The Staff - Music Theory Lesson 2

Welcome to Aristia Music. Let's talk about the staff. In our previous lesson, we explored how pitch moves from treble or high pitch to bass or low pitch and its relationship to the keyboard. Here are all the pitches found on a keyboard. Since going up in pitch means going to the right of the keyboard and going down in pitch means going to the left of the keyboard, imagine a pitch ladder through which our pitch is going to climb up or down and we're going to place it below the keyboard so you can understand the movement of each pitch as it happens on a keyboard. On the keyboard, the pitch movement happens from one key to the next. Each line and space is going to represent a specific pitch or white key on the keyboard. We're not going to deal with black keys at this time. Here are our clefs. The red line is the middle pitch. The middle pitch key is indicated with a red circle. Adjacent pitches on the keyboard are played by simply going to the next notes. In our pitch ladder, if a pitch is on a line, the adjacent pitch will be in a space. Likewise, if a pitch is in a space, in this case green, the adjacent pitch will be on a line, red. In order to stay consistent with the concept of pitches being high and low, the keyboard will need to be moved to its side. The middle key pitch is highlighted in red. We will then add a treble clef to the right side of the keyboard and the bass clef on the left side of the keyboard. We're going to mark the point where the two clefs meet with a red line. This red line is also going to be our middle pitch key. Next, a black circle will represent which key or pitch we are playing. In this case, it's the middle pitch where the treble and bass clefs meet. When a pitch, in this case a black circle, moves up a key or up from a line in our pitch ladder, it will go into a space highlighted in white. When the pitch, again the black circle, moves up a key from a space, it will go into a line highlighted in black. We're going to move three pitches up. Now that we did that, let's analyze what happened on the pitch ladder and on the keyboard. Here, we move up from a line into a space, and that's one. Here, we move from a space onto a line, and that's two. Lastly, we move up from a line into a space, and that's three. We've successfully moved up three pitches. This means that we've also moved up three keys on the piano. We only moved from key to key, which moved us from line to space in our pitch ladder. Starting at our middle pitch again, we're going to move three pitches down. Let's listen. Let's analyze what happened on the keyboard and our pitch ladder. We move down from a line into a space, and that's one. We move down from a space onto a line, and that's two. Lastly, we move down from a line into a space, and that's three. Now that you understand the concept of moving from pitch to pitch and key to key on the keyboard, we're going to reduce the number of steps on our pitch ladder. This means we're going to reduce the number of lines and spaces in order to make reading the pitches much easier. As you can see, we have a full range of pitch. That means that all of the keys on the keyboard are represented with lines and spaces. Since most music we listen to is within the range of a human voice, meaning it could be sung by a human voice, we're going to allow for the human range of voice to be represented by the pitch ladder. Now that we've done that, we are going to focus on the central pitches. The red line will stay to show where the two clefs meet. We now have two sets of five lines. Each set is called a staff. A musical staff is a set of five parallel horizontal lines and four spaces that indicate the precise pitch of musical sounds. Each staff here represents a pitch range. The treble represents mid to high pitch range and the bass represents mid to low pitch range. By placing both staffs together or both clefs together, as we have done here from the beginning, gives it the name of grand staff. Just because we hit the other steps in our pitch ladder, which are the lines and spaces, out of view, it doesn't mean they're no longer there. Imagine you're playing the piano but you don't need the notes at the top or the very bottom. Well, you're not going to play them but they're still there. If you need those pitches in the pitch ladder that are at the extreme sides, you can summon them. But this will be the subject for a future lesson. In the last lesson, we listened to simple melodies and saw how pitch moved by imagining the sounds moving far away or close up. Let's listen to them again but now let's see exactly how these melodies move on the keyboard and the grand staff. We're going to see their precise movement. Number one. Number two. Number three. In this lesson, you've learned about the staff, the grand staff and how pitch moves up and down the staff. In the next lesson, we're going to explore tones and semitones so don't miss it and click in the link below. If you like this video, make sure to like and subscribe to help me continue bringing you more free music lessons. In the meantime, have a musical day and I'll see you in the next one.