Lesson One

Lesson One: Note Names, Clefs and Staff

Read the lesson and try to answer the questions. Click on the blue hyperlinks to read the music glossary for that note or to go to an interactive game. When you have finished you can do Test 1.

To begin with, we must know how to understand music as a written language.

If you are reading this lesson you have learned how to read in English. Music is another language and you must start from the beginning, learning what each special sign means - just like with the alphabet! There are even some bits of the alphabet in music: they are the names of the notes | A | B | C | D | E | F | G |

These are the names of all the white notes on the piano keyboard.

They continue over and over right from one end of the keyboard to the other. The black notes are types of A, B, C, D, E, F and G. You can think of them as their cousins. For now we will concentrate on the main family tree of the notes from A through to G.

Does anyone in your family do your family tree? A family tree is a list of all the parents and their children and their children's children from way back in the olden days until you or your little brother or sister came along.

Each person is a little different but you also have things in common. You may have your mother's eyes and you might be short like your Dad. Your mum may be thin like grandma or dad may wear glasses like grandma or grandpa. Each time someone in your family has their first baby they are making a new generation of your family.

If we think of the piano keyboard as a great family tree we can also think of each group of notes from A to G as one generation. In music we call each generation an OCTAVE. The octave is made up of eight notes or sounds. The prefix "oct" means eight.

By now you must be wondering why there are eight notes in each generation when A-G makes up only seven? That is because the last note is another A which is the beginning of the next generation or OCTAVE. This note is very important because it makes up the last note of one family and the first note of the next. This is just like in a real family where your Mum is the daughter of your Nanna but also the mother of you!

Learn about Octaves

If you look closely at the string of notes below you will notice that it is the same 7 notes repeating over and over again in the same order. How many A's can you spot?

A B C D E F G A B C D E F G A B C D E F G A B C D E F G A

On a piano you can see all the notes arranged one after the other in a row from low to high just like the letters above. Each time we go from A through to the next A, that is one octave of notes (or one generation of our pretend family). One octave of our note family starting and ending with A is coloured in pink below:

A B C D E F G A B C D E F G A B C D E F G A B C D E F G A

Or we could also start on a different A, one higher up:

A B C D E F G A B C D E F G A B C D E F G A B C D E F G A

We can also start our octave on any of those notes, it does not have to begin and end on A.

It could begin and end on B, C, D, E, F or G.

A B C D E F G A B C D E F G A B C D E F G A B C D E F G A

If you have a piano you can also try playing octaves beginning on different notes.

Some questions to begin:

If we start with D and end on D what would the notes be?	Type your answers in the boxes.
If we start with E and end on E what would the notes be?
If we start with F and end on F what would the notes be?
If we start with G and end on G what would the notes be?

Check your answers when all four questions are answered.

Learn about the Staff

We can think of all the notes on the piano as one big family where each generation names their children by the same names. The only way to tell which family they come from then, is to know their age.

In music theory, the STAFF (also called the STAVE) tells us which generation of notes we are talking about, listening to or playing.

	The staff is a set of lines on which we can write or read the notes on the piano.
	We read across the page just like we do when we read the words in a book.
	There are five lines in a stave and one note can be written on each line and one in each space.
	This makes up only nine notes if you count each line and the spaces in between.

This is a Staff or Stave:
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________

So how do we write all the others?

We place a special sign at the beginning of the stave which tells us if the family is from one end of the piano or the other. The proper name for this special sign is the word CLEF. There are different clefs to tell us which end of the piano to play the notes on. If you try playing the notes on a keyboard you can hear that one end of the keyboard has low notes and the other end has high notes.

We need a different sign for each end of the piano and we normally use the TREBLE CLEF for the high end and the BASS CLEF for the low end. This is why piano music always has two STAVES joined together. This allows for both your hands can play next to each other with the right hand playing the high notes and the left hand playing the low notes at the same time. Because these two staves join together and share some notes in the middle (where either hand can play the note) there is some overlap in the notes that can be written in the high end of the BASS CLEF and the low end of the TREBLE CLEF.

We have already learned a lot of new words. Let's review them:

Try the fun activities to help you learn the work for these lessons.

Hangman

Your new words for this lesson are: staff, stave, clef, treble, bass, octave.

To play hangman you guess one letter at a time. All the words to guess are from our list above. Try to guess which word it is from the number of '#' signs. One '#' sign for each letter you must guess. Type a letter and left-click on the 'Check!' button. If you guess correctly, the letter will appear in place of the '#' sign. You will have two guesses for each letter in the word. Try to guess the word before your guesses run out. You can play this game for as long as you want.

Click on the link to play Hangman!

Unscramble these words:

fcle	tveaoc	ftsaf
brlete	vates	sbsa

Can you write these words scrabble-style so that they all share some letters?

Can you make up a little tune in the bass clef by writing the notes on the lines and spaces? Just write the alphabet letter. Write a capital for a long note and a baby letter for a short one.

A Family of Note(s)

Make a paper doll chain of an octave.

Materials: A4 Paper, safety scissors, textas.

Instructions: Cut A4 paper in half along it's length. Fold concertina-like, seven times in equal widths. Draw person on front so that hand and foot are joined at the folded edge. Cut around outline while still folded. Label each person from C-C. Draw on funny faces. Use as decoration.

What do we call eight notes in a row?	Type your answers in the boxes.
What is the name for the five lines that tell us whether the notes are high or low?
What is the name for the sign that tells us whether a note is from the high or low end of the piano?
Which clef tells us that a note should sound high?
Which clef tells us that a note should sound low?