Music Theory 101: Notes on the Treble and Bass Clef

I know I'm a couple days late on this blog post. Tuesday I was traveling back from California from the Grammys! Anyways I want to dedicate this blog to those who are struggling and are interested in reading music. There are many layers to sight reading, such as notes, intervals, chords, and patterns of all three, but we'll start with the first one. Since we're now familiar with the grand staff, lets get into navigating through it:

What you see above is a grand staff (two staffs connected by a bar line and a brace). On the top staff you see the famous music icon called the "Treble Clef", which indicates, at least for the most part, that the the notes on its staff are for the right hand to play. On the bottom staff, you see the "Bass Clef", which will consist of notes for the left hand to play. Now very rarely, you'll see the treble clef on the bottom staff, which I'll explain later what that indicates. For now, we'll keep it simple:

~Treble Clef is for the right hand

~Bass Clef is for the left hand

The next image you will need to study is as follows:

These are the basic notes on the piano. Not all of them, but most of them. The two "C"s you see in between the staffs (the one on the left on the treble clef and the one on the right on the bass clef) are both the same "C", called "Middle C", referring to the same "C" on the piano (the "C" closest to the middle of the piano). On the treble clef, the notes are referring to the corresponding ascending keys above middle C, and the notes on the bass clef refer to the corresponding descending keys below middle C. Now, there are two ways to learn and memorize these notes. You can do the long way where you can count your way up or down to navigate, or you can do the famous method of memorizing sentences for the lines and spaces of each clef. Refer to the images below:

For example, the notes on the spaces for the treble clef spell out the word "FACE", as shown on the top left of the image above. So if you see a note on the third space from the bottom, all you have to do is count "F"... "A"... "C", and it's "C". Same thing with the lines, shown on the top right. If there is a note on the fourth line from the bottom, count "Every Good Boy Does"... it's "D". Same rules apply for the bass clef.

Once you practice finding your notes on each clef over time, you'll find yourself navigating through the notes without having to use the sentences. One good program to use for this is www.musictheory.net. Go to the "Exercises" tab and click on "Note Identification". You will then see the exercise, and on the top right you'll see a funny looking icon next to the "i" icon, where you can customize your exercises to work with whatever notes you want. It's a pretty user-friendly site, along with it's sister mobile app called "Tenuto", that you can buy in the app store and use offline.

I hope this helped get you started with learning how to read music! Be sure to check out some of my tabs above that talk more about who I am, my youtube videos/tutorials/piano covers, and the private Skype lessons I offer!