Day 12: Music Reading 101
Tuesday, August 18th, 2026
Warmup: Music Reading Pretest
Complete the music reading pretest on CTLS Student Coursework.
It is 20 questions and is not a grade.
When you finish, check out these slides. PDF of Music Reading Slides
Work Session: Part 1 — Reading the Staff
Follow along with the Music Reading 101 slides. Take notes — the practice at the end goes much faster if you do.
The Staff
The staff is five lines. Notes sit on the lines and in the spaces between them.
- Notes move in alphabetical order: A B C D E F G, and then it starts over at A.
- Low notes are at the bottom. High notes are at the top.
The Clef
Five bare lines do not tell you anything. A clef gives the staff meaning by locking one specific note to one specific line. Everything else is counted from there.
There are only four clefs in common use, and you are learning two.
| Clef | Also called | What it locks down |
|---|---|---|
| G clef | Treble clef | Shows where G is |
| F clef | Bass clef | Shows where F is |
The Grand Staff
Put the treble clef on top and the bass clef underneath and you get the grand staff. This is what piano music looks like.
The two staves meet in the middle at a note called middle C. Middle C sits on a short line of its own — one ledger line — below the treble staff and above the bass staff. It is the same note either way. It is the hinge the whole system swings on.
Work Session: Part 2 — The Piano Keyboard
A keyboard looks like a wall of identical keys. It is not. The black keys come in groups of two and three, and that pattern repeats forever. Once you can see the groups, you can find any note.
Memorize these four. They are the whole trick.
| Note | How to find it |
|---|---|
| D | D is in “duh” middle of the pair of black keys. |
| E | E is always next to the group of two black keys, on the right. |
| F | F is in “front” of the group of three black keys. |
| B | B is “behind” the group of three black keys. |
Octaves
There are dozens of keys but only seven note names. So the names have to repeat — and they do, every eight notes.
The distance from one C to the next C is an octave. Both keys are called C. The higher one sounds like the same note, only higher. That is why the pattern of black keys repeats: each repetition is one octave.
Whole Steps and Half Steps
This is the last idea today, and it is the one everything next week is built on.
- A half step is the distance from one key to the very next key, with nothing in between. Count the black keys too.
- A whole step is the distance from one key to another with exactly one key in between.
Look at the keyboard while you read these:
- B and C are a half step apart. There is no black key between them.
- E and F are a half step apart. Same reason.
- C and D are a whole step apart. There is a black key sitting between them.
- F and G are a whole step apart.
Most pairs of neighboring white keys are a whole step. Only two pairs — B–C and E–F — are half steps. Those two exceptions are why scales work the way they do, which is where we are headed on Monday.
Work Session: Part 3 — Practice
Reading notes is a skill, not a fact. You do not learn it by understanding it, you learn it by doing it a few hundred times. Start now.
Go to musictheory.net and work through these in order.
- Note Identification — Treble Clef. Open the exercise — try for a perfect score twice.
- Note Identification — Bass Clef. Open the exercise — try for a perfect score twice.
- Keyboard Identification. Open the exercise — you are shown a note name and you click the key.
- Keyboard Reverse. Open the exercise — you are shown a key and you name the note.
If you finish all four, go back to treble clef and beat your own time.
You are going to need the bass clef. Next Thursday you will write a bass line, and it gets written in bass clef. Learning it today is not busywork.
Closing
Tomorrow is a short period because of BEACON testing. We will cover rhythm quickly and then open a new program called MuseScore, which is what we will write music in for the rest of this unit.
Closing Question
Think about this — you may be called on to share your answer out loud.
If a staff is just five lines, and the notes go in alphabetical order, why can’t you read the notes without a clef?
Standards
- MSMTC8.RE.2 — Analyze how the structure and context of varied musical works inform the response (reading pitch notation and keyboard layout as organized systems).
- MSMTC8.CN.2 — Relate musical ideas and works to varied contexts and daily life to deepen understanding (connecting written notation to the piano roll students already use).