Theory:Lesson 2,Reading from staff pt.1

Welcome to the basics of music theory lesson 2.

So,now that we looked at how to recognize the notes on the piano it's crucial for every musician to be able to recognize them on the staff. The philosophy behind this is very simple, but to master reading the notes quickly (and you should learn to do that as i wrote in my Music learning tips )
can take some effort and time. It's a very basic aspect but no one should skip this knowledge ,especially not the theory guys of music (Arrangers,composers etc.).

Ok,so what is the musical staff? Take a look at this image:








These are two staffs of a piano.Each staff has five horizontal lines.You can see now that there are 4 elements in the staff beside the staff lines. So what are those things? The first element to the left is the Clef. You can see two clefs here the bass clef (or the F-clef) and the treble clef (or the G-clef).The clefs are symbols that are always exist in the beginning of each staff and they determine the pitch range of the notes of each staff.So how they do it? The way is pretty simple but first let's look at the piano keys because it's one of the instruments out there that has the largest range of notes (that's another advantage,by the way, of the piano for composers and arrangers):



As you can see in the image here the notes are repeated many times on the piano keys.Actually there are 7 octaves and a half as you can see by the numbers i wrote above (i talked about octaves in the First Theory Lesson). So what the clef does is that it shows you in which range the notes located on the staff are.The middle octave as you can see has the number 3 ,so the C in that octave will be named C3 to be clear. To the left they are descending and ascending to the right.The notes on the staff can be located on the lines or on the spaces. So if the C note is on a line then the D note will be on a space, the E note on line again and so on. So the G-clef shows you where the G3 is located.It's the point in the middle of the clef where it's starting point is :

So you can see that it's on the second line from the bottom and that will be the G3 in the G-clef. The F-clef is showing the F2 note and it's the second line from the top on a F-clef staff. There are also two more clefs available to use but they aren't used as often as the other two. These are the Alto and the Baritone clefs:


Both of them are showing the C3 note,so their ranges are located between the ranges of the other two clefs.

Because of the "popularity" of the G and F-clefs I will concentrate on them.

The material about reading from staffs is pretty huge so I will continue this aspect in the Reading From Staff Lesson pt.2.Until then,best wishes from me.