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The Staff and Clefs

Sheet music looks complicated until you notice it is a graph. Time runs left to right, pitch runs bottom to top, and a sign at the front tells you how to read the vertical axis. That is nearly the whole system.

  • 5 lines
  • 1 reference point
  • 2 axes

Where you run into this

  • Every instrument
  • Classical
  • Choir
  • Teaching
Play the notes on the staffTreble clef
or press a note on the staff

In short

Put a staff next to a graph from a maths class and you see the same two axes. Horizontal is time: what is on the left sounds first. Vertical is pitch: higher on the staff is higher in sound. A note is a point in that plane. Both axes have a catch, though, and that is where most confusion lives: the horizontal axis is not to scale, and the vertical one counts letter names rather than equal distances.

The feeling

The clef is what makes five lines mean anything. On its own a staff is five lines. The clef names one line, and every other position follows automatically, because the staff simply counts on through the letters: line, space, line, space is A, B, C, D.

How it works

Two clefs cover most music. The treble clef curls around the line it names as G, the bass clef puts its two dots around the line it names as F, and together they form the grand staff with middle C sitting on its own short line between them. The C clefs, alto and tenor, still exist for viola and for the upper register of cello and bassoon, and they work on exactly the same principle.

Where you run into this

  • Sheet music for any instrument, where the clef is the first thing printed
  • A piano score, where two clefs describe two hands
  • Ledger lines, which are simply the staff continuing beyond its five lines

Our own examples

Every note of the scale playable here with its position named, so reading and hearing happen together rather than on separate pages. On history we are careful: staff notation developed gradually from ninth-century neumes and the single-line-plus-clef idea, and attributing it to one person in one year is tidier than the record supports.

Keep going

Everything in reading music

Open reading music
The page
In practice