Why guitar music does not fit into the staff
Hi Visitor
Have you ever tried to read sheet music written for guitar?
If you’re anything like most guitar players, the answer is probably a pretty resounding ‘no’. Why read sheet music when tabs are right there?
But, if you have lost your way as a guitarist and succumbed to the lures of standard notation, you may have stumbled immediately on the most obvious problem:
Which C on the guitar is the middle C on the score?
And if you spent just a little time thinking about it, you have also noticed an issue with the range of the staff music is written on, and the range of the guitar:
Generally speaking, music for the guitar is written on one staff only.
For comparison, on piano it’s written across two staffs, one treble clef and one bass clef. For guitar we use just the treble staff.
But if you are reading music written on treble clef and playing it on the guitar, you’ll start running into some problems pretty quickly.
The issue is that the range of the guitar does not fit neatly into treble - or the bass clef!
If you were a nerd like me you could use the alto clef - but no one uses the alto clef (*) (or at least admits using it...) and it’s generally best to pretend it just doesn’t exist...
So what do you have to do? How do we make the range of the guitar fit neatly into treble clef?
That’s exactly what I’ll be sharing with you in the video below. Watch it and see how to read and write sheet music for the guitar.
Watch the video here: https://musictheoryforguitar.com/sheet-music-guitar-problems.html
(*) Well, nobody except violists (the people who play violas). And they are mercilessly teased from all the other musicians in the orchestra for this.
Enjoy!
Tommaso Zillio
Music Theory Education Expert
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