Music Clefs Explained: Unlock the Power of Your Sheet Music

The Most Common Clefs

The most common clefs that are still widely used today are the G-clef, the F-clef, and the C-clef.

The G Clef (Treble Clef)

The G clef is also called the treble clef. It marks the second line from below as the place where the G sits, by definition. Medieval composers just wrote down the letter G, centering it at the appropriate line. Over time, it developed into the intricate famous treble clef symbol that gets turned into jewelry and tattoos and has become an emoji for "music" itself.

The G clef is used to notate music for instruments or voices ranging from the middle C up. It is vastly popular as it covers instruments like the piano (right hand), the violin, the flute, and high choral voices, among others.

The F Clef (Bass Clef)

The F clef is also called the bass clef. It marks the second line from above as the place where the F sits. Originally, the letter "F" was used, but eventually, it developed into today's loopy thing crawling around the F line. It is usually accompanied by two dots above and below the line for further accentuation.

The F clef is used to notate music for instruments or voices below the middle C. This includes the piano (left hand), the double bass, the bass voice, and the tuba.

The C Clef (also known as Alto Clef or Viola Clef)

The C clef is most widely used for orchestral instruments like the viola, cello, or bassoon, or for older vocal styles. Like the other clefs, it started out as the letter "C" and has since developed into an intricate symbol consisting of two slashes, one bold, one slim, and a bracket in the shape of two "C"s stacked on top of each other, joined at the line that is marked "C". The difference between the C clef and the previous two is that the bracket between the two stacked "C"s was movable to create several sub-clefs. The purpose of that was to best serve each vocal range of choral music:

• The soprano clef was positioned the bracket on the lowest line, thus making notation perfect for the high human voice starting from C4 without having to resort to ledger notes. It is no longer in use today.
• The mezzo-soprano clef jumped one line higher, so the C moved from the lowest line to the second one from the bottom, to accommodate for the slightly lower female voice. It is also no longer in use.
• The alto clef places the bracket smack-bang on the middle line of the staff system. It is still in use as the "viola clef" for middle-range instruments.
• The tenor clef climbs yet another line higher. It was used for the male high voice, and is still in use for instruments like the cello, the bassoon, or the trombone.

How to Easily Learn a New Clef

1. Make sure you train your brain continuously to create a habit of reading the new clef effortlessly. Set aside some time each day to simply read notes in the new clef. Don't worry about playing, just read aloud as if you were reading a book. Then transfer your sight-reading onto your instrument during practice.
2. Learn and visualize which notes are on the lines and which ones are between the lines.
3. Silly sentences can help you memorize. Either come up with your own or apply these:
   1. For the treble clef, the notes on the lines can be remembered by "Every Good Bird Does Fly", or "Every Good Boy Does Fine". The space notes between the lines can be memorized by the word "face".
   2. For the bass clef, the line notes can be memorized with "Good Boys Do Fine Always", and the space notes can be memorized with "All Cows Eat Grass".
   3. For the alto clef, the notes on the lines can be memorized with "Fat Alley Cats Eat Garbage", and the space notes with "Good Boys Do Fine".

A Short History of the Clef

The first dots on lines were just meant to vaguely point singing monks in the right direction so they could sing in (arguable) unison. The nice thing about these was that you could start singing in whichever pitch suited you best. As long as you got your intervals reasonably right, no one cared which exact tone you started out on.

Around the 12th century, the monks felt like adding more voices to their choral music and thus invented polyphony. Suddenly, it wasn't enough to sort of know whether your voice needed to go up or down. If you had multiple instruments playing their own intricate melodies, and you wanted the result to sound good, you had to make sure that every musician knew exactly which tone they were supposed to play.

Late Medieval and early Baroque Composers came up with a solution we are still using today: to define a point on the staff lines that marked one note clearly on the staff, and thus all other notes could be deduced easily, given some training. Not only that, but they found that for different instruments, different starting points worked best to represent their tonal range without needing a ton of ledger lines. And voilà, clefs were invented and enabled exact and complex compositions for every instrument, whether high or low, to fit neatly on five staff lines.

6 Clef Facts

From "Useful" to "Nice to Know"

• Clefs are usually found at the beginning of each staff line, and stay the same for each voice throughout the arrangement or score. Rarely do they change mid-piece to indicate that another voice or instrument takes over.
• The G and F clefs combine to form what is called a "grand staff" or "great staff" centering around the middle C. This is commonly used for the piano.
• Almost all clefs mark a line and not a space between the lines. It is not known why this is so.
• Although they look like abstract symbols now, clefs started out as alphabetic letters and then grew more abstract through the ages.
• The F clef is the easiest to draw, the C clef takes a little more practice. The G clef is the prettiest one and the most fun to draw once you've got the hang of it.
• Each composer has their own, very recognizable, way of drawing clefs - some have very sloppy hand-clef-writing skills, some carve them out beautifully.