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Meaning of Clefs. Episode 4 Bass Clef Space Notes

Updated: Jul 3, 2021


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Hi, my name is Chris from ‘Chris at the Piano’ and today we are looking at the meaning behind the bass clef and how that relates to the letter names. On the bass clef stave I have a bass clef here already so let's draw the space notes, on the first space, second space, third space, and fourth space.


In the last video we spoke about the bass clef telling us where F3 was and this line was F3. From this we can work out the next note after F is G and the note before F is E so let's put those down G and E. We can carry on working letter names out by where the F3 is located but to make it easy we have a little rhyme. The rhyme is ‘All Cows Eat Grass’ so let's put that on, ‘All Cows Eat Grass’. Now we've got certain pitches here to consider as well and this is the A below the C so this is A2 as it's low down on the stave. This is C3, E3 and G3.


On the worksheet that you can download from the website the rhyme is detailed here, and if you want to have something else instead of ‘All Cows Eating Grass’ you can write your own rhyme here. Do let me know what your favorite rhyme is in the comments below. When you've completed this there is a worksheet as well where you can add the letter names to the notes you have four lines of that when you get down to these two lines at the bottom you have to draw your own notes in as crotchets or quarter notes.


To do that you color in the note head and draw a stem up on the right hand side if the note is below line three and if it's above line three color in the note and the stem goes down on the left hand side like so.


Make sure that the stems are at right angles to the stave, the note head is coloured in neatly and that the stems are around about four lines long.


I hope this has been helpful for you, these rhymes are great to help you get a hang of the notes but do learn them using flashcards as well. You can get flashcards on your smartphone or on your tablet that you can download from the app store.


There are many different flash card games online and you can print out flashcards from our website which is musicacademyhub.com. There's also bingo games and domino's games and all sorts of things. It is really important that you can read these notes quickly and easily.


The next video in this series is about the bass clef and the treble clef the alto and the tenor, episode five. Episode six is going to go into how to read the notes on the alto clef Ihope you join me for the next episode.


Thank you for watching this one and if it has been of any help please do like and subscribe see you next time bye for now.



Chris Caton-Greasley LLCM(TD) MA (Mus)(Open)

Ethnographic Musicologist, Teacher, Researcher

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