Ledger Lines and Clefs
Fundamentals of Music Theory
This course will introduce students to the theory of music, providing them with the skills needed to read and write Western music notation, as well as to understand, analyse, and listen informedly. It will cover material such as pitches and scales, intervals, clefs, rhythm, form, meter, phrases and cadences, and basic harmony. This course covers the fundamentals of Western music theory, from the absolute basics to some more advanced concepts and, as such, is the perfect course for beginners and more experienced musicians alike. Follow us on twitter @musictheorymooc #edmusictheory
and writing notes, in relation to the treble clef.
And in lecture one, Richard showed us that, although this, stave
has five lines and four spaces, actually we can temporarily extend this.
If needs be, by use of ledger lines.
Now what this does, is allows us to go, a bit
higher for a period of time, or a bit below the stave,
a bit lower for a period of time, if we need
to represent and show notes that are out width this main range.
>> There's a couple of problems with that.
If we go on for any duration using
only letter lines, that's really quite hard to read.
A musician trying to read that music, kind of
loses that orientation if you stay a long way from
those five lines and you're just floating above the stave
on those ledgers, or below the stave on those ledgers.
You can see an example here.
It gets a little disorienting to look at.
And secondly, even using ledger lines, reasonable amounts of
ledger lines above and below the staff, we still
not getting, at all of the ranges of pictures
that, that real instruments and real voices actually use.
When they're performing music if you think about a
bass guitar and you compare it to a flute.
We've got really low sound and we've got really high sounds.
We need ways of covering both of those ranges of pitches.
If you think about choirs and the four voice
types that we might commonly have in a choir.
We might have a bass voice.
A tenor voice, an alto voice, a soprano voice.
And kind of the point is, that in those
different voice ranges, we cover different ranges of pitches.
>> So you remember from week one, we described a
clef, a cleft as really just a way to identify notes.
And really to assign letter names to the series of four spaces and five lines.
The treble clef is the one that we've used so far, and it's just a system.
sorry, the treble clef we've used is just a symbol, that we use to
indicate which range of pitches we want
these particular lines and spaces to represent.
So, there's actually a few different types of clefs.
And all of which do exactly the same thing.
They indicate the different selection of pitches that should be read from
the lines, and the spaces on the stave, but we're going to focus on
the next most commonly used clef and that is the bass clef and
as the name suggests this one is used to represent low-pitched notes.
>> Now an interesting thing about this clef, is that it,
quite often, forms part of a system with the treble clef.
Anyone who's ever looked at a piece of piano
music, will be really familiar with the look of this.
Now, you can see that we've got two staves.
Each of them has got the normal five lines.
And they're connected by what we call, a brace.
That's the bracket here on the far left.
So these two staves together, give us, a grand stave.
>> So we've got five lines, on the top
stave and we've got five lines on the bottom stave.
Now what one is to do is imagine, an eleventh
line, that runs right through the middle of these two.
It's right in between the two staves.
We could say that this line gives us a meeting
point between the ranges of pitches, and between the two clefs.
So the middle line, if we think about it
then, would appear as the first ledger line, below.
The treble clef stave would go down, and if we are thinking
about the bass stave, is the first ledger line above this stave.
Now, this line whether you are thinking about it
in the treble clef, or in the bass clef, actually,
represents the same note, is the note that we, is
the, is the line that we would draw, C on.
And because it's right in between the two, staves,
with the two clefts, we actually call this, Middle C.
So we can see that this note Middle C joins or it connects the two staves, and
that as such, we can see that the
treble and the bass staves aren't completely separate entities
but actually there are two constructs that serve to
form a spectrum, of pitches from low to high.
The treble and the bass clef are the two most common clefs.
But there are others, as we've mentioned,
and the additional material for this section
goes into this further.