What these guides cover
Each guide answers one question completely, with steps, tables and honest trade-offs. You do not need any particular app to use them: the advice on reading notation, counting rhythm and practising works with a pencil, a metronome and a printed page.
- Reading music — start with how to read sheet music, then move on to counting rhythms, the skill most self-taught players skip.
- Hearing a score — playing sheet music from a PDF compares the ways to turn notation into sound, and using a sheet music reader on your phone covers the mobile side.
- Scanning and file formats — how to scan sheet music for accurate recognition, and what MusicXML is and why it matters.
- Practising — a step-by-step method to practise a difficult passage using slow tempos, loops and careful listening.
Where Musaica fits
Musaica is a free online sheet music reader. You upload a PDF or a photo of printed sheet music, it recognises the notation, and you can play the score back in your browser with a moving cursor, tempo control, looping, a metronome, a rhythm counter and a microphone intonation check. The guides mention it where it genuinely saves time — for example, hearing a rhythm you are not sure about — and point to other tools where they are a better fit.
New to all of this? Read the guides in order: notation first, then rhythm, then practice. Each one stands on its own, so you can also jump straight to the question you have today.