The four open strings, on the staff

Your four open strings are four fixed points on the staff. You never have to work them out, and every stopped note is a step or a skip from one of them.

Where they sit

String	Staff position
open G	below the staff, hanging under the second little line
open D	just below the bottom line
open A	in the second space
open E	in the top space

52 bpm

The four open strings, low to high — G, D, A, E — a fifth apart each. These are your anchors on the page.

Reading from them

54 bpm

Land on the note you know — open A, second space — and read the rest as steps away from it.

The usual mistake

Not using them. Reading a stopped note from scratch when an open string sits one step away and would have handed you the answer.

Try

Play each open string and find it on the staff — say "open A, second space" as you play it. Then pick any note near it and read it as "one step up from open A", and so on.