Many pianists can read the notes on the staff well enough, but still feel slow and unsure. Very often the reason is not the notes themselves. It is the sharps and flats.
Every note becomes a small puzzle
In standard notation, a note on the line for F is not always F. To know what to play, you have to check several things:
- Is F in the key signature at the start of the line?
- Was there an accidental on F earlier in this bar?
- Is there a natural sign that cancels it?
- Was the note tied over from the previous bar, keeping its accidental?
Each check takes only a moment, but there are many notes on a page, and with two hands there are two staves to watch at once. Those small moments add up, and they are where most wrong notes come from: a forgotten sharp in the key signature, or an accidental that was still active.
The one thing you always know
There is one thing a pianist always knows for certain: whether a key is black or white. You can even feel it under your fingers without looking. Standard notation hides that information in signs placed before the note or at the start of the line. iCanPiano Style puts it in the note itself.
- F sharp: right half black. Play the black key to the right of F.
- B flat: left half black. Play the black key to the left of B.
- B natural: no natural sign. A note that is all black or all white is played on a white key.
Same music, nothing to decode
Everything else stays as you know it: the same key, the same notes in the same places, the same rhythms. Only the noteheads change. The key signature is still at the start of the piece, so you know the key, but you never need it to work out a note, because every black key is already marked.
This is why the improvement comes so fast. You are not learning to read again. You are simply skipping the puzzle.