Name: Lecture 2.5 - Ledger Lines and Clefs (Coursera - Fundamentals of Music Theory 12)
Uploaded: 2016-07-28T13:52:33.000Z
Duration: 4 min 46 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

So up until this point, we've been reading

and writing notes, in relation to the treble clef.

And in lecture one, Richard showed us that, although this, stave

has five lines and four spaces, actually we can temporarily extend this.

Now what this does, is allows us to go, a bit

higher for a period of time, or a bit below the stave,

a bit lower for a period of time, if we need

to represent and show notes that are out width this main range.

>> There's a couple of problems with that.

only letter lines, that's really quite hard to read.

A musician trying to read that music, kind of

loses that orientation if you stay a long way from

those five lines and you're just floating above the stave

on those ledgers, or below the stave on those ledgers.

It gets a little disorienting to look at.

And secondly, even using ledger lines, reasonable amounts of

ledger lines above and below the staff, we still

not getting, at all of the ranges of pictures

that, that real instruments and real voices actually use.

When they're performing music if you think about a

bass guitar and you compare it to a flute.

We've got really low sound and we've got really high sounds.

We need ways of covering both of those ranges of pitches.

If you think about choirs and the four voice

types that we might commonly have in a choir.

A tenor voice, an alto voice, a soprano voice.

different voice ranges, we cover different ranges of pitches.

>> So you remember from week one, we described a

clef, a cleft as really just a way to identify notes.

And really to assign letter names to the series of four spaces and five lines.

The treble clef is the one that we've used so far, and it's just a system.

sorry, the treble clef we've used is just a symbol, that we use to

these particular lines and spaces to represent.

So, there's actually a few different types of clefs.

And all of which do exactly the same thing.

They indicate the different selection of pitches that should be read from

the lines, and the spaces on the stave, but we're going to focus on

the next most commonly used clef and that is the bass clef and

as the name suggests this one is used to represent low-pitched notes.

>> Now an interesting thing about this clef, is that it,

quite often, forms part of a system with the treble clef.

Anyone who's ever looked at a piece of piano

music, will be really familiar with the look of this.

Now, you can see that we've got two staves.

Each of them has got the normal five lines.

And they're connected by what we call, a brace.

So these two staves together, give us, a grand stave.

stave and we've got five lines on the bottom stave.

Now what one is to do is imagine, an eleventh

line, that runs right through the middle of these two.

We could say that this line gives us a meeting

point between the ranges of pitches, and between the two clefs.

then, would appear as the first ledger line, below.

The treble clef stave would go down, and if we are thinking

about the bass stave, is the first ledger line above this stave.

Now, this line whether you are thinking about it

in the treble clef, or in the bass clef, actually,

represents the same note, is the note that we, is

the, is the line that we would draw, C on.

And because it's right in between the two, staves,

with the two clefts, we actually call this, Middle C.

So we can see that this note Middle C joins or it connects the two staves, and

treble and the bass staves aren't completely separate entities

but actually there are two constructs that serve to

form a spectrum, of pitches from low to high.

The treble and the bass clef are the two most common clefs.

But there are others, as we've mentioned,

and the additional material for this section