: Can't read but can play good It's been long ~ 10-15 years since i started playing/fiddling around over piano. Although it's been just 5 years that i am into staff notations reading thing. I have completed 2 grades with Trinity.

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It really sounds like you need to take the time and work on your sight reading. In many ways learning to read notes is the same as learning to read letters.

When young children come to elementary school the teacher may hold up a sign that shows the letter 'A' together they may say the sounds of the letter A. They may practice writing the letter 'A' together and eventually these things are so ingrained in a person that you hardly spare a thought to the letter 'A' when you read or write.

In a similar manner you have to get your theory teacher to count notes with you. Ask her to get some rudimentary piano music and then just start counting.

Remember to practice both Treble and Bass Clef (They are equally important. You start on the Treble Clef Second line from bottom. That is a G. When you go up on the staff you count forwards in our musical alphabet and when you go down on the staff you count backwards.

The Bass clef you start on the second line from top and that is an F. If you have trouble counting the alphabet backwards do yourself a favour and write the musical alphabet out A-B-C-D-E-F-G. This will aid in counting letters backwards.

You simply just have to do this a lot but eventually it will bear fruits and you will be able to just look at notes and know there names.

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Improve Your Sight-Reading by Paul Harris is a very nice series.

You first need to do some flash card practice to learn to identify individual notes more efficiently and comfortably.

You can buy a pack of flash cards quite cheaply at a music shop. Sort your cards. In the beginning you will have a very small set of cards that you will be practicing with. Middle C will definitely be in this collection!

Once you are comfortable with this skeleton structure, you can start adding some others.

The flash card thing might take you a month to get good at.

Then you'll be ready to start sight-reading actual pieces at the keyboard. It is essential that you choose extremely easy, short pieces (one or two lines), and that you pick a very slow tempo that you can abide by.

Sticking to a tempo is easier if you allow yourself a couple of minutes to preview the short piece by looking at it but not putting any fingers to the keyboard.

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Sightreading Mozart and Beethoven is more or less a matter of vertical pattern recognition, and you already have the patterns in your hands, just no connection to the visuals. That makes it frustrating.

There are two approaches: start with simple patterns and stuff that is more spread out horizontally. Scott Joplin might be reasonably nice to work with here.

The other extreme is just working on stuff that isn't composed vertically. Work yourself up from the Bach two-part inventions and three-part symphonies to the Well-tempered Clavier. Stuff like the Fugue #1 in C major is not something you play by ear and by harmony. So it's not as much an exercise in recognizing chord patterns as in overlaying several melody lines.

I think that this will also help to moderate the perceived difference between your sightreading skills and your play-by-ear skills. Of course, it is not much of a preparation for chord reading, but at least it works on your ability to see more than one note/voice at a time and it breaks up your hands' ways of thinking mostly in chord patterns.