Clefs: Interactive Summary
The interactive exercise below summarizes most of the concepts covered in the course so far, including the keyboard, treble and bass clefs, the grand staff, octave designations, and ledger lines. Play with it for a while to familiarize yourself further with the names and locations of notes on the grand staff and their relationship to the keyboard. Click "Rotate" to see the keyboard in its standard layout.
Remember that there is a one-to-one correlation between the lines and spaces on the staff and the keys on the keyboard.
The Staff and the Keyboard
Read the notes in the treble and bass clefs and play them fluently and accurately on the keyboard.
In the series of activities that follows, you will be asked to spell pitches using the treble and bass clefs by dragging them onto a staff. You should first become comfortable with the octave register numbers illustrated in the example above. (Note that the bass clef uses primarily octaves 2 and 3 while the treble clef mostly uses octaves 4 and 5).