Essential symbols to help you navigate sheet music
If you don’t know what to do when you see these signs, you could get lost in the piece of sheet music. It's happened to me during gigs where I'm sight-reading so I know the pain and don't want you to suffer!
These signs and symbols of musical notation are found very often in modern sheet music.
No-one really teaches these details of musical notation. It doesn’t matter how good a reader/player you are, you can still get lost if you don’t know what these symbols mean.
Repeat signs and symbols are used for several reasons:
- They cut down the number of pages required to be printed
- They may highlight the structure of the work. For example, verse section and chorus section.
The Repeat Sign
The most common sign in music ‘maps’ is the repeat sign.
The repeat sign is made up of a double bar line, with two little dots facing the music you’ve just played. The repeat sign indicates you should go back and play the same section again, before moving on, beyond the repeat sign, to the next section of music.
The question is, how far back should you go? There’s two options:
- Go back to the repeat sign whose dots face the other direction, ie. inward like this:
or
-
If there is no repeat sign facing the other way, go right back to the beginning and play from there:
Pro tip: You can enhance visibility and therefore diminish your chances of missing repeat signs by adding little highlights in pencil:
First and Second (and third and fourth...) Time bars
These are used in conjunction with repeat signs, if the composer wants to finish the repeated section differently the second time around.
How to play 1st and 2nd time bars
The first time through, play the 1st time bar up to the repeat sign. Go back. The second time through on the repeat, skip from just before the beginning of the 1st time bar to the beginning of the 2nd time bar section then play on:
There can be 3rd, 4th and more time bars:
Da Capo (D.C.)
Da Capo means go back to the beginning of the piece.
Dal Segno (D.S.)
DS means go back to the ‘sign’.
This is probably the easiest sign to miss when you’re reading a piece of sheet music.
Pro tip: If you’re going to be sight-reading in a gig, highlight the sign during the rehearsal or talk-through of the map so you can jump straight back to it.
D.C. or D.S. al Fine
‘Al Fine’, pronounced ‘al finay’ means ‘to the end’. Al fine means go back to the beginning (in the case of Da Capo) or the sign (in the case of Dal Segno) and play either:
- to the end of the piece; or
- to the word Fine.
Coda
The Coda (Latin for ‘tail’) is a separate section at the very end of a piece of music. Finding or getting to the Coda in a piece of sheet music can be challenging, so get out the highlighter so you don't miss it!
Usually there is an indication like ‘to Coda’ or just the coda sign by itself. Then you have to jump to the Coda and play to the end of the piece.
In rehearsal, or even at live gigs where the musicians are sight-reading, they might take a few minutes before starting to talk through the sheet music, highlighting things like:
- The key signature and any key signature changes
- The intended speed (tempo) of the song
- Where the repeats, DS's ,Codas, etc are.
A comprehensive course on rhythm
This tutorial is part of a 5.5 hour course on rhythm called 'You Got Rhythm!' You can check out the course here: