The staff

Now that we have some background information about music, we can talk about the staff. The staff is a small set of five parallel horizontal lines used to write and read music, like the one you have in the graphic below.

The staff has not always been of five lines, though. It has been simplified from a larger one, which had eleven. When needed, instead of the eleven-line staff, musicians use two parallel staffs of sol and fa clefs.

The notes in the staff

The five lines in the staff create four spaces within them. Notes are placed on all those lines and spaces, being each line one note and each space one note too. Sharps and flats are expressed with the # and b symbols, respectively.

The notes are arranged from lower pitch to higher pitch, and from the first line (the one at the bottom of the arrangement) to the last one (the one at the top of the arrangement). In case you need to write a note which is over or under the arrangement, you use ledger lines to indicate the correct note.

To make notes clearer, musicians use bars. They also take for granted that if you find two notes in the same position of the staff, you need to play them at the same time; if you find them one next to the other, you play them in succession.

Placing the notes on the staff

As for which note goes in which line or space, that depends exclusively on the clef you are using to write the song:

+ If you are using the do clef, the third line is do, and the other notes are arranged accordingly.
+ If you are using the sol clef, the second line is sol, and the other notes are arranged accordingly.
+ If you are using the fa clef, the fourth line is fa, and the other notes are arranged accordingly.

Most of the times, do clef is used for instruments with very treble sounds, sol clef is used for, say, normal sounds, and the fa clef is used for the bass sounds.

In the example above, you see the major scale of do under the three clefs

Up to there, you know where to locate each note in the staff. Now let's learn to read or write one.

Continue with... To read and write a staff

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