The Art of Notating Piano Music

Jack Mitchell Smith
Apr 30
4 min read

One of the forgotten arts of practising your sight reading and better learning the craft of how music first together is actually the art of writing. This isn’t necessarily meaning that you need to compose an entire concerto (although nobody would prevent that!), but using your strategic thinking to either copy out an existing score or - better still - score out a slight arrangement of the score - will really help you to associate clefs with notes and note values with rhythm etc.

This blog is not here to teach you how to identify notes, what different note values are, what clefs are or anything like that. It’s just a few helpful tips and tricks that will best help you put pen to paper!

So read on and learn how to begin notating your very own piano music!

Notating Piano Music

Clefs

Typically, we associate treble clef with the right hand and bass clef with the left hand. However, this is only because of how common it is to find a right hand part playing above middle C and a left hand part playing below it. If you are notating something where both hands play above, you can very easily consider notating both hands in treble clef. Similarly, if they both play below middle C then they might both be notated for bass clef. This is where we play generally within these registers, mind! The odd few notes below middle C in the right hand, for example, would still work best using treble clef.

Beats

Don’t forget that a bar is divided into its beats! For example, beat 1, 2, 3 and 4 in 4/4 time. However, each beat can further be subdivided here because - as each beat in 4/4 is worth a crotchet - we can establish that each beat could contain 2 quavers, 4 semiquavers etc.

It’s important to remember that the right hand and the left hand sync up in this regard, so to help you get used to it it may help you to pencil in invisible lines so that you don’t over or undershoot the number of notes in one hand.

Alternatively, try and identify the smallest beats in each hand as you go along and add them in as you do so. Even if the bar is incomplete, longer notes such as minims can wait whilst we fit in quavers and semiquavers as they will much more snugly fit in.

Stems and Beaming

Writing music is a really powerful way to start to learn how stems work and how beams work.

I have written an entire blog on the subject, but general rule of thumb is that if the note head sits on the middle line, the stem can go up or down. If it’s below the middle line, stem up. Above the middle line is stem down. If the stem is up, it goes right side of the note head. If it goes down it goes left side side of the note head:

Only quavers and shorter notes (semiquavers / demisemiquavers etc.) are beamed. You beam them according to the measure that they fall in. For example, four consecutive semiquavers starting on beat one of a 4/4 bar would be beamed together as they all fit within that beat. However, if four consecutive semiquavers started halfway through that first beat (i.e. a quaver rest and four semiquavers) then we would beam them as two groups (pairs) of semiquavers as the first two would be finishing off beat 1 and the second two would be starting beat 2.

‘Justifying’ Bars

It’s not essential to be extremely neat and tidy, but it does make you feel a bit better. Therefore, if you are working through and it looks like you’re about to come to the end of your line and you’ve just finished a bar with seldom enough space to fit another bar, just consider: do you need the full width? (For example, a bar where you just play a semibreve or two minims won’t need as wide a bar as a semiquaver heavy one). If not, you might get away with it. Otherwise, it’s fine to start on the next line. However, the best approach is to consider thinking through your next few bars when you start a new line and ensuring you best spread them. This, however, is more desirable and less essential!

Shorthand

Similarly to writing words shorthand when being dictated to, it pays to learn how to do things quickly! That’s not to say, however, beyond recognition:

Whilst our first score might always feel a grand achievement, we shouldn’t always aim to produce ‘frame worthy’ sheet music! Get into a mindset whereby your clefs are recognisable for what they are and you know what they mean when you read them, but you can draw it in a second. Same for the like of rests or individual quavers / semiquavers etc. (with the tails). Obviously you need the notes and the note values to be identifiable, but the art here is getting used to what you are writing out and learning it:

Jack Mitchell Smith is a piano teacher based in Congleton, Cheshire. Click here to find out more.

Weekly blogs are posted that may help you with your musical or piano journey. Click here to sign up to the mailing list so you never miss a post!