The ABCs of Music
The Grand Staff is the foundation for reading music. It is the alphabet for our musical literacy. The eventual goal for every student is to memorize all of the lines and spaces on the Grand Staff.
Just like preschool students memorize the alphabet by learning what the letters look like, what their names are, and what they sound like, music students need to memorize all of the lines and spaces of the Grand Staff. This allows us to find all of our notes and build a foundation of musical knowledge before we put notes together to form musical phrases, coordinate two hands on the piano to form harmony, and put all of it together to make music.
Start with Staves
The Grand Staff is made up of two separate staves. (Stave is plural for more than one staff.) We refer to them as the top staff and the bottom staff, or the treble clef staff and the bass clef staff. Sometimes with students I’ll shortcut it and call them the right-hand staff and the left-hand staff. Since the right hand plays the high notes on the piano and the left hand plays the low notes, the right hand reads the top staff, and the left hand reads the bottom staff.
This large grouping of lines and spaces is a direct representation of the piano keyboard. As notes move up the page from one line to the space above, and from one space to the line above, the keys move up the piano one at a time. (At this point, we’re only talking about the white keys.) Inside the students’ brains we are trying to connect the correct line (or space) with the correct key. This sounds like a huge challenge because there are 36 different notes on the Grand Staff itself. But this is where the alphabet comes in.
From A to G
Learning the musical alphabet and sayings for the different staves is a way to address the challenge. It gives our brains steps to work through to arrive at the right answer. Simply trying to memorize, ‘this line equals this key’ would be not only time consuming, but very frustrating for most people. The musical alphabet gives us a limited number of keys to commit to memory, while memorizing the sayings gives us a mnemonic device to give our brains a shortcut for the staff itself.
When a student starts piano lessons there’s usually a section of pre-reading they’ll go through. Depending on the age and experience of the student, this can be from one week for adults, to several months for early learners.
The pre-reading stage allows the students’ brains to learn the keys of the piano. In other words, which key is which letter. Luckily, there are only seven letters in the musical alphabet: A-B-C-D-E-F-G.
When you move through the musical alphabet (A–G) on the piano, you’re just moving from one white key to the next. The same pattern of white and black keys repeats over and over. That’s why every C on the keyboard looks the same. It’s always the white key directly to the left of a group of two black keys.
Meet the C Family
The piano is a very large instrument with 88 keys. There are eight different Cs alone. The beauty of the Grand Staff is that it tells us exactly which key on the piano to play.
We start with middle C. While middle C is, in fact, the middle most C on the piano, it’s called middle C because it’s in the middle space between the two staves. This space is larger than most others to help our eyes separate right-hand notes from left-hand notes.
Middle C sits on its own little line, called a ledger line (what we call a ‘Cat’s Whisker,’ since cat starts with C). Even though it’s in the middle space, the note itself is never perfectly centered there. If the note is drawn closer to the treble staff, the right hand plays it; if it’s closer to the bass staff, the left hand does.
This middle space can contain several notes, but the first ones we focus on are B, Middle C, and D. Unlike Middle C, which can lean toward either staff, B and D stay in fixed positions.
- B sits just above the bass clef (‘aBove like a Bouncing Baby Bee’).
- D hangs just below the treble clef (‘D Dangles Down like a Drip’).
These are common phrases we use to prompt students when they are learning these notes or struggling to remember them.
Bass C is the next lower C (one octave below middle C). Bass C is on the second space of the bass clef (or bottom) staff. We only count the spaces within the staves themselves. The space above and below the staves are considered to be ‘outside’ the staves.
The spaces of the bass clef are usually remembered with the saying ‘All Cows Eat Grass.’ Each space is one of the words, starting on the bottom and moving up, so the lowest space is A, the second is bass C, the third is E, and the top space is G.
Treble C is the C that’s higher than middle C (one octave above middle C). Treble C is the third space of the treble clef (or top) staff. The treble clef staff spaces are remembered most easily of all because they spell the word ‘FACE.’ The bottom space is F, the second is A, the third is C, and the top space is E.
New Ways to Say It and See It
As you can see, the two staves are different. And when a student realizes this, they have a light bulb moment. EUREKA!
This is one of the points in music lessons that you discover you’re one of two kinds of people: either you’re someone who can easily accept that you have to remember two different things, or you’re someone who fights against the extra effort.
If you remember the mnemonics for the spaces, you can figure out the lines by going up or down one letter of the music alphabet. But for most, it’s easier to also have sayings for the lines.
The most old-school phrase for Treble and Bass clef lines is ‘Every Good Boy Does Fine’ (treble) and ‘Good Boys Do Fine Always’ (bass). For decades now we have been advocates for letting this phrase and its counter clef variant die.
First, they are the exact same idea and become too easily confused for one another. Second, no one cares about the good boy and how fine he is. We cannot have a good girl because you cannot use G twice in a row, so enough with the good boy already. Let’s be more creative than that.
The bass clef line saying we enjoy most is ‘Gummi Bears Do Fly Airplanes’ (remember Cloudy with a Chance for Meatballs, anyone?). Once again, we are starting at the bottom and working our way up, line by line. In other words, the bottom line of the bass clef staff is G. (If you’d like, you can make up any sentence you want with the five words being in the order of G B D F A. Another fun one we have used over the years is ‘Great Big Dragon’s Fly Alone.’)
The treble clef staff saying we use most often is ‘Ernie Gave Bert Dog Food.’ This helps you to remember that the bottom line of the treble clef staff is E, and the top line is F. Again, any five word sentence in the order of E G B D F can be used. (We have heard music schoolteachers teach ‘Evil Giant Babies Destroy France’ in their recorder units.)
(For years Alicia would have her flute students come back with three original sentences of their own. She stopped doing that assignment when a girl returned one week and proudly declared ‘Elderly Geezers Behind Doors Fart.’ She says that she didn’t realize that the assignment was a competition, but clearly that girl had won, and she doubts anyone will ever be able to top that phrase.)
When putting all of the sayings together and including the three notes in the large area between the staves we get the progression of keys through the alphabet. The Grand Staff ends up being a graph. Moving up the page goes up in pitch (up the keys). Moving down the staff goes down in pitch (down the keys). And moving from left to right with progression in time (or rhythm).
From Confusion to Clarity
When students begin using the Grand Staff, we start matching the keys they already know to their places on the staff. Since there are many keys but only ten fingers, we use ‘hand positions.’ These positions give students a clear, fixed place to put their fingers, so they don’t have to search around, and they limit the number of lines and spaces they need to think about at once.
This is a fantastic way to parcel out the information into manageable chunks. The unfortunate part is that students will get so locked into the positions they’ve learned and know that breaking out of it and learning new positions with new keys and new lines and spaces can be confusing and very discouraging.
Suddenly it’s like starting back at the beginning because everything they built up doesn’t apply anymore. It’s up to us as the teachers to keep stretching their understanding outside of their positions so they don’t become too attached to them. Additionally, we need to explain how everything connects and crosses over so they understand that they’re not just starting from scratch again, but they are actually filling in gaps they didn’t know existed.
Eventually, with the use of positions and stretching outside of positions the entire Grand Staff will be covered. Through the whole process the mnemonic sayings are our safety line to allow us to move up and down the lines and spaces and not get lost. There will be some notes that are more easily remembered and others that seem like they are in a fog. That’s just how our brains work. Through patience and experience the fog will eventually lift and our memory will grab onto all of those lines and spaces.
Do you have questions about the Grand Staff or confusion about musical literacy. Feel free to contact us. We’d love to help.
Metronomes