The staff and the treble clef

In chapter 7 we met the piano roll: time runs to the right, pitch goes up, and every note is a bar in its own row. It is honest to the last detail. You can see every key and every beat. The trouble is size. A piano has 88 keys, so a full piano roll has 88 rows. Make each row two millimetres high and a single tune takes up a strip eighteen centimetres tall, almost all of it empty.

Musicians spent a thousand years on the same problem without a computer: how to write pitch down so that it fits on a page and can be read at a glance. The answer is the staff (in Britain often called the stave): five lines. In this chapter you will build it again from a piano roll, and then learn to read it so that your eye sees the shape of a tune rather than separate notes.

A piano roll folded into lines

Here is an 18th-century French tune, "Ah, vous dirai-je, maman". English speakers know it as "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star", and Mozart wrote a set of variations on it. First you see it in a piano roll. Press "Listen", then slowly drag the "View" slider to the right, or press "Fold into a staff".

Watch what happens on the way. First the black-key rows shrink: the tune never goes there, and they only take up room. That leaves the white keys alone, seven rows to an octave instead of twelve, all the same height. Then every other row turns into a line, and the rows between them become spaces. The bars shrink into ovals, and each one grows a stem.

The result is a staff. Not one note has moved. C is still where the C row was, and G where the G row was. The rows have simply closed up. Try playing something while the staff is half folded: your key lights up its own row. A black key, once its row has gone, lights up the place of a white neighbour. That is exactly how it works on paper: black keys are written in the places of white ones, with a special sign. That is the subject of chapter 11.

The five lines of the staff are counted from the bottom up: the lowest is the first, the top one the fifth. The gaps between them are the spaces, and there are four. Notes are written both on the lines, with the line running through the middle of the oval, and in the spaces, with the oval squeezed between two lines.

What does the staff lose compared with the piano roll? The black keys have lost their rows, and signs will bring them back. You can no longer see how long a note is from the length of its bar. The shape tells you instead: a filled oval with a stem is a quarter, a hollow one with a stem is a half, as in chapter 7. In return, an octave now takes seven places instead of twelve rows, almost half as many, and a tune reads as a line that rises and falls.

How the staff was invented

The five lines did not arrive all at once. The earliest written melodies from medieval Europe that survive date from the 9th century. They are neumes, small marks above the words of a prayer: strokes, dots, hooks. They showed that the melody went up or down, but not by how much. They were meant for someone who already knew the melody. Neumes reminded, they did not teach.

See what that means in practice. Below is the same tune in five kinds of notation. "Read it as a stranger would" plays it the way someone would who sees the notation for the first time and knows only the first note. Each time the stranger goes wrong in a different way, and always exactly where the notation leaves a choice.

With neumes the stranger nearly always misses: the climb from C to G is drawn just as small as the step from G to A. Later, scribes began writing neumes at different heights, and then they added a line, at first simply scratched into the parchment with no ink, later drawn. One line fixes one pitch, usually F or C. Notes close to it can be read exactly. Notes further off are still guesswork.

In Italian manuscripts of the 11th century there were two lines, both coloured: red for F, yellow for C. The choice was no accident. Just below F and C lie E and B, and there is no black key between E and F, or between B and C. The coloured lines marked the places where the melody's step is shorter than usual. Then a third line was drawn between the red and the yellow, then a fourth, and the lines settled one note apart: a staff of four lines. In Guido's scheme the fourth line, a black one, ran above the yellow. In the widget it lies below the red, because our tune goes lower. Later scribes did this all the time: they put the clef letter on whichever line let the whole melody fit on the staff. In the "4 (Guido)" mode the stranger never makes a single mistake.

Five-line staves appeared in Italy in the 13th century, but for a long time they lived alongside others. As late as 1600 people still wrote on four, five and six lines. A keyboard piece by William Byrd in a manuscript of 1591 is written on six. In the end five lines won: with a couple of ledger lines, they hold the range of one part or one hand. Books of Gregorian chant are still printed on four lines, as in Guido's day.

Why does a stranger reading neumes go wrong even when he knows the first note?

Neumes show the direction, but not the distance Neumes have no first note Neumes record rhythm, not pitch

A neume says "higher" or "lower", but a step and a big climb look almost the same. To read a distance you need a line to measure it from. With every new line there is less to guess.

Lines and spaces

Now take a closer look at the places on the staff. Press keys or step with the arrows: each white key in turn is the next place, from a line to a space, from a space to a line. The caption under the staff tells you where the note lives.

Walk up from middle C and watch: each press moves the note up by half a space. This is a step, the smallest move on the staff. A step up the staff is a step to the right along the white keys.

Switch "Show" to "all lines". The five lines hold E, G, B, D and F. Between neighbouring line notes there is exactly one white key. The spaces hold F, A, C and E, which spell FACE, and that is how most English-speaking pupils remember them. The lines have a sentence of their own, "Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge". There is also a rule that needs no words: line notes and space notes take turns, like the black and white squares of a chessboard.

Check it with your hands. Set the widget back to "one note" and play E, G, B, D, F, every other white key: the note climbs all five lines. Now start on F and play F, A, C, E: it climbs through the spaces.

You saw the line attached to a note back in chapter 7. It is called the stem. Which way it points depends on the pitch. On notes below the third line, the middle one, the stem goes up on the right of the note head. On notes on the middle line and above, it goes down on the left. That way stems don't stick far out of the staff. Listen to the notes climbing the staff and see where the stems flip over.

While the notes are below the middle line, the stems point up. From B on the middle line, they point down.

B on the middle line sits exactly halfway, and the rule is softer for it. Usually its stem goes down, but among neighbours with stems up it may be turned up too, so that the picture doesn't jump about. You will meet both in printed music, and both are correct.

Test yourself: the program names a note, and you click its place on the staff. Only the staff itself for now, from E on the first line to F on the fifth.

A clef is the letter G

The staff in the picture above has a flaw. It shows what is higher and what is lower, but by itself it doesn't say which note sits on which line. That is the job of the clef. In Guido's time the clef was a letter at the start of a line: F meant this line is F, C meant this line is C. Over the centuries the letters grew curls and turned into the signs we see today. The one that appears in almost all music for the right hand grew out of the letter G.

Move the "Shape" slider from the letter to the clef. The curl of the sign wraps round the second line, where the crossbar of the letter used to be. That is the main thing the clef tells you: the second line is the G above middle C (G4). That is why it is also called the G clef, though more often the treble clef.

Now move the clef down to the first line. The notes look the same, but their names change, and the tune sounds different. Such a clef really existed: the French violin clef, with G on the first line, used in France in the 17th and 18th centuries for violin and flute music. Now choose "no clef": the staff says nothing about pitch, and only the shape is left. A clef is a setting for the staff: it tells you which key to count from.

The first reading exercise: notes from C to G. Play them on the keyboard in any octave or pick the name. Count from the G on the second line: below it are F in the first space, E on the first line and D just under the staff.

Landmarks: C, G, C, G

An experienced reader doesn't count the lines up from the bottom. They keep a few landmark notes in their head and count from the nearest one. For the treble clef four work well: middle C (C4, note 60) on a ledger line below the staff, G (G4) on the second line, the next C up (C5) in the third space, and the G above that (G5) just over the staff. C and G take turns: it is four steps up from C to G, and three from G to the next C.

Click anywhere on the staff or play a note. The widget finds the nearest landmark and shows the way from it: the grey notes are the steps your eye passes on the way.

Notice that the way is never longer than two steps. Every note from A3 to B5 is at most two steps from the nearest landmark. After a week or two of reading you will start to recognise these notes straight away, without counting, and the landmarks will stay as a safety net for moments of doubt.

Ledger lines

Middle C has already slipped off the staff: a short line was drawn under the staff just for it. Lines like this are called ledger lines. A ledger line is a small piece of staff, drawn only where a note needs it. It carries on the pattern of lines one note apart, as if the staff had grown taller for a moment.

Why not draw all the lines at once? Look at what a staff for the whole piano would be like. Move the "Key" slider or play: the note jumps about on a giant staff, and below it is the same note in the treble clef.

The whole piano would need 26 lines. The eye takes in three or four identical lines at once, without counting, and beyond that it starts counting them one by one. Five lines are already past that limit, but a reader sees the staff thousands of times, and the eye recognises it as a familiar figure without counting. So five lines plus ledger lines for the rare notes is a good bargain: there are usually only one or two ledger lines, and they hardly need counting. When too many would be needed, musicians change the clef or write "8va" over the notes: "play an octave higher".

Ledger lines are read just like the lines of the staff: one note apart. Below the staff, D hangs under the first line, C sits on the first ledger line, B3 hangs below it, and A3 is on the second ledger line. Above the staff, G sits over the fifth line, A is on the first ledger line, B is above it, and C6 is on the second ledger line.

Read the shape, not the notes

So far we have read notes one at a time, the way a child sounds out a word letter by letter. An adult reader doesn't spell words out. They see each word whole. Notes work the same way. A tune is not a list of names but a line, and there are only a few ways it can move:

• Repeat. The second note is in the same place: the same key.
• Step. From a line to the next space, or from a space to the next line: the next white key.
• Skip. From a line to the next line, or from a space to the next space: one white key is skipped.
• Leap. Anything wider: two or more keys skipped. You count it from a landmark or along the lines.

This is your first meeting with intervals, which chapter 13 covers in detail. There the step and the skip get their proper names, the second and the third. For now something else matters more: line to line, or space to space, means a skip, and a line to the space right next to it means a step. You can see that at a glance, without any names.

The exercise below shows two notes. Don't name them: just judge the distance. Try to answer quickly.

What is this for? When you read by shape, you name only the first note, and after that your fingers follow the line: a step up, a step up, a skip down. This is how sight-reading is taught: you look at the distances and recall the names of the notes only when the shape is unclear. Now the whole staff, from E on the first line to F on the fifth: try to recognise each note by where it sits next to the one before.

The first note is on the second line, the second note on the third. What do you play?

G, then B: one white key is skipped G, then A: the next key A, then C

The second line is G. From a line to the next line is a skip: the A in the space between them is left out. So the second note is B.

Reading speed

Recognising a note is half the job. Recognising it quickly is what separates sight-reading from decoding. Speed is easier to build when you can see it: your own score spurs you on, and after a few days the chart shows your progress too.

This widget is a stopwatch. It shows 12 notes in a row and times how many seconds each one takes you, until you name it correctly. A mistake doesn't stop the clock. At the end you get the median: the middle of your times, which one stray hesitation barely moves. The best run of the day goes on the chart, and the chart is kept in this browser.

Look at the bars for your run: which notes took longest? Usually they are the ones far from the landmarks, or on ledger lines. Those are worth reading a few more times. A good goal for the week is the "whole staff" range at under two seconds a note, and later under one.

Here is the same thing, only stricter: 15 notes, answers on the keys only, and if your average comes out at more than two seconds a note, the exercise doesn't count. Don't rush the first try. Accuracy first, speed later.

To read fast, read a little every day. That is what the "Reading notes" trainer is for: nine levels, from "C to G" up to reading against the clock. It remembers the notes you find harder and shows them more often. The "Placing notes" trainer works the other way round: it trains writing.

Playing from the page

Now everything together: the clef, the landmarks, steps and leaps. The tune is on the staff, with the next note highlighted. Play at your own pace. Start with "Ah, vous dirai-je, maman". A hint: the first note is middle C on its ledger line, then comes a leap up to G, and the second half comes back down by steps.

The French tune "Frère Jacques" is made of steps and skips, with a leap down at the end to G3, hanging under two ledger lines. Landmarks: C below the staff, G on the second line.

And finally the opening of Beethoven's "Ode to Joy", this time in tempo. First comes a bar of count-in, then play along with the clicks. This tune is almost all steps: read it through with your eyes first, find the repeats, and your fingers will find their own way.

What's next

You can now read a tune in the treble clef. You find notes from the G on the second line and from the landmarks, read ledger lines, see steps and leaps, and know your reading speed. The piano roll and the staff are two views of the same notes for you now, and you can turn one into the other.

But only white keys live on our staff: the black ones lost their rows back in the first widget. How do you write F sharp, why is there no black key between E and F, and why does one key have two names? That is chapter 11.

The Notebook now shows your tune as notes, on a staff with a treble clef. Write or edit the tune in the Notebook's piano roll, and the notation changes along with it. Long notes that cross a bar line are split in two and joined with a tie. In chapter 11 the notes will gain sharps and flats, and the Notebook will learn to choose the right names for them.