Piano for Beginners 6th ED - 2016 UK

Understanding theory

W

hen you’re looking at a piece of

music to play on the piano, you’ll

notice that the treble clef and the

bass clef are joined together with

a bracket on the left-hand side. This is called the

grand stave and makes it possible for you to read

the music to play on the keyboard with both your

left and right hands simultaneously. However, as

there are more notes on the piano that can fit on

the treble, bass or even grand stave, we need ledger

lines to help. These are lines that work to extend

either the treble stave or bass stave’s five lines in

order to represent notes that appear either above or

below the stave.

For example, Middle C appears below the five

main lines of the treble clef, yet it appears above

the five main lines of the bass clef. So, to help you

recognise the note, a ledger line is placed through

the notehead, spaced equally relative to the lines

in the main stave. Middle C is then placed on the

‘imaginary’ line above or below the stave.

Many other notes will appear in your sheet music

with ledger lines. Much higher notes will appear

above the treble stave, notes in the middle of the

range will appear on ledger lines in the middle of

the grand stave and very low notes you’ll see drop

down below the bass stave.

Learn about

ledger lines

Get to grips with these essential parts of music notation with

our simple step-by-step guide

Line it up

How to recognise, play and use ledger lines

01 Middle C

The best place to start is to find Middle C. This is the first note to be placed on a

ledger line below the treble stave or above the bass stave. On our example, you

can see that Middle C can appear in two locations, but it’s the same note.

03 On the bass clef

If you take a look at the bass clef, you’ll see that ledger lines will be present

below the stave after the note F, which rests beneath the last line of the bass

clef’s five. These notes can go rather low.

02 On the treble clef

Ledger lines on the treble clef begin to crop up after G, which rests above the

top line of the stave. Work out which note to play by checking its position on

the ledger line and lines below it.

04 On the piano

Think about the notes on the bass clef (plus ledger lines) as keys on the left of

the piano keyboard, the ledger lines in the middle as notes in the centre, and

notes on the treble clef as notes on the right of the keyboard.

G A B C D E F G

F E D C B A G F