How to read the bass clef
The bass clef is the lower staff of piano music, mostly your left hand. Its five lines and four spaces each stand for one white key, and you read them fastest not by reciting a rhyme but by knowing a few landmark notes on sight and stepping from them.
The lines and the spaces
From the bottom up, the lines are G, B, D, F and A and the spaces are A, C, E and G. Each step up the staff, from a line to the space just above it, is the next white key to the right.
The landmark notes
Learn these 4 by sight first. Every other note is a step or a skip from one of them.
- C2, low C: on the second ledger line below the staff
- C3, bass C: in the second space up
- F3, the note between the clef's two dots: the bass clef is an F clef: on the fourth line up
- C4, middle C: on the first ledger line above the staff
The trap
The two clefs put different notes in the same places. A note on the bottom line is G in the bass clef but E in the treble clef, and the same holds all the way up: each bass clef note is two letters above the treble clef note in the same place. If you learned one clef first, the old names will come to mind; that's the habit the drill breaks.
Now read them. A drill of the 13 notes in this guide: play each card on a MIDI keyboard or the keys on screen as soon as you can read it. Every answer is timed and goes on your reading map.
Start the drillNext: How to read ledger lines