Music Notation Basics Part I - Notes and the Musical Staff
(26 Jun 04)
Putting the Notes on the Staff
Each line and each space between two lines on the staff represents the location of a natural note.
We already learned where middle C is—it is one leger line below the staff for the treble clef, and one leger line above the staff for the bass clef. Remember, these two leger lines were at one time the very same line—the middle or center line on the grand staff, before we split the grand staff into two staves.
On the treble clef, I've shown all the natural notes beginning from the bottom with middle C, and moving up the staff with D, E, F, G, A, B and finally C again. I've shown the notes as open circles. The little circles are note heads, but I'll cover how notes are written in Part II. Right now I want to concentrate only on the placement of notes on the staff.
Naming the notes from left to right, notice that the first note after middle C is D, and that D is written on a 'space', in the case the space between the leger line we used for middle C (imagine the leger line is extended to the right), and the first, bottom line of the staff. D is of course followed by the note E, on the bottom line of the staff.
I stopped writing in notes when we reached C again—the note that is in the second space from the top of the staff. I could have continued with D, E and F, at which point we would have run out of staff.
Doing the same thing for the bass clef, beginning with middle C and moving downward with C, B, A, G, F, E, D and C—looks like this:
We can now use the accidentals mentioned earlier to do the same thing here that we did with the letter names of the notes; that is, we can expand the actual set of notes from just seven to 12 by altering the natural notes with accidentals.
When we altered the natural note names using accidentals, we placed the accidental after the note name. In music notation on the staff, the accidental is in front of the note. Here is a chromatic scale on the treble clef:
From left to right, the notes are: A – A# - B – C – C# - D – D# - E – F – F# - G – G# - A
I mentioned earlier when I talked about leger lines that I'd return to the topic and refine my comments. It's already past that time. You may have noticed the leger line that I used for that last A note above the staff shown above.
Earlier I said that we write the notes above middle C on the treble clef, and use a leger line below the staff to write middle C itself. I said that we write notes lower than middle C on the bass clef, using a single leger line above the staff if we need middle C.
The fact is, we use leger lines wherever we need them to extend the staff we are using. We can extend the staff upward or downward as far as we please using as many stacked legers as needed.
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