How a staff works

Western music is written on a staff: five horizontal lines with four spaces between them. Every line and every space stands for a pitch, and pitches get higher as you move up the page. That is the whole idea. Everything else — clefs, ledger lines, sharps — is bookkeeping on top of it.

Lines and spaces

Nine positions fit on a single staff: five lines and four spaces, bottom to top. A note sitting on a line is drawn with the line running through its middle; a note in a space sits cleanly between two lines. Neighbouring positions are neighbouring pitches, so a melody that steps up one position at a time is moving through the scale one note at a time.

• A note one position higher is the next note up.
• A note that jumps three positions is a bigger leap in sound.
• Two notes on the same position are the same pitch.

The clef sets the anchor

On its own, the staff is just lines — it doesn't say which pitches. The clef at the far left fixes one reference point, and the rest follow. The treble clef curls around the line that means G; the bass clef's two dots straddle the line that means F. Once you know one line, you can count the rest.

Going off the edge

Music doesn't stay inside five lines. When a pitch runs above or below the staff, you draw short ledger lines — little extensions of the staff, added one at a time — to keep counting. They are the staff's way of admitting it ran out of room without starting over.

Read the staff enough and you stop counting lines at all: the shape of the melody on the page starts to look like the shape of the melody in the air.