From the course: Beginning Acoustic Guitar Music Lessons

The notes and the staff

- All right, next section is on reading music. And reading music is so important because it gives you a visual representation for what you're hearing. Now I've always loved the way that music looks on the page. It's so fascinating to me and it allows you to understand it in such more depth. So I strongly suggest you guys check out this next section. Lesson one, The Notes and the Staff. We use five horizontal lines as a sort of playing field for our notes. This is called the staff. The natural notes, notes without sharps or flats, are laid out on the lines and the spaces of the staff. Lower notes are near the bottom of the staff. Higher notes are near the top. A clef sign at the the beginning of the staff indicates which notes are represented by which lines and spaces. When the G clef sits on the second line from the bottom of the staff, it is called treble clef. The line it encircles is called G. This is a treble clef. This is the note G. Here are pitches going up. Here are pitches going down. Now that you know the second line from the bottom is G, all the other notes can be related to that line. For example, the space under it is F, the note before G in the musical alphabet. The space above the G line is A, the next note in the musical alphabet. E, F, G, A, B, C, D, E, F. Learning the notes on the staff. There are several memory devices you can use to quickly learn all the notes on the staff. One is to separate the notes on the lines and the notes in the spaces. The notes on the lines give you the first letter of each word of this sentence, every good beginner does fine. The notes in the spaces themselves spell the word face.

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