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Is there a one source, website, free or paid, book, that can be used as a reference because it has the complete teachings on how to read music.

What do you mean by "the complete teachings on how to read music"?

Any piano method book or series should be satisfactory for one to learn how to read music. At the basic level, what more is there other than determining the note to be played by its position on the staff (or leger line) and the time value of the note?

Regards,

I recommend this:

https://www.amazon.com/John-Thompsons-Easiest-Piano-Course/dp/1423468228

Re: "complete teachings on how to read music"

I'm not sure I understand what you are looking for (that's like asking "what is a source for the complete teachings on how to read English" ;-) However, any piano method book (e.g., Alfred or Faber) should give you the foundations to read music.

If you are looking for something else, then you probably need to give more detail-- a particular style of music, just the basics of the grand staff, chord charts?

This is a situation where a bricks-and-mortar store might be useful:

Go into Long & McQuade, or Tom Lee, and ask for a recommendation from a piano-playing salesperson. They can ask face-to-face questions, more effectively than we can.

You'll be able to look at the book, to see if it's what you want, before buying it. Even better than "free return".<g>

There are a million websites, apps, Youtube videos and books that teach you what keyboard notes correspond to what lines and spaces on the staves, how to decode the time signatures, note durations, articulation instructions and so on. That’s not hard to find.

But that’s not reading any more than knowing the alphabet is reading language. The tricky bit is wrangling that up into real time reading at the same speed as the music. And that is something you only really learn by doing. The only “method” if you can call it that is “practice lots, start simple and if you can’t do it go even simpler”.

So the books and courses that are aimed specifically at developing sight reading are not focused on a “method” that is anything more than giving you selected and graded examples to suit your current level. Which you could do yourself.

Try this book:

Music Theory 101: From Keys and Scales to Rhythm and Melody, an Essential Primer on the Basics of Music Theory
Book by Brian Boone and Marc Schonbrun

Like others said I'm not sure what exactly you're looking for but I have a feeling this is what you're looking for. It might not cover every single thing but it does cover a lot of basics like clefs, rhythms, intervals, all those lines like slurs ties etc, and even those italian terms you'll see in sheets. I bought this and been reading it and I find it pretty useful book to start with in learning how to read music but it covers a lot more.

Also try Music Theory for Dummies. Pretty good and simple explanations here too never mind the insulting title.

Reading music isn’t difficult. You can learn the basics in a pretty short time. There are many books and websites to learn the mechanics.

However, becoming FLUENT at reading music takes time and effort.

Don’t confuse being able to figure out what the notes and timings are with being able to do it quickly without really thinking about it. Remember when you learned to read? You probably read very slowly at first, figuring out how the letters went together to form words. After a while, you could recognize simple words at a glance, without examining the individual letters, and maybe even recognize the intended word when it was spelled incorrectly.

So it is with reading music. Acquiring fluency takes time, practice, and effort. You need to spend time doing it, and you need to progress from simple stuff to more advanced stuff along an incremental curve, not trying to make big jumps. If you were learning to read, you wouldn’t have a primer today and a college textbook next week. But many adults try to progress that way when learning to read music.

Take the time to learn and practice the skills and build on them until the reading becomes second nature. Sometimes people start with one method and then switch to another because they are unsatisfied with their progress, but the problem isn’t the teaching method, it’s that they need to put in the time and effort to allow their brain to truly and completely absorb a new skill.

Hi, yes, there is. I have written an interactive course for beginners that will teach you how to read and write music from ZERO and up to the level expected by Grade 1 of the ABRSM and Trinity syllabus. The course is designed as an alternative to private tuition, but it will work equally well as an addition to piano lessons.

You can try it for free here:

http://www.edjet.com/course/67528e36

Log in and search for The Essentials of Music Theory

You look at the piece, you see symbols you don't understand. That's what I mean. I just learned what p, mf, and mp yesterday. But two days ago, I didn't know. Today, if you ask me the meaning of the giant > on top or bottom of a note, I don't know what that means. It would be nice to go to a book, like a dictionary of music symbols, signs, notes, abbreviation, to quickly check it's meaning, definition, explanation, examples.

Why don't you get a beginner's course like the one I linked, which will teach you all the basics (including all the stuff you've mentioned) plus a whole lot more, little by little, while getting you to put that into practice on the piano?

After all, unless you want to know what > or # or bb means as an academic exercise, there's no point in learning a whole lot of stuff that you can't or don't know how to use.

BTW, if all you want is a 'dictionary of musical terms & symbols' there's wiki - for free:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glossary_of_music_terminology
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_musical_symbols

......which is very far from exhaustive, but even so, some of that - and most of the terminology - is pointless to memorize or learn, because you'll hardly ever encounter them, even in super-duper advanced music.

That's why it's always better to learn simple stuff that you'll need as you encounter them in music, the stuff you're likely to see in beginner's pieces.

Most adult method books will introduce and teach a lot of the musical markings and their meanings. It just takes a lot of practice and time (like everything with piano) and you’ll keep learning a couple here and there and eventually you’ll naturally have a wide knowledge of note recognition, accent marks, etc.

If you want a paper book that is kind of a reference that you can look up when you come across a new term or symbol, then a beginner theory book will have this.

These books are deliberately limited to simple “what things are called” definitions without going into more complex “how things work” stuff like functional harmony. So it won’t be full of ideas you may never use.

My go-to is Eric Taylor’s AB Guide to Music Theory. I picked it up for $10 on our Craigslist equivalent that we have here in Aus.

This book is exactly what you ask for!