Piano Note

A guitar is a fantastic instrument to play. It is easy to play and very difficult depending on what you play. Let’s take a look at learning to play guitar sheet music!

I have found in my teaching experiences that many pupils find reading sheet music on guitar to be very difficult.

Admittedly there are a lot of factors that make reading guitar sheet music notation more of a challenge than on other instruments in certain aspects.

However, the most important factor is in my opinion that many guitarists never decide to learn to find the notes on the guitar. Instead they cultivate the habit of listening, playing and calculating where the specific note probably is to be played on the guitar.

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In this piano lesson you will learn to play Mary Had A Little Lamb without the use of sheet music. We will be a little bit professional and use both hands!

As you probably know Mary Had A Little Lamb is a popular nursery rhyme. Here is the first verse:

Mary had a little lamb
little lamb, little lamb
Mary had a little lamb
its fleece was white as snow

In When testing his invention of the phonograph in 1877 Thomas Edison used this poem and it became the first audio recording to be successfully made and played back.

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Back in the 19th century, songs in the United States were popularized by musicians through sheet music. It was only in the 1950s when musicians started to bring sheet music to bands so they could play, allowing more people to hear their compositions.

Simply, sheet music is a musical composition in printed form. It is composed of unbound sheets of paper where a musical notation of a song is printed. Many associate it with popular music. However, musicians say popular songs are not the only ones written down on paper. Many classical songs were published in sheet music and classical musicians performed even unfamiliar songs with these printed compositions.

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Recently, I had a student ask me to offer some techniques for using the right hand. Usually, it’s the left hand that causes the most difficulty but I had to think about it because up till then, I really did not have any “techniques” for the right hand.

I thought about it and tried to think about what I do as far as improvising with the right hand goes. Basically there are really only a few things you can do. You can:

1. Play single note runs - this is where you just play one note at a time

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Reading sheet music can be very intimidating for a beginning guitarist. It is, after all, a brand new language composed of a lot of symbols that are new and alien. But Reading sheet music is a must for anyone who wants to be a serious guitarist and it will take your guitar playing well beyond anything that TAB will show you. Tablature is a crutch. It will only teach you how to play songs and compositions by rote. It is true that with Tab you will learn how to play a piece of music but in the process you are missing some of the real things that music, and being a musician are all about.

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