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  • In this lesson, I'm going to talk about note reading in a variety of clefs.

  • Over here on the whiteboard, you can see we've got five parallel lines

  • and those just make up the musical staff.

  • If we want to write music, we just start putting these things called note heads on either the spaces or the lines, like this.

  • The thing is though, that these actually aren't going to mean anything

  • and they're not going to tell a musician anything

  • until there's a staff at the beginning, which is here, since we do read music this way.

  • I'm going to put this clef right here.

  • This clef is called a G clef (at least that's one name for it).

  • It's called that because if you make this curly line right here, it curves right around this G.

  • So this is the line on which G goes on.

  • Here's a G right here.

  • And once you have that, you can relate everything else to that G.

  • So, let's use the musical alphabet and put some more pitches in here.

  • If this is a G,the first thing I'm going to do is go backwards in the musical alphabet.

  • I'm going to go down.

  • So if this is a G, then this is an F, and E, D, like that.

  • And then, of course, I can also go this way.

  • The thing about the musical alphabet is that it's actually just A through G, and then it starts over again with A.

  • So, if this is already a G, then this next one here is going to be A, B, C, D, and so forth.

  • And here I am, all the way up to G again.

  • This is already going to show us a couple things.

  • One thing is that since these notes start over again, we actually have a couple of the same notes here,

  • like here's a G, and then there's a G all the way over here, like that.

  • And when that happens, we've just created an octave.

  • And you can find a few more. There's one right there, for example.

  • But there's also something else that's happened, which is that we've kind of run out of room,

  • so we've kind of reached our limits like this, but that's okay.

  • What we can do is add something called ledger lines.

  • If I'm here, I'm going to keep going now past this point, past this D.

  • So here's E, and D, and then I can just draw this extra line like this.

  • That's called a ledger line.

  • And we can keep going, so there's a B, and here's an A, and so on.

  • You don't want to put in more ledger lines than you actually need, so you wouldn't want to go like this,

  • because everyone would wonder why these things are there. That's not necessary.

  • And of course, you can go above the staff as well.

  • So, if we're up to a G over here, here's an A, B, et cetera.

  • It turns out that this note, right here, is an important note, and we call it middle C.

  • You can find it on the keyboard, so we'll play it here.

  • I put a little green dot on my keyboard.

  • And it's specifically this C, so if you hear that one, or this, or something else like that, that's actually not middle C.

  • So, it's very specific, it's in this particular octave.

  • The next clef we're going to look at is a type of F clef.

  • It's called an F clef because right in between these two dots, right here, is F.

  • You can also call it bass clef.

  • So, what were going to do is walk up here and find where middle C is.

  • This is actually an F below middle C.

  • So if I just go like this, I need a ledger line, just like I did before, and there’s middle C.

  • On the keyboard, I’m just going to do the same thing.

  • So here’s the F, and I just walk up G, A, B, and there’s C. There’s that same middle C.

  • There are a couple different ways you can make a C clef.

  • The lazy way that I use is just sort of like a K, like that.

  • But, youll also see it in printed music and it looks a lot fancier, kind of like a B.

  • It doesn’t really matter how you make it, but in either case, that intersection

  • of the lines or of these curves is going to be C, and it’s going to be middle C.

  • So right in there, there’s middle C.

  • Now the thing about this C clef is that it appears in different places on the staff.

  • Sometimes youll also see it up here, and that’s why I said there were two kinds.

  • So, if it’s here, then that means that now this is C, middle C.

  • It’s going to move around.

  • So, if it’s here, were going to call it alto clef, and then this one is called tenor clef.

  • And a lot of people know about treble and bass clef, I don’t know if you play piano,

  • those are the clefs that you use a lot, but these of course are also out there.

  • If you study orchestral scores, youll see them.

  • People who play the viola play primarily in alto clef,

  • and trombonists, bassoonists are going to be familiar with the tenor clef.

  • You do exactly the same thing, this would be a B, that’s an A,

  • over here, since this is C, this must be D, this must be E, like that.

  • And that’s it for the lesson today.

In this lesson, I'm going to talk about note reading in a variety of clefs.

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