Blissfully Ignorant, what instrument do you play? I have a lot of trouble with reading music, but I found that I am able to do it well enough to just get by ever since I started playing accordion. Before that, I played the recorder, and I never could read music for that instrument. I think it's because with the recorder, one note on the page involves positioning several fingers, whereas with the accordion, one note on the page represents one finger (except on the bass side where one finger can play two or three notes at the same time).

Actually, this is sort of why I need the paper. I have printed out the sheet music for a piece I want to learn to play, but the bass part of the music has each separate note indicated, and what I need is for the treble part to be notated, and the bass part to have chords indicated with the letters that represent them. So I need to rearrange the score to meet my own needs.