The Guitar Clef

So, as you might already know if you’ve read this post, musical notes are written on five horizontal lines that are, together, called the “Stave”. Notes that are higher in pitch are written higher up, and notes that are lower in pitch are written lower down.

However, this isn’t the full picture. I mean, what we have so far is great…but it’s all relative- i.e. you can say that one note is higher than another, but you can’t tell which note is, say, a “C” and which one is an “A”. What we need is a reference point that fixes where one of the notes is, so that we can count up and down from that to get the others, right?

Well, we do have those, and they’re called “clefs”.

The Treble Clef

The clef that we use for guitar is technically called the “treble clef”, but it can also be referred to as the “G Clef” because it tells us where “G” is on the stave. For example, here is a treble clef:

It kinda looks a bit like a stylised “G”, and the red line (which I’ve added in for emphasis, it’s not really red!) here is where the clef is telling us the “G” note lives (inside the “swirly bit”).

From this the rest of the notes can be worked out- the space above the G is an A, and the line above that is a B…and so on…

The Guitar Clef

…but wait! Which “G” is it referring to? There are several- third fret on the low E string, the open G string, the third fret on the high E…

The “G” in the example above is the one on the 12th fret of the G string. Not much use for us guitarists, huh? Just think: if that’s the 12th fret on the G string, then the G string itself would have to be the G below that, and then the low E string is going to be way off the bottom of the page somewhere…

…so what do we do? We put a little “8″ underneath the treble clef, like this:

…and now the “G” line from before is the G a whole octave (12 frets) lower- the same as the open G string. The notes of the open strings of the guitar can now be written like this:

…sometimes the “8″ is missed out below the treble clef, we just assume it’s (or it’s effects are) there if the music is written for guitar!

So there you have it: the “guitar clef”. Exactly one octave below the treble clef- so if you’re ever trying to play piano sheet music on guitar, remember that the guitar will sound an octave lower than the piano when playing the same stuff (as piano music is written using standard treble clef)!

If you have any questions, please leave a comment below.
Rob.

October 7, 2011 at 2:52 pm | Music Theory | No comments