All bass clef notes
You can watch this lesson in the video below, or read at your ease under the video.
When you’ve seen my lesson about treble clef notes, you know how to find all the notes on the staff with a treble clef, especially if you remember the trick how to memorize them (the FACE-notes). To easily find all bass clef notes, we also have a little trick. Keep reading to find out how to find all bass clef notes.
How to find all bass clef notes?
The bass clef is mainly for notes from middle C and lower. So this is for the left hand on the piano. This is, however, not a rule. You can display notes on a bass clef that are higher than middle C. And sometimes, but not often, notes on the bass clef are played with the right hand.
To indicate that the staff we’re reading is in bass clef, we use the next bass clef symbol at the beginning of the staff:
On the next staff, you can see all bass clef notes on and in between the 5 lines of the staff:
The highest note, the A on the upper line of the staff, is the A just under the middle C, so a minor 3rd under the middle C.
As I promised you, there’s also a trick to easily remember all bass clef notes. When I display only the notes in between the lines of the staff, we get:
At first sight, those notes A, C, E and G don’t make up a nice word as was the case with the FACE-notes in the treble key. But, the letters of those bass notes form the first letters of the sentence “ALL COWS EAT GRASS”.
With this trick, it’s easy to remember the bass notes in between the lines of the staff. The other notes are then easy to find from those 4 notes.
Ledger lines
As with the treble clef, we can add ledger lines to the staff. When you don’t remember how they work, have a look at the treble clef lesson.
Can you see which note is displayed here?
It’s a (very low) B!
And this one?
Well, this is an important one to remember: it’s the middle C!
The middle C is on the first ledger line above the bass clef staff. Remember that the middle C is also on the first ledger line under the treble clef staff.
Treble and bass clef together
In sheet music for piano, you find the treble clef (generally for the right hand) and the bass clef (generally for the left hand) displayed together as in the figure above.
Now that you learned how to read notes on the bass clef, be sure to practice this regularly. The exercise that is accesible via the link below is ideal for this purpose.
Recommended exercises for bass clef notes:
Place the note on the bass clef on the piano keyboard (only white keys)
Please tell us what you think of this lesson (for example what did you think of the trick to remember the bass clef notes?) by leaving a comment below.