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Hi all,

I have a student who is really struggling to remember the notes associated with the ledger lines and spaces above and below the treble and bass clef staves.

I was wondering if any of you had any tips and tricks to help him remember?

Have you tried flashcards? There are free, printable versions on the internet

Actually I normally do for notes on the stave but have never done so for ledger lines.

Do you know of any sites with printable version before I start googling?

This set has some above the stave... you can always print, add lines and the associated notes for more drills

http://makingmusicfun.net/pdf/lesson_resources/flash-cards-tc.pdf

There is also a bass clef on the same web site

If the student is young enough to like this then you could try a picture I like to draw --

Treble clef staff, draw some trees and flowers around the staff, this is the land

Bass clef staff, draw some waves on top and fish swimming around, this is the deep water

The G on top of the treble clef staff is a Giraffe G: whole note drawn with little giraffe horns and a long neck and maybe a nose
The D below the treble clef staff is a Dog Nose D: whole note drawn at the end of a dog's head pointed downward sniffing the ground, mine always looks a bit like Snoopy

The B above the bass clef staff is Bubble B floating on top of the water: draw a few whole notes of different sizes
The F below the bass clef staff is Flounder Fish F, a flat fish hiding on the bottom: I just draw a flat fish shape around the whole note

They can play the notes from the picture in different orders as a memory exercise at first, and then from time to time in repertoire when notes need a reminder, you can draw the giraffe horns attached to the note or the dog head or the fish around the note (haven't figured out what to do for bubbles yet) instead of writing in the note name, helps them find the right octave quickly too, which is a special issue for Suzuki students and others whose ear-playing is good.

Do you use the landmark + intervallic reading approach? High C and Low C are both landmark notes, and my students count intervals from there.

The trick is to introduce one or two ledger line notes at a time. Don't overwhelm the student by introducing too many ledger line notes at once.

Do they realiza that notes on the ledger lines spell ACE from bottom to top? with that trick even my youngest remembers.

That works for the outer ledger lines, but the inner ledger lines don't spell anything.

Of course, sorry. Those need a different approach until the interval can be recognized automatically. I sometime whish I had a USB slot in my brain to directly upload information

I would suggest writing songs out in the ledger line territory. For instance, Twinkle Twinkle above the treble in G major.

I once wrote a piece for a student who had the same difficulty which used many ledger lines. That would be another route.

Thank you for the replies.

I like the ACE idea - funny how these things aren't apparent at first (rather like the high an low C)

What about the notes about the bass clef? Is there a way to help him remember there. The D and B surround Middle C always seem an area of confusion too, let alone anything beyond that.

As a child I was a very bad reader, struggling with "Every Good Boy Deserves Figs", or something like that, trying to learn the name of each note on the staff and then finding that note on the piano. Finally I realised that it was much faster, and easier, to associate positions on each staff directly with a key on the piano, and then (if necessary) to see what the note name was. In a very short time, I found I was able to sight-read, at the correct speed, pieces which earlier I would have slowly struggled through, note by note. I ended up making a living as a collaborative pianist, where sight-reading skills are essential.

You need to visualise on the keyboard where the lines of a staff will fall. You need to get used to this rule: staff lines fall on every other white note. Here's an idea. It should help in learning to read both notes on the staff and on ledger lines. On a sturdy piece of cardboard, make a large diagram similar to this one:


The essential thing is that the treble and bass staves are closer together than usual, only separated by the single ledger line for middle C, so that each line of a staff is aligned with the corresponding key on the image of the piano keyboard. Ideally this would be printed on a piece of whiteboard, so that you could write on it and then erase what you've written.

You can place the diagram on the music desk oriented as shown, with the staves as normal and the keyboard rotated through 90°, but you can also turn it so that the keyboard is oriented correctly and the staves run from top to bottom.

This idea isn't new, by the way: you can buy something very similar from these people.

edit: I've no idea why the forum software puts so much space between the image and the text that follows it. Can I do something about that?

Do you teach intervallic reading? None of my students who started with intervallic reading has that problem.

A firm foundation in directional and intervallic reading prevents the kinds of issues you are describing. Students need to establish that going up on the staff is going to the right on the piano, and vice versa. Then you give them a couple of landmark notes to strategically place them across the keyboard in various positions.

As the students "hunt" for the first note in each system, they gradually come to memorize all the letter names. This takes time, and the more naturally the learning takes place, the more permanent the association will be between notes on the staff and keys on the piano.

Hi AZN,

Thank you for your replies (and thank you to the others too!)

I largely teach from Piano Adventure so, yes, interval reading is encouraged from a young age. I also, seem to, constantly remind students about the piano travelling in the same direction as the stave. For some reason though the issue of the notes above the bass clef persist.

A few tricks I've used:

Middle D, written in the bass clef, looks like a lowercase D lying on its back. I call it "lazy middle D." One of my students figured that one out.

I say this rhyme: "High A, Low E look like middle C."

High E looks like a letter E with its three ledger lines.

I also use the Music Pathways method, which introduces high and low C as the very first two notes (weeks before middle C even!). So my students generally see ledger-line notes as about as easy as any other notes.

MRC's picture really started me thinking about the reasons why problems in reading notation are so common. I suffer from those too.

It takes time and work to learn reading for everyone I'm sure, but for people with some sort of NLD (if you don't know what that is, google "non-verbal learning disabilities"), the problems in reading notation fast enough may seem to be just impossible to overcome. Fast reading has to be intuitive and if one's intuition doesn't work correctly things go wrong.

Conventional notation may be economical for writing music, but there are several "asymmetries" in it and those can be difficult to handle for some brain. The lines and spaces refer to white keys always. So there are 5 lines while there are 12 keys in the octave. This causes the same notes to alternate between lines and spaces on different octaves. It also causes a strong association of black notes being "anomalies" of the white notes, when actually all the notes in the chromatic scale are basically equal. This association can make it very difficult to perceive scales and intervals starting on sharps or flats.

There are other examples of unwanted consequences that can defy one's natural perception. When you read the upper staff for example, going up the outer lines are e and f. But when you come down the outer spaces are e and f as well. So e-f going up is bigger than e-f coming down. Why such asymmetry?

Things like that can completely throw off one's intuition, causing problems in reading. It's too late to change the notation now, but it may help to analyze and understand in one's mind the reasons why the notation feels wrong. Then one can try to intellectually compensate with the lack of correct perception and intuition. This probably requires a level of abstract thinking and studying music theory not possible for young children, but for older kids and adults it may be worth investigating if the problems don't seem to disappear by reading practice only. With persistent reading problems it hardly helps to blame the victim, it would be better to acknowledge that the notation is a compromise, created probably more for composers' than keyboard players' needs and try to work from that.

I have explained it a couple of times, that like people, you are seen in different directions, but YOU are the same person.
You are a child, a grandchild, a sibling, a student, a friend, etc...
but you are the same person.

An older person looks down/lower to see you.
A smaller person looks up to see you.
A friend is on the same level.

Like notes, people can come from all directions, but YOU are ONE person, one note, no matter the direction others are coming from, no matter their perspective.




Also,
worksheets showing notes around middle C, with and then without ledger lines, and having the student PLAY the actual notes-
bass C is NOT middle C, and so on...

I usually tell them that it is in singing range, for middle C area. For above treble and below bass, we usually know intervals well by then, and just confirm.

The picture that MRC posted is also quite good. I have a similar one, from a music teacher friend who had it on overhead projector plastic paper that I photocopied (??!?) and it has been a good "hands-on" approach.

Keep up the good work.

Any teacher that simply writes in all the note names for the student is not teaching. I have seen that done, and no learning takes place. (Not that any teacher here does that...I like to believe that we are here to help and better ourselves and our students, not look for easy ways out!)

It may take a while to find the way to make it stick, but having that student have a Ligtbulb moment, Oh, I Get It! is so worth it!!