2: Two basic clefs

 

A staff is nice because it tells you exactly where all the notes are in relation to each other. We haven’t always had the standard 5-line staff we have now, but it’s been around for centuries. Many, many posts down the line, when this series is much more advanced, I’ll talk about the history of notation and where we came from. But for now, let’s focus on the modern system, since learning the older systems requires a good foundation in the modern ones.

We have symbols called clefs (from the French, and ultimately Latin, for “key”), and they function essentially like a compass. A compass points at north, and a clef gives you a similar reference. Different clefs do this differently—I’ll show you two of the most common ones in a minute—but they both have one job: fix the position of one note in particular so that you can deduce the positions of all the others from it. If you know the position of one note, you can find the position of any other simply by counting the appropriate number of lines and spaces up or down.

The two most common clefs are called the treble clef (or the “G clef”) and the bass clef (or the “F clef”). I tend to prefer to call them “treble” or “bass,”  but know that “G” or “F” are perfectly valid, and interchangeable, in order, with “treble” and “bass.” They got these names for two reasons. First, and most helpful to us, the treble clef does its job by fixing the position of the note G. I’ll show you a treble clef soon, and here’s how it works: whatever line the lower loop encircles is the line on which there sits a note G. For the F clef (remember, this is exactly equivalent to a “bass clef”), it does its job by fixing the note F on the line in between the two dots on the right side of the clef. Secondly, and this is interesting for historical reasons, the treble clef used to be just a really ornately styled capital G, and the bass clef used to just be a really ornately styled F. Over the centuries, the design of the clefs evolved until about 1700. Nowadays, the main difference in clefs is down to the handwriting of the person who wrote the clef and how messy or neat they were, but the design is settled.
               Here is a treble clef on a staff:








Notice that the second line—we always count from the bottom up—is encircled by the loop. Therefore, the second line is where the note G lives, and the placement of all other notes higher or lower follows from there.

And here is a bass clef:







Note as I said earlier that the dots on the right surround the fourth line. Therefore, a note F can be found on the fourth line, and the placement of all other notes higher or lower follows from there.

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