Recognising pitches and a problem with notes

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I have two problems.

I don't know musical terms, please excuse my lack of knowledge in this.

The first problem is something I don't understand.
I know when music is played right, I just recognise that. But when I sing myself I have trouble recognising that I sing the right pitches. I notice when I sing a note off-key, I know because I sang two notes off-key already in my singing lessons and it sounded horrible.

But why can't I notice when I sing right? That makes no sense, I always know it with other people and instruments.

The second problem is that I want to learn playing the keyboard, but that I don't understand music sheets. I just see ink on a paper. Papers don't make sounds obviously. So how am I supposed to know how a piece written on paper sounds?

How do people learn playing the keyboard? A teacher is a too expensive.

Your voice sounds differently from inside your head than from the outside. That's completely normal. It's all a matter of practice, I think. Try recording yourself and listening to it.

I don't read sheet music myself, but I did back when I played the trombone (a long time ago), and it's really a pretty simple system once you learn it. There are five lines. down is low notes, up is high notes. There are different kinds of notes and pause symbols - they symbolize the length of the notes and pauses. Just learn the system to work out the details. There should be books and websites and all kinds of stuff. And if you own a midi keyboard and a midi program, you can use that to figure it out. I'm gonna do it myself eventually. When I feel like I have time...and a computer that works.

The same way you know how these letters on a piece of paper sounds. Reading music is like learning another language. You recognize the letters I'm writing, and you know what they mean and how to pronounce them. If you're talking about reading music, it's not necessary at first to be able to look at a piece of music and be able to hear it in your head. A lot of people (perhaps most) can't do that. You'll get an idea of the sounds relative to each other (which ones are higher, and lower) and with time and practice, you'll recognize the sounds in your head that corresponds to the written notes.

when you read music, remember that those five lines represent certain notes, and the spaces in between them are pitches in between the notes. the lines up top represent higher pitched notes, the ones at the bottom are lower notes, and depending on what the dots on the lines look like, it will tell you how long the note lasts, etc. the "cursive g" looking thing at the beginning will tell you precisely what key the song is in too, if you cant tell by the choice of notes, so its just a matter of memorizing what note each line represents and singing it or playing it on your instrument.

^ That's good advice. Nobody, including NTs, don't really "understand" sheet music at first. I'll tell you how I learned, and maybe that would help.

So my parents had a piano, and I began to pick up little melodies by ear using trial and error. Eventually I asked my parents to get lessons, and they did. So I'm in lesson for a couple of weeks, learning the musical staff by going through these little beginner books, and it pretty boring. So, one day I resolved to mess around with a little more advanced book, from when my mother had taken lessons years ago. I took the first measure, and painstakingly wrote out the note names above each. Then I painstakingly figured out where on the keyboard each note was, and then I played that measure over and over and over and over.... till I could do it in my sleep. I was pretty bored with that, so I moved on to the next measure.

This was advantageous because I was practicing music how most people will say is the correct way. Start slow, one hand at a time, then put both hands together until you have it up to the proper speed. Since sight-reading was so tedious, it forced me to practice like this. Nowadays, I'm much better at sight-reading, and I don't have as much discipline as I would like, so, ironically now I can only memorize really difficult pieces because I have to, I can't sight-read them, which is kinda funny I guess.

Anyways, though, learning to sight-read just takes time, and in many ways is just like learning to read. At first, you painstakingly sound out all the consonants and vowels to decode what word it is, but before too long, your brain can recognize an entire combination of letters and automatically know the word. With sheet music, eventually you'll stop being like, "Okay, so every good boy does fine and so that's an F#, which is here on the keyboard," and instead you'll just automatically know that this mark here means this key here, and the note names don't even enter into it. It's like, as someone told me once, your brain doesn't know the notes, but your hands do.

Sorry that's a rather rambling post, which I have a tendency to do, but hope it can help you out some.

E G B D F starting at the bottom line right? lol i forgot the names

^ Yeah, and the bass Clef is (lowest to highest) G B D F A