Start by looking at the treble line up there. We have 12 notes there +1, with the note names underneath them. Lets look at the E there, the 5th note in the sequence. In the treble clef, the E occupies the first line. This refers to a specific E in terms of pitch, which I will explain later on in the document. For now we are going to focus on the natural notes, which is to say the ones that are not sharp or flat. In the example above, those that we are ignoring for now are the ones with the #'s (sharps). So the next note up is F, and F here doesn't occupy a line, he gets a space. Look at the next note in the sequence (ignoring F# for now), and we have G. G occupies a line, and so on. As you can probably see, the pattern is that notes alternate lines and spaces. This means that, once you know the clef, you can figure out what lines and spaces mean what. Traditionally, this is taught through mnemonics, and there are literally dozens to remember the line arrangement for the treble clef.
The lines are EGBDF. You can remember this with: Every Good Boy Does Fine, Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge, Empty Garbage Before Dad Flips, Even God Believers Drown Fast, Even God Buys Dark Funeral, etc. Pick one and memorize it and you'll know your lines in the treble clef. The spaces are even easier, and is always remembered as simply being FACE. The easiest way to remember this is, of course,
To balance this out, the letters for the bass clef lines are GBDFA. Notice these are almost identical to the treble clef, except that the treble clef starts with an E, then goes into GBDF. The bass clef doesn't have that E, but adds an A at the end. This is the way it was taught to me, but it doesn't have a catchy mnemonic, and what's the fun in that? We can take one of the ones up above and modify it a bit to be a handy mnemonic, and also reference everyone's favorite Swedish black metal band! God Buys Dark Funeral Albums should do nicely, I think. The spaces for the bass clef then, are ACEG, which sounds kind of like a terrible rapper. I also don't have a mnemonic for this one that has been hammered into my head since I was a child, because it is so similar to the treble clef. Anorexia Creates Emaciated Girls?
Anyways, the important part is to recognize what the lines and spaces mean, and how when you go one line or space apart the note name changes. The astute reader has noticed that for that first C on the staff there has an extra line through it. As we proceed downward from the E, we have the D there, which could be construed as being in a space, were there to be another line beneath the staff. For the C, we have added a small little line, and it functions exactly how a regular line would. This is called a ledger line, and is meant to allow us to notate things that don't fit into the traditional staff. Ledger lines can go up or down as far as is necessary.
This C is actually a special one. The first C just below the staff in the treble clef is called 'Middle C', and is the C right in the middle of the piano. Look now at the last note on the bass clef. It is one ledger line up from the last line on the bass staff. Counting our notes, we go from an A on the line, to a B on the space, then for our ledger line we have a C again. THIS IS THE SAME NOTE AS IN THE TREBLE, IE: MIDDLE C. Middle C sits in the middle of the grand staff (the traditional manner piano is notated) and is in the middle of the keyboard. Middle C is not a piano-exclusive term either, its the traditional name for that note on any instrument. Starting to get an idea of just how much involved with musical notation is piano-centric? More on this in a bit.
The next thing to notice is that there is no sharp or flat between 'B & C' and 'E & F'. That sentence was terrible but I hope you get the idea that I'm trying to communicate. Me am dum. This is because of the concepts of whole steps and half steps. The half step is the smallest increment of pitch measure in western music. When a pitch changes, the smallest it can go and be notated (or even expressed) is a half step. The human ear can hear at a greater resolution than this, and many eastern musics involve quarter tones and more, but they are completely disregarded for western music and notation (this is not a true statement, but I'm simplifying for the sake of brevity and historical accuracy). But why?
The western (european) method is currently based on the equal tempered tuning system. Back in the olden days when there wasn't any system for tuning, pianos didn't exist, and things were actually in tune. Instrumentalists (including vocalists) used the ability to subtly change the intonation of their instruments to keep things in tune, but there was only a general idea of tuning after a piece started. For example, vocalist 1 sings a note, and vocalist 2 sings a different one that is meant to harmonize. Vocalist 2 comes in a bit lower in pitch than he'd intended, and the combined sound doesn't sound quite right. Vocalist 1 bends his pitch a little bit lower while Vocalist 2 does the opposite. When they hit the proper pitch ratio, they stop bending to ensure the sound is correct. Both of them do this automatically and very rapidly. This continues throughout the piece, and as long as both performers keep their pitch ratios accurate, the work will sound just fine. Obviously, the more people and pitches you throw into this mix, the more difficult the tuning becomes.
Secondly, the mathematics for harmonic ratios don't work out perfectly for every starting frequency. Perhaps you've heard of A440? This is a tuning system, meant to have all instruments tuned to it conform to the idea that middle A (which is the A in FACE) is exactly 440Hz. But Jack Chick, you say, Hz is a measurement generally reserved for electromagnetic radiation! Well as it turns out, Hz (being a measurement of cycles per second) also applies to vibration, and is the way you can qualitatively measure pitch.
The piano (and all of the related instruments, harpsichord et al) is different than other instruments, in that its pitches are fixed by the tuner ahead of performance. The mechanism of the instrument is to have strings pulled to various tension levels and then smashed with hammers, mechanically attached to the keys. And here you thought Cannibal Corpse didn't even know what a piano was. Thus, there is no way for the performer to adjust the pitches on the fly, requiring a system to be put in place to approximate all pitches for all keys.
Take a string and hold it at a specific tension. Pluck the string, you get a pitch. Halve the distance between the two points of the string, and hold it at an identical tension. Pluck it. Your pitch is now exactly double in frequency, because the string is vibrating twice as fast. Elementary physics, right? Consequently, we have increased by one octave. Take the second frequency and subtract the first. We now have a defined frequency range in which all of the additional pitches must fall. To do this, they simply divided the range by 12 to get the value of a half step (once again, smallest increment), then tuned each note to that value. The methodology isn't actually accurate, but provides the correct information and I really don't want to go on a sidetrack here about the harmonic series.
This is all a lot of detail to explain what the half step is and how it works. Western music doesn't use quarter tones or smaller resolutions because it has a necessity to conform to this instrument family that was considered incredibly important, so we use the half step as our finest resolution. Going back to our chart at the top of the document:
Start with C. The next half step up is C#. A whole step, which I mentioned a before I rambled on about tuning, is two half steps. So one half step up from C# is D, which is one whole step up from C. The chromatic scale, which is what we are looking at here, is defined by being the sequence of all half steps present in an octave. This then, inadvertently, answers our question about E and F. E is one half step below F. Same with B and C. I do not know historically why these two note pairs are outliers, but they are. Thus, E# is F, and F♭ is E, and C & B function the same.
To listen to the chromatic scale and understand how these half steps sound, listen to this. It's a little quicker than I'd want, but you can hear the half step motion involved. I'm not sure why the video starts with him off camera and he has to show himself sitting down, but I imagine that is part of the fetish.
So now you know quite a bit about the names of the notes, and how they relate to each-other. You're going to want to internalize a lot of the notation pieces, and when you see a couple notes on the staff you should be able to identify what they are (don't worry if it isn't very quick). As always, questions and comments are welcomed.
As a kid, for the bass clef I was taught:
ReplyDeleteGood Boys Do Fine Always
and
All Cows Eat Grass
or
All Cars Eat Gas