Reading Between the Lines: Teaching Music Without Mnemonics

I can still remember the first time I heard “Every Good Boy Deserves Football.” I was young, sitting at my teacher's upright piano, trying to make sense of what felt like a jumble of black dots and sticks. That mnemonic stuck in my head—because it was supposed to help me remember the lines of the treble staff, and for a little while, it did.

Fast forward to years later, as a teacher, and I found myself questioning whether that kind of memory trick really helped me or held me back. If you’re a music teacher, you’ve likely used mnemonics at some point. They’re part of the tradition, and let’s be honest, students enjoy coming up with silly versions. But here’s the thing: when we rely on mnemonics to teach music reading, we might be planting seeds of confusion instead of clarity.

Why Mnemonics Fall Short

Let’s think about what we’re really doing when we teach a student to say “FACE in the spaces.” We’re giving them a tool to memorise a letter name—not to understand the music.

There’s a long process before they can even apply that mnemonic: identify the clef, count the lines or spaces, recall the mnemonic, find the letter, then find that note on the piano. It’s slow, and it’s not musical. It’s more like decoding than reading. Worse still, it teaches students to think about notes in isolation. But music isn’t about isolated notes—it’s about patterns, phrases, shapes, and sounds. Mnemonics work against this kind of holistic thinking.

What We Now Know About Learning

Over the years, cognitive science has taught us a lot about how we learn complex skills. One model that's especially helpful is the three stages of learning described by Fitts and Posner (Human Performance, 1967):

1. Cognitive – where you think through each step

2. Associative – where you start refining the process

3. Autonomous – where things happen automatically

The problem with mnemonics is that they keep students stuck in the first two stages. They may learn the phrase by heart, but translating that into musical fluency is a long and clunky detour.

So What Should We Use Instead?

Two strategies have helped me—and many others—move students toward real fluency in reading:

Landmark Notes: Teach a handful of key notes on the staff (like middle C, treble G, and bass F), and build outwards. These anchor points give students spatial awareness and confidence.

Pattern Recognition: Music is filled with patterns—steps, skips, repeated notes, intervals. Helping students see and respond to those patterns means they’re reading musically, not mechanically.

It’s a shift in mindset, but one that aligns far more closely with how musicians actually think.

It’s Not About Throwing Out Everything

Of course, we don’t need to be dogmatic. If a student comes up with their own silly mnemonic to help remember something in the early stages, there’s no harm in that. But as teachers, we need to be careful not to lean on them as our primary method of instruction. They’re a crutch, not a bridge. Instead, we can teach students to see, hear, and feel the music from the very beginning.

Letting go of mnemonics might feel uncomfortable at first—especially if you were taught that way yourself. But when I look at my students now, reading with more fluency and confidence, I don’t miss those old memory tricks. It’s like learning to drive a car: you might start by consciously thinking about every little movement, but eventually it becomes second nature. That’s what we want for our students when they read music.