Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Piano Teachers Forum E BOOK ON LEARNING LEDGER LINES

OK, has anyone come across this site, the ebook sounds interesting. I'm tempted to buy it but I don't want to get 'ripped off'. Does anyone know about it or does anyone have any rhymes etc. to teach ledger lines. Thanks
http://www.musicwithease.com/read-ledger-line-notes.html

Ledger lines function just like any other line or space on the staff. What's the problem? Perhaps we can help you out without you having to spend the money.

I had 9 yrs. of classical lessons as a child
and I've been playing for more than 30 yrs.
and I work on some very advanced pieces,
and I still can't read ledger line notes
without laboriously counting the lines in
them.

If I thought this could get me reading them
fluently, I would buy it in a second. But
I'm not biting. This looks like a complete
ripoff.

Hmm interesting. Does anyone know of any rhymes etc. that make learning the ledger lines easier. We all know Every Good Boy Deserves Fruit and FACE for the treble cleff and All Cows Eat Grass and Good Boys Deserve Fun Always. Initially I used to say them every time I played music but eventually they sunk in. It would be good to learn something similar for the ledger lines or a poem or something just like the link makes out. I'll be interested to hear other peoples' ideas. Thanks.

I don't really count the lines, as much as I glance at the physical distance. For example, I know that one ledger line about the treble clef is A. So I look and if it looks like 1 line above that, then I know it's a third higher, which is C. If it looks like 2 lines above that, then I know it's a fifth higher, which is E. It's kind of like a triad: the lines above the staff are the odd numbered notes of the chord (1, 3, 5, or A, C, E) and the spaces are the even numbered notes (2, 4, or B, D).

Eventually, I just learned what it looked like to have 1 line or 2 lines or 3 lines without even having to count, and I'm so used to playing 1 line as A and 2 lines as C and 3 lines as E, that I don't even have to really think about it anymore. Of course, the spaces then I learned in relation to the lines, and now I don't really need to think about them anymore. (Though I still have to think a little when there are 4 or 5 or 6 ledger lines, simply because they don't really appear so much in the music that I've played.)

It's a lot like how I learned the regular lines within the staff. In the beginning I had to think about it, count lines, name letters, etc, but now I just look and I automatically know what it is.

There's no need to spend any money to learn ledger lines. This free web site has note and key trainers that let you learn and test yourself on ledger lines and much more. The note trainer can be set to show up to four ledger lines above or below the grand staff. http://www.musictheory.net/

Taffy, I don't care much for rhymes. I did end up memorizing EGBDF, pronounced just as I have written it, once I worked on formal theory. But the note names also follow the alphabet. You memorized some 26 letters as a child, and here you only need to be able to recite 7 of them forward and backward.

I see key areas on the staff: the C in the space of the treble and bass staff, then the C's that are on the leger lines. The treble clef is actually a stylized G that circles G, and the bass clef puts a giant dot on F and surrounds it with two little dots on G and E, which incidentally also mark G and E. So there you have four notes already.

The people in the past were probably much more pictoral than we are now. When you get to the leger lines, your main notes to notice are C.

C6 is two leger lines up: I have a picture in my mind of two lines with the top one holding the note. C2 (the one below the bass staff - did I get the hame right?) is two leger lines down below the bass staff. It's the same picture but in reverse. What's above the C has to be D, and what's below it has to be B, because that's the alphabet.

Middle C is the first leger line up from the bass staff, and the first leger line down from the treble staff - mirror images.

You can use these to start orienting yourself around the leger lines. I wrote out hundreds of notes while I was learning theory, and also drilled on the site Faucon mentioned. I also used the most basic introductory Czerny. He introduces the notes in groups that span five fingers, and if you practice playing each of those small exercises by telling yourself what those notes are, how they related to the keyboard and the black and white keys, that pattern stays in your mind. He goes up to the G above C6. I spent about a week on each grouping just for the purpose of getting to know these notes.

There is also a drill on this site.