What is a stave?

A stave is a system for notating pitch in music.

About a thousand years ago in Europe monks living in monasteries would sing their prayers using a type of melody called plainchant. They needed to sing a different plainchant melody for every day of the year. These were learned by ear, by singing them over and over again until they could remember them, much in the same way as you might learn a pop sing. The problem was that it would take up to 10 years to learn all the plain chants this way. There was a very real need for a system of writing music down. The idea for staves came from a monk called Guido d’Arezzo or Guido of Arezzo. He was a choir master for monks and lived in the early 11th century. He is responsible for giving us the stave and also what we now know as Do Re Mi or Solfege.

Why do we need clefs?

Without a clef we would not know which notes go on which line or space. Basically, clefs take one line of the stave and tell you what note that is. You can then work out all the other notes from that reference note. Also each clef was designed to fit the range of a voice onto the stave. 

Treble Clef

Treble clef is the clef for the treble or soprano voice (a treble is a boy soprano). It is a G clef because it decorates the second line of the stave and tells you that that is the line that the note G will be on.

Here is an easy way to remember the names of the notes on the lines in treble clef:

Remembering the spaces is even easier as they spell the word FACE. So its “faces in spaces”.

Bass Clef

Most men’s voices fit nicely in the bass clef. The bass clef covers the range of the bass voice and is an F clef because it decorates the fourth line of the stave and tells you that that is the line that the note F will be on.

Here are the names of the notes on lines in bass clef.

And here are the spaces.

Alto Clef

Altos and tenors use C clefs. These may seem strange to you unless you play the viola or ‘cello but once you understand them they are easy because they decorate the line middle C is on. The alto clef is particularly useful since it extends a fifth above and below middle C. The top line is the dominant and the bottom line is the subdominant of C