Why the bass clef exists in music. Take the piano, why can’t the left hand on all pieces just be in the treble clef like the right?
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OK, say you put the left hand in treble clef with a note saying ‘play these an octave lower’. There is a notation for this.
Now middle C for the left hand is on the third space, and the C below is on the first lower ledger line. Anything below that gets into many ledger lines, which would be very bugsome.
It would technically work but would be awkward and confusing.
You want notation where it’s common for notes to have like 6 ledger lines?
Most people don’t like excessive ledger lines, so they use the different clefs. Piano is one of the obvious instruments to need the use of different clefs due to the wide range of notes it plays.
The lines on the bass clef are GBDFA. The lines on the treble clef are EGBDF. You could imagine drawing a treble clef right on top of a bass clef and adding in an extra line between them for C, making a single megaclef with 11 lines.
In fact, this used to be a thing, but 11 is quite a lot for humans to keep track of. So it was split into two smaller groups of 5, with the C slipping onto each as an extra temporary line when needed. 5 is a number we can easily figure out at a glance without having to think, so it makes it much more functional for us to read.
Apparently my last response was too short. So here’s the longer version: the reason is because it would be too hard to read the music when playing it. Lot of lines to count. That’s why g clef and c clefs exist. You can actually move the treble clef up and down. It’s just normally placed by default in the most common position we see it.
OK, say you put the left hand in treble clef with a note saying ‘play these an octave lower’. There is a notation for this.
Now middle C for the left hand is on the third space, and the C below is on the first lower ledger line. Anything below that gets into many ledger lines, which would be very bugsome.
It would technically work but would be awkward and confusing.
Apparently my last response was too short. So here’s the longer version: the reason is because it would be too hard to read the music when playing it. Lot of lines to count. That’s why g clef and c clefs exist. You can actually move the treble clef up and down. It’s just normally placed by default in the most common position we see it.
I’m going to assume you know a little bit about the way a piano is laid out and music in general because of this question.
For an instrument like the flute that really only has about three octaves of range, treble clef works great. They start on middle C which is only one ledger line below the treble clef staff, then the treble clef staff covers a little less than two octaves, meaning flute players only ever have to play about one octave of ledger lines above the treble clef staff. Most of what they do is concentrated on or closely around the treble clef staff, making music reading easy and fast.
A piano is very different. It can cover seven octaves, although most of the music is concentrated within the five middle octaves. Therefore, we need to use more than one staff to represent the notes, as five octaves worth of ledger lines above or below a single staff would be kind of wild and difficult to read.
I think your question is: why don’t we just use two treble clefs and assume that the lower treble clef is actually an octave below a higher treble clef? Well, the top line of the treble clef is an F. So for the “left hand treble clef” which F would that be? If it’s the F above middle C for the left hand, then there’s a bunch of overlapping notes that could be written on one staff or the other, and you’re losing out on a lot of real estate since you’re kind of trying to cover a lot of notes with just two staves.
If it’s the F below middle C, then you’ve kind of got this awkward amount of space between the staves where you’re using a lot of ledger lines in between two different staves and it gets a little confusing to read. Plus, they’re not really symmetrical because the left hand staff will have to ledger lines to get up to middle C while the right hand staff will only use one ledger line to get down to it.
When you use a bass clef instead, all of the left hand notes are shifted up by two notes from where they would be on the treble clef. Instead of F, the top line now represents an A. That means that we only need one ledger line to get up to middle C, and the two staves connect smoothly and evenly to represent all the notes in between. It fits much better with our intuitive sense of how the piano is laid out, with middle C being the center of the entire grand staff (bass clef and treble clef together).
Finally, there are other instruments that have smaller ranges that are just better centered from G-A than they are E-G. For example, the voice part of “bass” in a choir is considered to be from the low E to middle C, meaning it’s perfectly centered on the base staff whereas you would need some ledger lines on one side of the treble clef and they would be some notes on the other side of the treble clef that weren’t being used at all. A double bass in the orchestra is similar: its lowest note is an e (one ledger line below the bass clef staff) but it goes up an octave above the bass clef staff. If we changed that to treble clef it would never go below the treble clef at all, stopping on the e of the bottom line, but it would go more than an octave above, making it more difficult to read the ledger lines.
The bass clef is just better in some situations at representing the range of an instrument with the least amount of ledger lines possible. That’s really the reason that we use any clefs at all.
I’m going to assume you know a little bit about the way a piano is laid out and music in general because of this question.
For an instrument like the flute that really only has about three octaves of range, treble clef works great. They start on middle C which is only one ledger line below the treble clef staff, then the treble clef staff covers a little less than two octaves, meaning flute players only ever have to play about one octave of ledger lines above the treble clef staff. Most of what they do is concentrated on or closely around the treble clef staff, making music reading easy and fast.
A piano is very different. It can cover seven octaves, although most of the music is concentrated within the five middle octaves. Therefore, we need to use more than one staff to represent the notes, as five octaves worth of ledger lines above or below a single staff would be kind of wild and difficult to read.
I think your question is: why don’t we just use two treble clefs and assume that the lower treble clef is actually an octave below a higher treble clef? Well, the top line of the treble clef is an F. So for the “left hand treble clef” which F would that be? If it’s the F above middle C for the left hand, then there’s a bunch of overlapping notes that could be written on one staff or the other, and you’re losing out on a lot of real estate since you’re kind of trying to cover a lot of notes with just two staves.
If it’s the F below middle C, then you’ve kind of got this awkward amount of space between the staves where you’re using a lot of ledger lines in between two different staves and it gets a little confusing to read. Plus, they’re not really symmetrical because the left hand staff will have to ledger lines to get up to middle C while the right hand staff will only use one ledger line to get down to it.
When you use a bass clef instead, all of the left hand notes are shifted up by two notes from where they would be on the treble clef. Instead of F, the top line now represents an A. That means that we only need one ledger line to get up to middle C, and the two staves connect smoothly and evenly to represent all the notes in between. It fits much better with our intuitive sense of how the piano is laid out, with middle C being the center of the entire grand staff (bass clef and treble clef together).
Finally, there are other instruments that have smaller ranges that are just better centered from G-A than they are E-G. For example, the voice part of “bass” in a choir is considered to be from the low E to middle C, meaning it’s perfectly centered on the base staff whereas you would need some ledger lines on one side of the treble clef and they would be some notes on the other side of the treble clef that weren’t being used at all. A double bass in the orchestra is similar: its lowest note is an e (one ledger line below the bass clef staff) but it goes up an octave above the bass clef staff. If we changed that to treble clef it would never go below the treble clef at all, stopping on the e of the bottom line, but it would go more than an octave above, making it more difficult to read the ledger lines.
The bass clef is just better in some situations at representing the range of an instrument with the least amount of ledger lines possible. That’s really the reason that we use any clefs at all.
Clefs don’t actually tell you just which note. Notes repeat every octave, right? So each octave has a C and a D and so on. So you might think you can just play a treble clef middle C an octave lower on the left hand and that’d solve the problem. But what you’re actually doing isn’t playing what’s written, you’re mentally transposing it an octave down. Middle C is C4 (the C in the fourth octave) in scientific pitch notation, and if you played it one octave lower you’d be playing C3 (the C in the third octave). On the treble clef that pitch would be four ledger lines beneath the staff. And that’s because the clef doesn’t just tell you which note in any octave, they actually tell you specifically which note in which octave.
Each clef has its own specific range of pitches that it’s best for. Treble clef is best for stuff between middle C and about two octaves up from there. Any higher and you’re reading a ton of ledger lines. Not fun, right?
The opposite is also true: go lower than the middle C and you’re going to be reading ledger lines for days. On the piano, most melodies are written from the middle C and higher, and left hand accompaniment is generally lower than middle C. So left hand is usually written in the bass clef, which is much more suited for that range. If the instrument were different, or the piece of music in a different range of octaves, the composer would usually opt to write using a different clef – for example, cello uses tenor clef because it best represents the most commonly played pitches of the instrument using the least amount of ledger lines.
Here’s a page that I found that visually explains how different clefs work! https://www.dacapoalcoda.com/relation-between-clefs
It’s because the bass notes are lower, and would lie outside the treble clef. It would be akin to saying “why not just put the bass guitar notes on a six string guitar”, same answer, they simply wouldn’t fit and it’s clearer, easier and more simple to read and play if you have them separately.
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