Part of our section on Musical Notation where we look at the elements of a music score.
This page follows on from our page on the Music stave, bars and notes
At the start of each line is a symbol called the music clef which tells us how to read the music notes. The first one here is the treble clef and the other one is the bass clef.
At North Tyneside Brass in Schools, we always use the treble clef for our music, but you may come across the bass clef if you play the trombone, or the piano, etc.
There are other clefs such as the tenor clef and alto clef which you may come across.
The sample music score at the top of the Musical Notation page is written for a piano player with the right hand playing the top stave in treble clef and the left hand playing the bottom stave in bass clef.
The clef tells us how to read the notes on the stave as shown here – notice how they are different:
There are lower and higher notes that cannot be placed on the music stave, but we can show them by adding extra “ledger lines” below and/or above the music stave as here:
Continue to explore musical notation on our page on Middle C
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