Is my wizard too bardy?

I’m pretty new to dnd. I read the flavour text about a variety of wizard spell book options and wondered if sheet music should fit as a wizards method of writing down and copying spells. I was planning on taking the musician background, and I was wondering if this stepped too hard on the toes of the bard class. Im not super into how the bard plays, and like the mechanics of a wizard better. I wanted to ask some other players how they would go about roleplaying this, or if I should just be a bard and add some wizard flavouring in there. Thoughts?

That would be a bard that uses the mechanics of a wizards. If the table is cool with it, then I suppose it would work.

First thing is, if there’s no bard in the party, it wouldn’t really matter. And even if they are, not all bards do music.

But even if there is, it seems like just flavor for how you cast your spells. It’s not really stepping on the bard. Other people are allowed to play music. Heck, if there is a bard, sounds like a good chance to work on a background together. You could be in a band. Or maybe you washed out of bard school, where you met the party bard, but the music part stuck and helped you with your wizardry.

The singing, dancing wizard is a classic. I am playing a wizard right now that does that. My variation is 80s Jazzercise to cast spells. Get your dance party on. 

That sounds like a great spin on a wizard! Too many wizards are built as the generic smart dude who just casts spells and nothing else. Every character has a class (and a subclass), but that's not all they are. Everybody has hobbies. Most people wanted to be something else when they grew up other than where they ended up. I say lean into it.

So maybe when he was young, he wanted to be a musician. not necessarily a bard character, but he just really loved music and wanted to spend his life making music. But maybe his parents kept telling him that musicians so rarely earn a decent living. So they pushed him to study something "more sensible", in this case magic. So he went to the prestigious Magical Academy and got a good magical education, but maybe he minored in music. So now, as a security measure to keep his spellbooks safe, he transcribes his spell formulas into his own secret code that's based on musical composition. So if someone ever steals his spellbook, they'll think it's just a book of musical notation, because only the musically-inclined wizard knows how to interpret it correctly.  And maybe during his university days, the wizard spent most of his down time at bars and nightclubs learning new songs and playing here and there just for fun. So he's seen his share of bar fights. So maybe he's got a few nice scars and he likes to show them off and tell people the stories behind where and how he got each one. 

All in all, this sounds like a fun refreshing way to play a wizard. And if you want to multiclass into bard later on, that option is always available. Just have fun!

Yeah. This is the kind of flavor that you can just do. You're not stepping on the bard's schtick in gameplay terms.

(As an aside, this is reminding me of a social media post I saw somewhere which said something like "If you want to draw wizards, google for pictures of conductors to use for reference", accompanied by several pictures of people in formalwear making very dramatic poses with a short stick.)

You will probably come across some voices on the Internet (including on this forum) who can be very… emphatic about the importance of sticking closely to the core archetypes of classes (and species).  I agree to a point: those archetypes form the framework of the fantasy of D&D. However, making and playing characters that don’t adhere to the archetypes of their class is not going to bring the whole edifice of D&D crashing to the ground. 

If you look at how character building is constructed, you can see that that flexibility is built in. Backgrounds are not locked to certain classes: if the game designers had wanted only Bards to be Entertainers, they would have made it so.
Some subclasses very clearly overlap with the core archetypes of other classes: for example, the Fey Wanderer subclass lets you build Rangers that can be played as “Bards”.

So, yes, go for it and have fun.

No. Not too bardy. Do your thing and have fun.

Now if you still feel like you need to make it feel less bard but not change anything, then make them a conductor. Conductors know music, usually can play an instrument, wave around a little wand, and read sheet music.
Boom. Music wizard.