Lesson 32 / 41 9 min
The staff, clefs and ledger lines
The staff, treble, bass and C clefs, the guitar octave clef, ledger lines and 8va/8vb octave lines.
Tab tells you where to put your fingers. Standard notation tells you what the music is: which notes, how long they last, how loud, and how they fit together. It's the language shared by every instrument, so once you can read it you can play from any songbook, method, lead sheet or Guitar Pro file.
From here on, examples show the notation with the matching tab underneath, just like Guitar Pro. Press Play to hear them with a moving cursor, click any note to hear it alone, and use the switch at the top to show notation, tab, or both.
The staff
Music is written on a staff (or stave): five lines with four spaces between them, numbered from the bottom up. Each line and each space is one note of the musical alphabet — A B C D E F G, then A again. The higher a note sits on the staff, the higher it sounds.
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Each step up — line, space, line, space — is the next letter. A note on a line has the line running through its middle; a note in a space sits between two lines.
Clefs
The symbol at the start of every line of music is the clef. It tells you which note each line stands for. Without a clef, the staff is just five lines.
The treble clef (G clef)
Guitar music uses the treble clef. It's also called the G clef because its curl wraps around the second line, marking it as G. Every other note is counted from there.
The lines, from bottom to top, are E G B D F — Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge:
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The spaces, from bottom to top, spell F A C E — the word face:
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Name each note — switch on the tab hint if you get stuck:
Which note is this?
Guitar's octave clef
The guitar actually sounds one octave lower than written. Composers do this so the guitar's low notes don't disappear under a forest of extra lines. Many scores remind you with a small 8 under the treble clef — the "octave treble clef" or "treble 8vb" clef. It's read exactly like the normal treble clef; the 8 only tells you the sound is an octave lower.
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Whether the 8 is printed or not, guitar music is always read this way. A pianist playing the same written notes would sound an octave higher.
The bass clef (F clef)
Low instruments — bass guitar, cello, the piano's left hand — use the bass clef. Its two dots surround the fourth line, marking it as F. Bass players read it every day, and as a guitarist you'll see it in piano scores, band arrangements and theory books.
The bass clef lines are G B D F A — Good Boys Do Fine Always. The spaces are A C E G — All Cows Eat Grass. Unlike guitar music, the bass clef is written at the pitch it sounds.
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The C clefs
A C clef looks like a bold bracketed "B" and points at the line that is middle C. It can slide up and down the staff:
- Alto clef — the middle line is middle C. Used by the viola.
- Tenor clef — the fourth line is middle C. Used for the high register of cello, bassoon and trombone.
You'll rarely meet them as a guitarist, but now you can recognize them. Here is the same melody, starting on middle C, in alto and tenor clef:
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Other clefs you might see
- TAB — written vertically at the start of a tab staff. It isn't a real clef: it just says the lines are strings, not notes.
- Percussion clef — two thick vertical bars. Used for drums; each line or space is a drum or cymbal, not a pitch.
Ledger lines
Notes too high or too low for the staff get short extra lines of their own, called ledger lines. Keep counting the alphabet: one ledger line below the treble staff is C (middle C), the space below it is B, and so on. Above the staff, the first ledger line is A.
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Ledger lines matter a lot on guitar, because the lowest notes sit well below the staff. Here are the six open strings, from the low E to the high e:
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The low E string sits on the third ledger line below the staff, A on the second, D just below the staff, G on the second line, B on the middle line and the high e in the top space.
Reading ledger lines fast
Don't count every line from the staff. Memorize a few landmarks — middle C (one line below), low E (three lines below), high A (one line above), high C (two lines above) — and count from the nearest one.
Octave lines: 8va, 8vb and 15ma
When a passage goes very high, the composer may write it an octave lower to save ledger lines and put 8va with a dashed line above it: play everything under the line an octave higher. 8vb (below the notes) means an octave lower, and 15ma means two octaves higher. The word loco ("in place") or the end of the dashed line tells you to go back to normal.
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Look at the tab: the notes under 8va are played twelve frets up, even though they look low on the staff.
Middle C and octaves
The same letter name repeats every eight notes, so music uses octave numbers to say which one: C4 is middle C, C5 is the C above it, C3 the one below. In this course, note names like "E4" always refer to the written note on the guitar staff.
How to practice reading
- Say the note names out loud before you play them.
- Read a few minutes every day — little and often beats a long weekly session.
- Use the tab only to check yourself, then switch to Notation and read again.
- Keep the tempo slow enough that you never have to stop.
Next: where each written note lives on the guitar neck.