As an experienced piano teacher, the thing that irritates me most of all is when piano books have the names of the notes printed in the middle of the note. I especially hate it when beginner piano books start off this way. I have seen piano books designed for the beginner that waste half the book with the names of the notes printed inside of the note.
Here’s the reason why I hate this: having all the notes written in allows you to play a piece of music, but it doesn’t help you learn to read the music. Over the many years I have taught, I have had students that used to learn from another teacher switch over to me for all sorts of reasons. I have seen quite a number of students that have started with this ‘method’ and out of all of those students none of them could read the notes at all. So 100% of these students that I have taken over from another teacher who have used tutor books with the names of the notes written in, cannot recognize a single note, not even one. The rate of success at learning to read the musical notation is so abysmal, that I am genuinely surprised that these piano books even exist.
So why am I so adamant about piano students learning to read the musical notation?
The answer is actually quite simple – choice. If you can learn to read music then you have literally thousands of pieces of music that you can learn to play. If you are reliant on playing pieces of music that have the notes written, then your choice of what you play is very limited. If I were to hazard a guess, I would say that less than 0.1% of piano music available is printed with the notes written in.
I have to make one point really clearly and that it is perfectly acceptable and standard for piano teachers to write in the names of a few of the notes for student whilst they are learning a particularly difficult bar or section. I would say that all piano teachers have done it, including me! I have sporadically written in a few notes that are proving to be quite tricky for a student and I have always written it in pencil, so it can be erased in a week or two. What I object to is when all the notes are written in, whether printed on the page or written in later – I truly believe it does nothing to help someone learn to read music.
Even though I hate seeing the names of the notes written on or near all the notes, I do understand why people want to do this – it supposedly makes it easier to read the music later on. Ultimately it helps in the short term but hinders in the long term (because of the very limited amount of music that is available with the notes already printed on the page).
I get that it can be daunting to not only learn to play a musical instrument like the piano, but learning to read musical notation as well can make it doubly daunting. I know this well because I have witnessed hundreds of piano students being initially overwhelmed!
I must admit that it makes me somewhat annoyed when I see ads for online piano courses aimed at a beginner because they often show piano music that is very complex and advanced to demonstrate just how hard it is to learn, like this:
Instead of showing the reality of how you would start like this:
As you can clearly see, there is an absolutely massive difference between the two and I am here to tell you that if you want to learn to read music, you definitely can. I have helped so many students become less daunted about reading music and frankly, any decent piano teacher can help anyone to learn to read music. The secret to learning to read music is time and effort, with a bit of encouragement along the way.
So now you know why I hate having all names of the notes written – it is simply because I think learning to read music is attainable for anyone – no matter how young or old.
Now comes the really important question – what do you think?
After everything I have talked about, do you think learning to read music is important for you to learn to play the piano, or are you quite happy to have a limited range of music to play that already has the notes all labeled? When all is said and done, it doesn’t actually matter what I think. What matters is what is going to give you the maximum enjoyment from learning to play the piano. It is entirely your choice…