7Music Street
The residents of 7 Music Street gathered outside number 7
Piano note reading for children

Every note has an address.

On 7 Music Street the grand staff is a building. The lines are floors, the spaces are hallways, and somebody lives at every note from C2 to C6.

Practice with the app Get the books Introductory video
Try it now

Children stop counting lines and start recognising neighbours.

Here is the building. Every window is a resident, and every resident is a note. Move across it and watch the two wings answer each other.

29 notes, 29 characters Storybook + workbook Free practice app
7 Music StreetTap a window
Left wing · bass
Right wing · treble
Cecil the Caretaker — Middle C. The only resident with no twin. He keeps the lamp on between the two wings.
Introductory short video

Cecil will show you around.

A short introduction to the street, hosted by the residents themselves. Under four minutes, and the quickest way to see how the whole system fits together.

3 minutes 42 seconds · best with sound on.

How it works

A map beats a mnemonic.

Most children learn the staff as a list of rules to recite. 7 Music Street gives them a place to picture instead — and places are much easier to remember than lists.

Gene GrandpaG2Gene Grandpa
Floor 1
Electric LampE4Electric Lamp

The staff is a building

Both of them live on the bottom floor — Gene in the left wing, the Lamp in the right. Lines are floors, spaces are hallways, and everyone has an address.

Celia the CatC3Celia the Cat
Hallway 2
Accordion ManA4Accordion Man

The wings mirror each other

Celia and the Accordion Man stand at the same height in opposite wings, so they are friends. Learn one and the other comes free — the bass clef is never the neglected half.

Alla the ArtistA3Alla the Artist
Floor 5
FlagF5Flag

The name gives the letter

Alla lives at A. Flag lives at F. Every resident is named for their own note, so meeting the neighbour means already knowing the note.

The method, in four steps

  1. 1
    Meet the resident A child meets a character in the storybook — Basil the Baker, Celia the Cat, Fredy the Firefighter — and learns where on the street they live.
  2. 2
    Find their door on the staff That character always appears at the same place on the grand staff. The picture and the position get stored together, the way a face and a house number do.
  3. 3
    Meet their partner across the way Every resident has a friend at the same height in the other wing. Learning one teaches the other, so the bass clef is never the neglected half.
  4. 4
    Let the picture fade With practice the character stops being needed. What remains is instant recognition of the note — which was the point all along.
Meet everyone

The residents.

Twenty-nine of them, from the mouse in the cellar to the comet in the sky.

Practice app

Ten minutes a day, and the street sticks.

The books turned into a game. It runs fully offline, keeps a profile for every child in the house, and shows exactly which floors still need work.

  • Four difficulty levels, from single characters to stemmed multi-note reading
  • Two quiz modes — name the character, or name the note
  • A profile per player, with progress saved on the device
  • Daily practice charts, so a streak is visible
  • A building report showing accuracy floor by floor
  • No account, no ads, nothing to install
Play in your browserFree · nothing to install · works on any device ▶

Apps for iPhone, iPad and Android are on the way. The browser version already works on every device — add it to your home screen and it behaves like an app.

The books

Read the street, then walk it.

The storybook introduces the residents. The workbook puts a pencil in the child's hand and asks them to go find those residents on a real staff.

Cover of 7 Music Street: Where Every Music Note Has a Home
Book one · Storybook

Where Every Music Note Has a Home

Every note comes to life as a friendly character with a home, a personality and an adventure. Readers meet the residents and discover how each one fits into the musical neighbourhood, learning to recognise notes on the staff and the keyboard along the way.

Written by a mother and daughter, inspired by a real lesson that wasn't working.

  • A story that introduces the notes through characters children remember
  • Illustrations that connect the staff to the keyboard
  • Reference pages for note recognition
  • Tips for parents and teachers
Buy on Amazon
Cover of the 7 Music Street Character Pairs Workbook
Book two · Workbook

Character Pairs Workbook

The companion workbook, where reading turns into doing. Children work across the grand staff from C2 to C6, meet the character pairs that link the bass and treble clefs, and build fluency through games and practice.

Use it alongside the storybook, or on its own as extra practice.

  • 14 character pairs and 5 special mirror pairs
  • 10 progressive staff-reading worksheets
  • Word search, maze, quiz and drawing activities
  • Piano challenges, and a certificate of completion
Buy on Amazon
Alla the Artist at the piano, sheet music open in front of her
Alla the Artist — a resident, and one of the two names on the cover.
Our story

It started at a piano bench.

A child sits down, looks at the page, and starts counting lines from the bottom. Every note. Every time. The counting works, slowly, and then the piece stops being music and starts being arithmetic. Anyone who has taught a beginner has watched this happen.

We kept asking why the staff had to be abstract. It already looks like something: five lines with gaps between them, stacked, twice over, one set above the other. It looks like a building. And once you say that out loud the rest follows — the lines are floors, the spaces are hallways, and if somebody lives at every note, then reading music becomes remembering who is home.

Children forget rules. They do not forget the neighbours.

So we built the street. Twenty-nine residents, each named for their own note. Two wings that mirror one another, so the bass clef stops being the hard one nobody practises. Cecil the Caretaker alone at Middle C, holding the whole building together.

Then children started reading it, and the questions started coming: can we practise tonight, can I be a different player than my sister, can we meet the rest of them. That is where the workbook came from, and then the app, and then the film. Every piece of it exists because a reader asked for it.

7 Music Street is a small family project. We write it, illustrate it, test it on real students, and fix what does not work. If you teach with it, we would like to hear what happened.

Leila & Alla
Authors, 7 Music Street

For teachers

Teaching with it? Tell us what happened.

7 Music Street was built in lessons, not in a studio, and it keeps changing because teachers tell us what worked and what didn't. If you have tried it with a student, a few minutes of your time makes the next edition better.

Teacher feedback survey A short form — what you taught, how it landed, what you would change. Opens in a new tab. → Ask us anything Questions about using the books in lessons, or about the teacher kit. →