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Lesson 2: The Grand Staff

When we talk about "playing by ear," we often mean being able to play music without being able to "read music" at all. Some people may be able to do this, but for this class, it will help me explain some ideas - and it will help you understand them - if we learn a little bit about musical notation.

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In the days before MP3s, before CDs, before cassette tapes and MIDI... the way people shared music with each other was to write it down using musical notation. A person in London would write down a song and send those pages to someone in Vienna, who could sit down at their piano and hear the song. Fortunately, these days we DO have ways to share music in recorded form, and this lesson will include lots of recordings to help you understand how printed music connects to things we've already learned on the keyboard.

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Once again - there are a LOT of audio clips, but each one is short and explains ONE idea.

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Play this clip to begin learning about the grand staff. I'll explain the G clef and the F clef and "ledger lines." We'll also learn our first two landmark notes on the musical staff (Bass F and Treble G).

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Play this clip to learn how the Grand Staff works as a picture of the keyboard. Each line and space represents one white key on the keyboard. On the drawing of the keyboard below, I've marked the same notes that I show on the staff above.

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Click to learn about the two-part names of notes - "Low C," "Bass C," "Middle C," "Treble C," and "High C" each refer to a different key on the keyboard, even though they are all the "C" note. Here is our grand staff again:

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Click to follow along as I move up the keyboard from "Low C" to each of the Landmark notes on the keyboard. Here is our drawing of the keyboard with the note names written to help you out.

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Click here to learn about the meaning of "octaves" - sets of 8 white keys. Here is a picture from one of our earlier lessons that you can use to follow along as I explain octaves.

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Click to hear about an exercise you can do to help you learn the Landmark notes on the staff and the keyboard. Click on the "Worksheets" icon just below to bring up a PDF file that you can print out for the exercise. You will probably want to print a few copies of the worksheet, as repetition will help you commit the information to memory.

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Click here to see a PDF copy of the worksheet you will use for this exercise. The worksheet will open in a new tab or window in your web browser, so you may need to look around for it...

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Click to work through the process of playing the different Landmark notes on the keyboard with me. To help you practice, I'll play some background music while you play the Landmark notes. Here, again, is our diagram of where the Landmark notes appear on the keyboard:

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Here is another exercise; in this one, we play the "G" Landmark notes.

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And here's another exercise, playing the "F" Landmark notes.

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And now we'll put it all together, playing ALL the Landmark notes from the bottom up.

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Hooray, You Made It Through Lesson 2 !!!

Well... we covered a LOT of material in this lesson, didn't we? I hope everything made sense - but if you still have questions, click the "Ask Rhonda" button to send me an email and I'll try to answer your questions as soon as I can!

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