between intervals. To memorize it you can use a software like Anki. There are lots of shared decks and some of them contain notes on score to memorize it.

Also personally I believe learning sight reading is not such a big effort. As I mentioned before, all you need is 88 positions on grand staff. So don't make it over complicated. Imagine it like learning letters when you were a kid. First they helped you to memorize them and then came the knowledge of "Why?"

Here you can find Anki.

Here are the flash cards