Sound
Reading Music: The Staff
Musical notation is the written system that records which note to play and how long it lasts, and the five-line staff is the form almost all printed music takes.
Beginner · 6 sections
Why Notation Exists
Play the first clip, then the other two. Each of the other two changes exactly one thing about the first — one changes which sounds you hear, the other changes how long they last. Decide which is which before you read on.
| System | What it records | Who uses it |
|---|---|---|
| Western staff notation | Exact pitch and exact duration for every note, plus loudness and phrasing in words and marks | Classical, choral, film and orchestral players, and most printed sheet music of any kind |
| Tablature | Which string and which fret to press, and roughly when — the physical action rather than the pitch | Guitar, bass, banjo and lute players |
| Chord charts and lead sheets | Chord symbols laid over a grid of bars, sometimes with the tune written above them | Jazz, pop, worship and session musicians |
| Piano roll | Pitch as vertical position and time as horizontal length, drawn as rectangles on a grid | Anyone writing in a DAW such as Ableton, Logic or FL Studio |
Musical notation is any written system that records a piece of music precisely enough for a stranger to play it back, and Western staff notation does that by fixing two things about every sound: which pitch it is, and how long it lasts. (also called sheet music, everyday English, for the printed result rather than the system)
The three clips are that pair of dimensions taken one at a time. The second keeps every pitch of the first and changes only the lengths; the third keeps every length and changes only the pitches. Both are recognisably different pieces of music, and a notation that recorded only one of the two could not tell them apart.
What notation buys you is distance. A page carries music to a player who has never heard it, to a room you are not in, and to a century you will not see — and it lets you hold a long piece still while you look at it, which no amount of listening will do.
What it costs you is everything it leaves out. The page fixes pitch and rhythm; how loud, how sweet, how urgent, how much to lean on the second beat are carried by a handful of Italian words and by the player. Two fine performances of the same page sound nothing like each other, and both are correct.
Convention
Western staff notation is one system among several, not the definition of what music is. Tablature, chord charts and a DAW's piano roll all write music down perfectly well; they simply record different things, as the table above sets out. A tradition that uses none of them — and most of the world's music is learned by ear — is not writing music down badly.
Convention
No later chapter of this course requires this one. Chapter 4 is a prerequisite of nothing. Every other chapter teaches by ear and by keyboard first and prints a staff only as an extra view you can switch off. Read this chapter if you want to read printed music; skip it if you do not, and nothing after it will break.
Constraint
A page fixes pitch and duration exactly, and hands almost everything else — tone, loudness, phrasing, how much to bend the tempo — to a few words of instruction and to the player's judgement.
Applies to: Western staff notation as used in printed scores; a DAW's piano roll fixes loudness exactly too, and a recording fixes everything
You already know this
In real music
- Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star, Traditional — the first seven notes are the phrase in the clips above, and they are the first line of almost every beginner piano book ever printed
Take a tune you can already play from memory on your own instrument and write it down on paper any way you like — letter names, numbers, dashes for the long notes. Then hand the paper to someone else and see whether they can play it back. Whatever they get wrong is the thing your system forgot to record.
Check 1
Listen. Compared with the first clip in this section, what has changed?
The Staff and Its Clefs
Play these two. They are the same eight-note climb, once low and once high. Before a written page can tell you anything else, it has to tell these two apart.
| Clef | What it marks | Typical instruments and parts | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 𝄞 Treble clef | Its curl wraps the second line from the bottom, and fixes that line as | Violin, flute, oboe, trumpet, the right hand of a piano, soprano and alto voices | |
| 𝄢 Bass clef | Its two dots sit either side of the fourth line from the bottom, and fix that line as | Cello, double bass, bass guitar, trombone, tuba, the left hand of a piano, tenor and bass voices |
A staff is the grid of five horizontal lines, and the four spaces between them, on which every note of Western printed music is placed, and a note's height on that grid is its pitch: the further up the page, the higher the sound. (also called stave, British usage; the plural is staves either way)
Lines and spaces are counted from the bottom up, so the first line is the lowest one and the fifth is the highest. That gives nine places on the staff itself — five lines and four spaces — and each place is one letter name higher than the place below it.
A clef is the symbol at the left-hand end of the staff, and it is what turns those nine places into named notes. Without it the staff says only that one note is higher than another. With it, every line and space has a name, and every note printed after it can be read.
Two clefs do almost all the work, because one staff only covers a little over an octave — to in treble clef — and a piano covers seven. The treble clef puts the staff where a violin or a singer's upper range lives; the bass clef puts it the best part of two octaves lower. Piano music uses both at once, braced together as a grand staff, which is why a pianist reads two lines of music simultaneously.
Fact
A staff on its own fixes no pitch whatsoever. The clef is what turns a position into a note, and the same position means different things under different clefs: the second line from the bottom is in treble clef and in bass clef — more than an octave apart.
Convention
The treble clef is a stylised letter G and the bass clef a stylised letter F, each drawn around the line that carries that note. Both shapes are medieval scribes' handwriting worn down over eight centuries of copying; nothing about the sound is hiding in the curls.
Convention
A third family of clef is still in daily use: the C clef, which marks the line carrying middle C, , and which moves. Placed on the middle line it is the alto clef, read by violas; placed on the fourth line it is the tenor clef, used for the upper register of the cello, bassoon and trombone. It exists to keep those parts off ledger lines.
You already know this
Where this goes
In real music
- Piano Sonata No. 14, "Moonlight", first movement, Ludwig van Beethoven — from the opening bar the right hand is printed in treble clef and the left in bass clef, one above the other — the two clefs of this section doing their day job
Find any printed music you can get hold of — a songbook, a free PDF, a photograph on your phone — and look only at the left-hand end of each line. Name the clef on every line of the first page, and say which hand or which instrument that line is for.
Check 1
Two notes, one after the other. The first is the note the treble clef names, and the second is the note the bass clef names. Which pair of names is right?
Pitch on the Staff
Play the first two climbs. The first moves up one letter name at a time; the second skips every other letter. One sounds like walking and one like a series of small jumps — decide which before you look at anything. The third chip is the two staves below, played straight through.
| Places on the staff | In treble clef, bottom to top | In bass clef, bottom to top |
|---|---|---|
| The five lines | ||
| The four spaces | ||
| Memory sentence for the lines | Every Good Boy Does Fine | Good Boys Do Fine Always |
| Memory sentence for the spaces | FACE, which rhymes with "space" | All Cows Eat Grass |
A note's pitch on the staff is its vertical position and nothing else: the five lines and the four spaces between them make nine places, each one letter name higher than the place below it, and higher on the page always means higher in sound.
A ledger line is a short extra line, no wider than the note head it carries, drawn above or below the staff to hold a note that runs off the end of those nine places, added one at a time as if the staff simply continued. Lines and spaces alternate the whole way, ledger lines included, so moving from a line to the space directly above it is one letter name and moving from a line to the next line is two. That is why the first clip above, which changes one letter at a time, would be drawn as a note on a line, then the space above, then the next line, while the second, which skips a letter each time, would sit on line after line after line.
The memory sentences in the table are the traditional way in. Read the treble lines from the bottom as E, G, B, D, F and the spaces as F, A, C, E, and you can name any note on the staff by counting. Most readers use them for a few months and then stop, because they have learned to recognise two or three landmark notes on sight and read everything else as a distance from one of those.
Middle C is the most useful landmark of all. It is a single pitch, C4, one ledger line below the treble staff and one ledger line above the bass staff — so on a piano's two braced staves it sits exactly halfway between them, which is where its name comes from. Find it once on your own instrument and the rest of the staff is measured from there.
Convention
Every Good Boy Does Fine and FACE are memory aids from English-language classrooms, and they are scaffolding rather than theory. Other traditions use different sentences, or teach from landmark notes and no sentence at all; nothing about the staff depends on them.
Fact
Middle C, , is one pitch with two printed homes. One ledger line below the treble staff and one ledger line above the bass staff are the same note, sounded by the same key of a piano — which is why a grand staff can be read as one continuous ladder of pitch with middle C in the middle.
Convention
Ledger lines are added one at a time, evenly spaced as if the staff simply continued. Beyond about three of them most editors give up and print an octave mark instead — "8va" above the line or "8vb" below it, which says to play the written notes an octave higher or lower and keeps the note heads back on the staff where they can be read at speed.
You already know this
Where this goes
See also
Find middle C on your own instrument. On a piano it is the C nearest the middle of the keyboard, usually just left of the brand name; on a guitar it is the first fret of the B string; on a bass or a cello it is well above the open strings. Play it, then the note one letter above it, then one letter below, and say all three names out loud.
Check 1
This clip plays a note that sits on the bottom line of the treble staff. The next note of the melody is drawn one space higher. Which note is it?
Rhythm on the Staff
Play the first three. Each one fills the same stretch of time and each uses the same single pitch, so the only difference is how many sounds are packed into it — and how long each of them is left ringing. Count the sounds in each. The fourth chip plays all five bars of the staff below, in the order they are printed.
| Note | Looks like | Beats in 4/4 | Its rest looks like | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Whole note | 𝅝 | 4 | 𝄻 | |
| Half note | 𝅗𝅥 | 2 | 𝄼 | |
| Quarter note | 𝅘𝅥 | 1 | 𝄽 | |
| Eighth note | 𝅘𝅥𝅮 | 1/2 | 𝄾 | |
| Sixteenth note | 𝅘𝅥𝅯 | 1/4 | 𝄿 |
A note value is how long a note lasts, and on the staff it is carried by the note's own shape rather than written beside it: a hollow head with no stem is the longest, and each feature added after that — a stem, then a flag, then a second flag — halves the length again. (also called semibreve, minim, crotchet, quaver and semiquaver, British usage, one name per row of the table above, in that order)
The first three clips are the first, third and fourth rows of the table: one whole note, four quarter notes, eight eighth notes. They take the same time because the arithmetic makes them, since four quarters and eight eighths each add up to one whole. Each sound is left ringing until the next one begins, so the first clip really is one unbroken sound lasting the whole bar, and that is the difference between a whole note and a single short click followed by four beats of silence — which would be written as a note and a rest, and is a different bar of music.
Silence is measured the same way and printed just as carefully. Every note value has a rest of exactly the same length, listed in the last column above, and a rest is part of the rhythm rather than a hole in it. A bar of 4/4 must add up to four beats whether it is filled with notes, with rests, or with both.
Two marks stretch a note past the values in the table. A dot after the head adds half again; a tie joins two heads of the same pitch into one longer sound. Between them they cover every length the plain shapes cannot reach.
Fact
A dot placed after a note head adds half of that note's own length to it. A dotted half note is two beats plus one more, three beats in all; a dotted quarter is one beat and a half. A second dot adds half of the first dot, so a double-dotted half note is three and a half beats.
Fact
A tie is a curved line joining two note heads at the same pitch, and it means one sound lasting the sum of the two. It is the only way to hold a note across a bar line, where no single symbol can reach — which is also how a length like five beats gets written at all.
Convention
Beams — the thick horizontal bars joining short notes into groups — change nothing about the sound. Eight eighth notes written with separate flags and the same eight written under beams are identical. The grouping exists so a reader can see the beats at a glance, and printers normally beam within a beat rather than across it.
Constraint
The "Beats in 4/4" column above holds only where the quarter note is the beat. In 6/8 the printed counting unit is the eighth and the felt beat is a dotted quarter, so the same five shapes are counted differently.
Applies to: meters whose lower number is 4, such as 2/4, 3/4 and 4/4; the full story is chapter 15
You already know this
Where this goes
In real music
- Canon in D, Johann Pachelbel — the first violin enters on long held notes and each variation after it roughly halves the value again — halves, then quarters, then eighths, then sixteenths — so the piece walks down the table above in order
Set a metronome to 60 and pick one note on your own instrument. Play four bars without changing the metronome: one whole note, then two half notes, then four quarter notes, then eight eighth notes. Count one-two-three-four out loud the whole way through, and name the value you are playing before each bar starts.
Check 1
Tap four steady beats along with this clip. How many sounds land on each tap, and so what would those notes be called on the page?
Sharps, Flats and Naturals
Play the first three. Two of them are the same sound and one is not. Say which is the odd one out before you read anything below. The fourth chip reads the two printed bars beneath, note by note.
| Sign | How it is printed | What it does | |
|---|---|---|---|
| ♯ Sharp | A hash-like symbol immediately left of the note head | Raises that note by one half step, for the rest of the bar | |
| ♭ Flat | A small letter b immediately left of the note head | Lowers that note by one half step, for the rest of the bar | |
| ♮ Natural | An upright open symbol immediately left of the note head | Cancels a sharp or flat already in force and restores the plain letter, for the rest of the bar |
An accidental is a sharp, flat or natural sign printed immediately to the left of a note head, which raises, lowers or restores that note by a half step for the remainder of the bar it appears in.
The ordering catches everyone out once. On the page the sign is drawn before the note; in speech and in typing, the letter comes first. You print a sharp and then the note head, and you say "F sharp" and write .
The bar line is where an accidental expires. A sharp written on the third note of a bar holds for every later note on that same line or space in that same bar, and then stops. It does not cross into the next bar, and it does not reach the same letter in another octave. Editors who suspect a reader might hesitate print a courtesy accidental in the following bar, often in brackets — it changes nothing and is simply politeness.
One sound can take two spellings. and are the same key of a piano and the same pitch in the air, which is exactly what the first two clips in this section demonstrate. Which one a page prints is decided by the key and by where the line is heading, never by the sound.
Convention
An accidental lasts until the bar line and no further. It applies to the line or space it is written on, for the rest of that bar, and it expires at the bar line — so the same letter in the next bar is plain again unless it is marked again.
Fact
A sharp and a flat can name one and the same pitch. and are a single key on a keyboard and a single frequency in the air; the two spellings exist to show how the note is functioning, not to describe two different sounds.
Convention
Double sharps and double flats also exist, written as a slanted cross and as two flat signs, and they move the note by a whole step rather than a half. They look like an eccentricity but they are bookkeeping: in G♯ minor, which has five sharps, the raised seventh degree is F double sharp, because the letter G is already spoken for by the tonic.
Convention
Sharps and flats printed once at the head of every line, just after the clef, are a different thing entirely: a key signature, which holds for the whole piece rather than for one bar. Key signatures are chapter 8.
You already know this
Where this goes
See also
On your own instrument play any note, then the note a half step above it, then the first one again. Do it from three different starting notes, and each time say out loud both of the names the middle note could be printed with — once as a sharp of the note below, once as a flat of the note above.
Check 1
Two notes, one after the other. The first is written as C sharp and the second is written as D flat. Same pitch or different?
Reading a Line of Music
Play the whole tune, then the clip that breaks off after three notes. Hold both in your ear: the rest of this section is about getting from the second to the first without guessing.
| Order | What you look at | What it tells you |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | The symbol at the very left of the line | Which clef, and so what note every line and space is |
| 2 | The sharps or flats printed just after the clef | The key signature — which letters are sharp or flat all the way through. Chapter 8 |
| 3 | The pair of stacked numbers after that | The time signature — how many beats are in a bar and which value gets one. Chapter 15 |
| 4 | The first note head: its position first, then its shape | Which pitch it is, then how long it lasts |
| 5 | Every note after it, read as a move from the note before | Up or down, and by how many lines and spaces |
Sight-reading is playing a piece of music from the printed page at first sight, and it is done by reading relationships rather than by naming every note: the clef fixes a starting point, and each note after the first is read as a move up or down from its neighbour.
The order in the table is the order the page itself is laid out in, and it is worth following literally for the first few months. Clef, then key, then time, then the first note: four glances, in that order, before a sound is made. Most wrong notes in a first reading come from starting at step four.
After that, read the shape. A note on the next space up is one letter up; a note on the next line up skips one. In the printed tune above, bar one climbs C, D, E — a step, a step — and then jumps to G, and you can see the jump without naming anything, because the head moves two places instead of one.
Speed comes from playing music that is much too easy, every day, rather than from struggling with music that is too hard. A reader who can play eight bars of something simple at first sight today will read a page of it in six months; a reader who spends six months on one difficult piece will have memorised that piece and learned nothing about reading.
Tendency
In most printed music the line opens with a clef, then a key signature, then a time signature, in that order. The clef is repeated at the start of every line; the key signature usually is too; the time signature appears once and is reprinted only when it changes.
Applies to: Western printed music from roughly 1700 onward; earlier manuscripts, plainchant and some twentieth-century scores order or omit these differently
Tendency
Fluent readers do not name every note as they go. They recognise two or three landmarks by sight and read everything else as a distance — a step up, a skip down, a repeated note — naming a pitch only when something needs checking.
Applies to: experienced readers of Western staff notation; a beginner naming every note is doing the right thing for their stage
Convention
The page is read left to right and top to bottom, exactly like text. Two or more staves joined by a brace are the exception: those are read simultaneously, the top and bottom lines sounding at the same moment, which is what a pianist is doing with both hands.
You already know this
Where this goes
In real music
- Ode to Joy, from Symphony No. 9, Ludwig van Beethoven — the tune enters low on the cellos and double basses in unison, unaccompanied, a few minutes into the fourth movement after the opening recitatives — it moves almost entirely by step, which is why it is the first thing put in front of a new reader
Find eight bars of printed music for your own instrument that you have never played before. Read it out loud at a quarter of the marked speed, in order: clef, then key signature, then time signature, then note by note. Stop and restart as often as you like, but do not look up a recording until you have played it through once.
Check 1
This clip plays the first three notes of the tune printed above. Reading on from where it stops, which note comes next?
Key Takeaways
- Notation is a written record of two things about every sound — which pitch it is and how long it lasts — and staff notation is one of several systems that do this.
- The staff is five lines and four spaces, and a note's vertical position on them is its pitch.
- A clef fixes which note each line and space stands for, and without one the staff names nothing: treble clef marks G4 on the second line, bass clef marks F3 on the fourth.
- Ledger lines extend the staff one line at a time, and middle C sits on one just below the treble staff and just above the bass staff.
- A note's length is written into its shape — hollow or filled head, stem, flags or beams — and every note value has a rest of the same length.
- A sharp, flat or natural sign printed before a note head alters that note for the rest of the bar and then expires at the bar line.
- Reading a line of music means looking at the clef, then the key signature, then the time signature, then the notes — in that order, every time.
Last updated September 22, 2026
Questions
- Do I need to read music to play?
- No. Blues, rock, flamenco, Irish traditional and Hindustani classical music are all learned by ear or from chord charts. Reading is a convenience, not a qualification: it lets you play something you have never heard and study a score in silence. Nothing later in this course depends on it.
- What is the difference between treble and bass clef?
- They put the same five lines in different registers. The treble clef curls around the second line and fixes it as G4; the bass clef puts its two dots around the fourth line and fixes it as F3, a ninth below that G. Higher instruments use treble, lower ones bass, and a piano both at once.
- What is a ledger line?
- A ledger line is a short extra line, no wider than the note head, drawn above or below the staff for a note that will not fit on the five lines. They are added one at a time, as if the staff continued. Middle C is the familiar one: a single ledger line below the treble staff.
- How long does an accidental last?
- Until the next bar line. A sharp, flat or natural applies to the line or space it is written on for the rest of that bar, so later notes there are altered too, even with no sign reprinted. It does not cross the bar line, and it does not reach the same letter in another octave.
- Why are there British and American names for note values?
- They are two surviving vocabularies for the same durations. The American names — whole, half, quarter, eighth — describe each value as a fraction of a whole note, which makes the arithmetic obvious. The British names — semibreve, minim, crotchet, quaver — come down from mensural notation. A crotchet and a quarter note are identical in every way.
- How long does it take to learn to read music?
- Naming the lines and spaces of one clef takes an afternoon. Reading simple music slowly and without stopping takes a few months of short daily practice. Fluency takes years, and it is built by reading a great deal of easy music rather than by struggling with hard music: eight new bars a day, well below your playing level.