Connecting the treble staff and bass staff

If you’ve been following along with my posts, you’ve learned a little about how the music staff works and how we can use ledger lines to extend the staff to reach notes a little higher or lower on the piano. Now let's take a minute to orient yourself to the staff that you will see when you're playing piano!

If you’re a visual learner, you may like to watch the video above where I walk you through everything. If you prefer to read, here’s a summary of my tutorial!

Orienting the staff to the piano

This is what music will typically look like in your beginner piano music. The treble clef shows us that the notes on this stuff are going to be played on the higher half of the piano and the bass clef shows us that the notes on this staff are going to be played on the lower half of the piano. So how do we distinguish where the middle of the piano is that separates the higher half from the lower half?

We use middle C! Middle C is a line note that is one ledger line below the treble clef and one ledger line above the bass clef.

Finding our first notes on the treble staff

Now we can use what we’ve learned about the order of notes (they go line-space-line-space) to help us figure out what the first line of the treble clef is.

Here I've put another few notes down so you can see how middle C connects to the staff. If this ledger line is C, that means that the very next space note going up is going to be D, and then the very next line note is going to be E. We've counted up line-space-line and now we know that the bottom line in the treble clef is E!

Finding our first notes on the bass staff

We can do the exact same thing in the bass clef. If I know that this ledger line note is C, that means a step down to the next space note is B, and then the step down to the next line note is A. So by following the order of notes—line-space-line or C-B-A—the notes tell us that the top line of the bass clef represents A!

Don’t kid yourself—this is big learning!

This might seem like a short tutorial, but don’t kid yourself. You’re building fundamental skills in learning piano! The truth is, 99% of reading music is knowing how to follow the directionality of the staff, so you’re building deeper skills than you might think!

I hope this post was helpful. If you have any questions about anything I’ve discussed here, please let me know by leaving me a comment. In upcoming posts I'll go into more detail on how to use the staff and how to find other kinds of notes.

Take care!