In this lesson, I'm going to talk about note reading in a variety of clefs.
Over here on the whiteboard, you can see we've got five parallel lines
and those just make up the musical staff.
If we want to write music, we just start putting these things called note heads on either the spaces or the lines, like this.
The thing is though, that these actually aren't going to mean anything
and they're not going to tell a musician anything
until there's a staff at the beginning, which is here, since we do read music this way.
I'm going to put this clef right here.
This clef is called a G clef (at least that's one name for it).
It's called that because if you make this curly line right here, it curves right around this G.
So this is the line on which G goes on.
Here's a G right here.
And once you have that, you can relate everything else to that G.
So, let's use the musical alphabet and put some more pitches in here.
If this is a G,the first thing I'm going to do is go backwards in the musical alphabet.
I'm going to go down.
So if this is a G, then this is an F, and E, D, like that.
And then, of course, I can also go this way.
The thing about the musical alphabet is that it's actually just A through G, and then it starts over again with A.
So, if this is already a G, then this next one here is going to be A, B, C, D, and so forth.
And here I am, all the way up to G again.
This is already going to show us a couple things.
One thing is that since these notes start over again, we actually have a couple of the same notes here,
like here's a G, and then there's a G all the way over here, like that.
And when that happens, we've just created an octave.
And you can find a few more. There's one right there, for example.
But there's also something else that's happened, which is that we've kind of run out of room,
so we've kind of reached our limits like this, but that's okay.
What we can do is add something called ledger lines.
If I'm here, I'm going to keep going now past this point, past this D.
So here's E, and D, and then I can just draw this extra line like this.
That's called a ledger line.
And we can keep going, so there's a B, and here's an A, and so on.
You don't want to put in more ledger lines than you actually need, so you wouldn't want to go like this,
because everyone would wonder why these things are there. That's not necessary.
And of course, you can go above the staff as well.
So, if we're up to a G over here, here's an A, B, et cetera.
It turns out that this note, right here, is an important note, and we call it middle C.
You can find it on the keyboard, so we'll play it here.
I put a little green dot on my keyboard.
And it's specifically this C, so if you hear that one, or this, or something else like that, that's actually not middle C.
So, it's very specific, it's in this particular octave.
The next clef we're going to look at is a type of F clef.
It's called an F clef because right in between these two dots, right here, is F.
You can also call it bass clef.
So, what we’re going to do is walk up here and find where middle C is.
This is actually an F below middle C.
So if I just go like this, I need a ledger line, just like I did before, and there’s middle C.
On the keyboard, I’m just going to do the same thing.
So here’s the F, and I just walk up G, A, B, and there’s C. There’s that same middle C.
There are a couple different ways you can make a C clef.
The lazy way that I use is just sort of like a K, like that.
But, you’ll also see it in printed music and it looks a lot fancier, kind of like a B.
It doesn’t really matter how you make it, but in either case, that intersection
of the lines or of these curves is going to be C, and it’s going to be middle C.
So right in there, there’s middle C.
Now the thing about this C clef is that it appears in different places on the staff.
Sometimes you’ll also see it up here, and that’s why I said there were two kinds.
So, if it’s here, then that means that now this is C, middle C.
It’s going to move around.
So, if it’s here, we’re going to call it alto clef, and then this one is called tenor clef.
And a lot of people know about treble and bass clef, I don’t know if you play piano,
those are the clefs that you use a lot, but these of course are also out there.
If you study orchestral scores, you’ll see them.
People who play the viola play primarily in alto clef,
and trombonists, bassoonists are going to be familiar with the tenor clef.
You do exactly the same thing, this would be a B, that’s an A,
over here, since this is C, this must be D, this must be E, like that.
And that’s it for the lesson today.