......................................................................................................................................

Basic

Staff

Elements

The Note

The basic building block in music is the note. A note consists of a specific pitch played for a precise duration. You cannot have music without sounding a note.

Staff Lines and Spaces

A blank staff (a/k/a "stave") serves as the empty grid upon which you will plot each note - and all other musical events - of your composition. The staff consists of five horizontal lines:

Each of the staff's five lines represents a musical pitch, as do the spaces between each of those lines. Every note is positioned either on a line:

or in the space between two lines:

The location of the note on a specific line or in a particular space indicates the pitch of the note. The higher a note appears on the staff, the higher the pitch.

Musical clefs determine which lines and spaces represent which pitches. So, without a clef, we can't know the exact pitch of the notes in the two above examples. (See Notation - Clefs.)