Getting more out of the staff with ledger lines!
Recently, I’ve been published video introductions to the basics of reading music. Today I’d like to expand on a previous video where I talked about how the music staff works so you can learn how we get more notes out of these lines and spaces!
If you’re a visual learner, you might want to watch the YouTube video above. But if you prefer to read, what follows is a summary of the points made in the video.
Why we want to expand the staff sometimes
We already discussed that the staff is where we write our music and is made up of five lines. Each line represents a different note on the piano. In between those lines are four spaces, each of which also represent notes on the piano. That means that every staff can represent up to nine different notes.
But there are way more than nine notes on the piano! So what do we do if we want to write notes that are higher or lower on the keyboard?
We can actually extend the staff a little bit to help us reach higher and lower notes on the keyboard!
How we can extend the staff
In my introduction to the staff, I explained how the order of notes goes line-space-line-space. When we get to the top of the staff, we don’t have to stop—we can just keep going with that same pattern. We can place another note above the staff and imagine it's a space note. Then, if we want to go even a little higher, we can add an extension line—we call this a ledger line—so we can write the next line note. The same thing can happen at the bottom of the staff.
If we're not done here, we can keep adding imaginary spaces and ledger lines to continue extending the staff in either direction. So now you can see that by using ledger lines we've been able to extend the range of our staff by eight notes!
How am I going to learn all these notes??
Now you could use as many ledger lines and imaginary spaces as you want to extend the range of your notes from as high on the piano as you can go to as low as the piano as you can go. If you’re a beginner piano player, this may seem really overwhelming! How on earth can you be expected to learn them all??
The good news is that you don’t have to learn them all. Even experienced musicians don’t learn them all! (We have other tricks that I can share in future blog posts.)
What’s important is that you focus only on the ledger lines that are important to you right now. I would say that 99% of the songs that you're going to learn in your first five years of playing piano are going to stay limited to just one ledger line. So my advice would be to just familiarize yourself with those notes!
The next five years after that, 90% of your songs are going to stay limited to only two ledger lines! So if you're just starting piano, I wouldn't worry too much about learning notes that go higher or lower than that.
Do you have ledger lines in your music?
So now that you know a little bit more about ledger lines, I wonder if you see any of the music that you're trying to learn? If so, comment below! How many ledger lines above or below the staff does your music go? Let me know!