You may be blessed with a fantastic singing voice but lack the ability to read the notes that you are singing. Being able to hear and find the notes to sing is of course a neccesity in singing, but being being able to read the notes on the page can make learning a vocal part a much quicker process. Read below and learn read the notes, and you will find your ability to learn a song drastically improved!
Instructions
1. Find the vocal line in your piece of music. Most sheet music on the market today includes three staves (the plural of staff.) A staff is a set of five lines on which musical notes are placed, and read. The bottom two staves are for the piano notes. The top set of five lines is the vocal line.
2. Understand that the notes placed on the lines and spaces of the staff get higher in pitch the higher they are placed and vice versa. You do not have to have perfect pitch (the ability to know the sound of any given note,) to know that if one note in a song is placed directly above the previous note in the song, you will be singing slightly higher than the previous note. Reading music for singing, can begin with simply following the direction that the notes move along the staff. Think higher if the note moves up from the previous note, and lower if the next note moves down the staff. Take note of how much higher or lower by the distance you have moved.
3. Go deeper in your understanding of the music. Figure out which clef you are in. The staff will either be in the treble or bass clef, and will have a symbol representing the staff as such. The symbol can be found all the way to the left of the staff. The treble clef symbol looks like a tall swirl, and the bass clef like a backwards letter "C." The bass clef notes begin below middle C on a piano and are usually written for men to sing. Conversely, the treble clef notes are above middle C and written for women.
4. Read the notes as you would notes on the piano. They are one in the same. In the treble clef, middle C is placed on the imaginary line below the bottom line of your staff. From there the notes follow the alphabet going up the staff and alternating between lines and spaces up to G, and then starting over with A. A note placed on the first space above middle C is D, the next line is E, the next space F, the next line G, space A, line B, space C, line D, space E, last line F, and continuing above the staff in the same fashion.
5. Learn the notes in the bass clef. Be aware that middle C is placed in the imaginary line above the staff, so in other words, musically, it is between the treble staff and bass staff. Again the notes will follow the alphabet A-G up the staff starting with G on the bottom line, and continuing up ... space A, line B, space C, line D, space E, line F, space G, line A, space B and you are back up to middle C. The treble clef continues up. Below the bass clef staff, the notes move down, getting lower in the same fashion.
6. Memorize a few sentences and acrostics for faster reading. In the treble clef, the lines on the staff are often remembered using a sentence. the first letter of each word in the sentence represents the note name for each line. "Every Good Boy Does Fine," represents the notes as E, G, B, D and F, beginning with the E on the bottom line and moving to F on the top line. The word "FACE" is used to remember the spaces moving up the staff as F A C and E. In the bass clef use "Good Boys Do Fine Always" to remember G B D F and A as the notes on the lines and "All Cows Eat Grass" to remember A C E and G moving up the staff spaces.
7. Have a pianist play your vocal notes and begin with simply following the direction the notes of the song are moving along the vocal staff. When you get better at hearing the pitches, try to learn the note names as listed in steps 5 and 6, and get a grasp of the musicality of the whole piece of music. With practice, you will be on your way to "sight singing." (the art of being able to sing a piece of music simply by reading the notes.)
