Watching the notes as they play is a great way to start learning a piece. Your ears and eyes work together to understand the notes, and then your fingers can learn the notes much easier.

To "sight read" music is to "play by ear" with the aid of your eyes.

Free 30-day fully functional trial version of MidiNotate Musician.

After you download it, come back to this page (find it in this web site's site map under "Special Musical Interests"), and download HappyBirthday.mid. Then see and hear for yourself.

After you have opened the MIDI song file, you can then customize the sheet music according to your playing skills and tastes.

For easiest playing, use the Prepare 'Easy Notes' Part command. It automatically creates sheet music which looks like this:

What is [__] ?

This is where MidiNotate is not sure about the chord, and so offers you a place to enter it. In this Happy Birthday song, you can quickly replace each [__] with the neighboring chord name

If you want to "fancy up" the arrangement of Happy Birthday to suit your musical tastes or more advanced playing ability, then you can change and add notes with MidiNotate Composer. The following example was quickly prepared using MidiNotate Composer.

With MidiNotate Musician, you can add annotations such as the slurs and dynamic marks shown here.

With MidiNotate Composer you can also change how the song sounds and arrange the notes exactly as you want them.