Bass clef notes

Bass clef

The bass clef is normally used for the left hand in piano music. Low instruments like the cello, double bass, and bassoon mostly read from the bass clef. It is an F clef because the two dots are on either side of the fourth line up which is an F below Middle C.

Bass clef

The only F-clef still in use is the bass clef, with the clef placed on the fourth line. Since it is the only F-clef commonly encountered, the terms "F-clef" and "bass clef" are often regarded as synonymous.

Bass clef is used for the cello, double bass and bass guitar, bassoon and contrabassoon, bass recorder, trombone, tuba, and timpani. It is used for baritone horn or euphonium when their parts are written at concert pitch, and sometimes for the lowest notes of the horn. Baritone and bass voices also use bass clef, and the tenor voice is notated in bass clef if the tenor and bass are written on the same staff. Bass clef is the bottom clef in the grand staff for harp and keyboard instruments. Double bass, bass guitar, and contrabassoon sound an octave lower than the written pitch; some scores show an "8" beneath the clef for these instruments to differentiate from instruments that sound at the actual written pitch.

The lowest note is C2, is one ledger line below staff and has the frequency of 65.41Hz.

Baritone clef

When the F-clef is placed on the third line, it is called the baritone clef. Baritone clef was used for the left hand of keyboard music (particularly in France; see Bauyn manuscript) and for baritone parts in vocal music. A C-clef on the fifth line creates a staff with identical notes to the baritone clef, but this variant is rare.

Sub-bass clef

When the F-clef is placed on the fifth line, it is called the sub-bass clef. It was used by Johannes Ockeghem and Heinrich Schütz to write low bass parts, by Monsieur de Sainte-Colombe for low notes on the bass viol, and by J. S. Bach in his Musical Offering.

It is the same as the treble clef, but two octaves lower, making the top line F3 (174.614Hz) and the bottom line E2 (82.41Hz).

Placement on the staff

Theoretically, any clef may be placed on any line. With five lines on the staff and three clefs, there are fifteen possibilities for clef placement. Six of these are redundant because they result in an identical assignment of the notes—for example, a G-clef on the third line yields the same note placement as a C-clef on the bottom line. Thus there are nine possible distinct clefs when limiting their placement to the lines. All have been used historically: the G-clef on the two bottom lines, the F-clef on the three top lines, and the C-clef on the four bottom lines. The C-clef on the topmost line has also been used, but is equivalent to the F-clef on the third line, giving a total of ten historically attested clefs placed on the lines. In addition, the C-clef has been used on the third space, i.e. not on a line at all. This is equivalent to the more common suboctave treble clef.

In modern music, only four clefs are used regularly: treble clef, bass clef, alto clef, and tenor clef. Of these, the treble and bass clefs are by far the most common. The tenor clef is used for the upper register of several instruments that usually use bass clef (including cello, bassoon, and trombone), while the alto is most prominently used by the viola. Music for instruments and voices that transpose at the octave is generally written at the transposed pitch, but is sometimes seen written at concert pitch using an octave clef.

A ledger line or leger line is used in Western musical notation to notate pitches above or below the lines and spaces of the regular musical staff. A line slightly longer than the note head is drawn parallel to the staff, above or below, spaced at the same distance as the lines within the staff.

The origin of the word is uncertain, but may have been borrowed attributively from the term for a horizontal timber in a scaffolding, lying parallel to the face of the building and supporting the putlogs. There is no basis to support the often-found claim that the word originates from the French léger, meaning "light" or "slight". The Oxford online dictionary describes the origin of the "leger" spelling as a "variant of ledger" that first appeared in the 19th century.

Although ledger lines are found occasionally in manuscripts of plainchant and early polyphony, it was only in the early 16th century in keyboard music that their use became at all extensive. Even then, printers had an aversion to ledger lines which caused difficulties in setting type, wasting space on the page and causing a messy appearance. Vocal music employed a variety of different clefs to keep the range of the part on the staff as much as possible; in keyboard notation a common way of avoiding ledger lines was the use of open score on four staves with different clefs.

Except for woodwind players, who prefer ledger lines to 8^va notation because they associate fingerings with staff positions, notes that use at least four ledger lines make music more difficult to read. For easier readability, the composer would usually switch clefs or use the 8^va notation. Some transposing instruments, such as the piccolo, double bass, guitar, and the tenor voice, transpose at the octave to avoid ledger lines.

Notation of tuba, trombone, and euphonium parts always uses ledger lines below the bass staff, and never the 8^va bassa notation.

Music for bass clef instruments, such as the cello, bassoon or trombone, use tenor clef for the high notes rather than the treble clef. Alto clef is used for the viola, the alto trombone, and for the tenor trombone parts in Russian repertoire. Bass trombone and tuba use the bass clef only.

A ledger line is also used to support a half rest or whole rest where there are multiple voices on one staff and such a rest is forced above or below the staff. (The rare double whole rest is suspended between two ledger lines in this situation.)

Overview

Scientific pitch notation (SPN), also known as American standard pitch notation (ASPN) and international pitch notation (IPN), is a method of specifying musical pitch by combining a musical note name (with accidental if needed) and a number identifying the pitch's octave.

Although scientific pitch notation was originally designed as a companion to scientific pitch, the two are not synonymous. Scientific pitch is a pitch standard—a system that defines the specific frequencies of particular pitches. Scientific pitch notation concerns only how pitch names are notated, that is, how they are designated in printed and written text, and does not inherently specify actual frequencies. Thus, the use of scientific pitch notation to distinguish octaves does not depend on the pitch standard used.

Nomenclature

The notation makes use of the traditional tone names (A to G) which are followed by numbers showing which octave they are part of.

For standard A440 pitch equal temperament, the system begins at a frequency of 16.35160 Hz, which is assigned the value C₀.

The octave 0 of the scientific pitch notation is traditionally called the sub-contra octave, and the tone marked C₀ in SPN is written as ,C or C, or CCC in traditional systems, such as Helmholtz notation. Octave 0 of SPN marks the low end of what humans can actually perceive, with the average person being able to hear frequencies no lower than 20 Hz as pitches.

The octave number increases by 1 upon an ascension from B to C. Thus, A₀ refers to the first A above C₀ and middle C (the one-line octave's C or simply c′) is denoted as C₄ in SPN. For example, C₄ is one note above B₃, and A₅ is one note above G₅.

The octave number is tied to the alphabetic character used to describe the pitch, with the division between note letters 'B' and 'C', thus:

• "B₃" and all of its possible variants (B𝄫, B♭, B, B♯, B𝄪) would properly be designated as being in octave "3".
• "C₄" and all of its possible variants (C𝄫, C♭, C, C♯, C𝄪) would properly be designated as being in octave "4".
• In equal temperament "C♭₄" is the same frequency as "B₃".