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Topic: Clefs (Read 16882 times) previous topic - next topic

Clefs

1. is there any way to put a percussion clef on nwc
you just make a stave with one line on but you need
a clef that has nothing in it

2. I heard that you can put a c clef on any line of the
stave and it becomes middle c.  Shouldn't there be a
vertical offset thing for clefs to make this possible
on nwc

Re: Clefs

Reply #1 –
#1 is an item for the wish list.  There currently isn't a null clef symbol in the NWC font.  However, if you did find a font with a clef you liked, you could insert it as a text item.

You're perfectly right about the C clef, but this is also true of other clefs as well.  For example, the G clef is now used only as the "treble clef" on the second staff line, but it could formerly be placed elsewhere.  On the bottom line of the staff it was the "soprano clef", and it identified the bottom line as G above middle C.  Similarly, the F clef on the middle line of the staff was the "baritone clef".

The difference between the C clef and the others is that it is still commonly used in more than one position:  On the middle line, it's the "alto clef", and on the line above that, the "tenor clef".  Both are available in NWC.

All clef positions aside from the standard 4 (treble, alto, tenor, bass) are now of historical interest only.

Re: Clefs

Reply #2 –
My free font "Bongos" has a percussion clef and some other useful symbols. It can be used as "text" in NWC. But keep in mind that the "text" clef will not be placed at the beginning of every system, unless you place each one there yourself.

"Bongos" is at http://www.icogitate.com/~ergosum

Use the index to find it.

Re: Clefs

Reply #3 –
Simon, no need to type "enter" at each end of line while entering your message. once per paragraph is enough :)

Grant, you wrote All clef positions aside from the standard 4 [treble, alto, tenor, bass] are now of historical interest only., and please let me say that I disagree.
Ut (C) clefs 1, 2, 5, Fa (F) clef 3 and Sol(G) clef 1 are still used, sometimes for instruments, and much more often for transposing by sightreading.
They are not at all history to me.
Unless I belong to history :)

Re: Clefs

Reply #4 –
The G clef on the bottom line of the staff is known as the French violin clef.
The soprano clef (actually Soprano staff, but that terminology is obsolete) may be represented by the C clef on the bottom line, or the G clef on the middle line (which was seldom used).

And, Marsu, from what I’ve read here at the Forum, you don’t belong to history, you are history!
[I mean that in a good way.]

Re: Clefs

Reply #5 –
No offense intended, old man.  However, I've never once  seen a modern score with a clef other than the 4 I listed.  Where exactly would I find, for example, a baritone clef (F on 3) in an instrumental score?

The use of nonstandard clefs for sight-reading practice is an interesting one, and of course it would be very useful for performers who want to perform from old scores that were written when these other clef positions were still current.  But I still think that upwards of 99% of musicians would get by very nicely without any knowledge of movable clefs.

Re: Clefs

Reply #6 –
As a singer (i.e. not a proper musician ;-)), I never knew there were any clefs other than the bass and treble before I started reading this forum!
Never let it be said that this forum isn't educational!

Robin

Re: Clefs

Reply #7 –
Well, I must be in that 1%.  I use the mezzo-soprano clef quite often.  Whenever I need to read a horn part (happens fairly often), I use it to transpose.  And when I have to play other parts (or horns in keys other than F), I use other clefs.  I have used seven different clefs on one concert!
Also, I have a book of Bach fugues which utilizes the soprano clef for the soprano line (go figure...).

Re: Clefs

Reply #8 –
I play the viola da gamba, and use five clefs every day (bass, tenor, alto, treble, and guitar-style octave treble), plus soprano and baritone clefs when using old editions or facsimiles, which I do often. I don't think adopting moveable clefs should be a priority for Noteworthy - I'm glad they even support the two common c-clefs - but they're musically useful and it's a shame they've passed out of use.

I sometimes use c clefs for my personal concert-pitch scores of wind music, since alto clef is the best fit for the range of the alto saxophone, for example, and I find reading tenor clef less disorienting than the octave transposed treble most tenor-pitch instruments use.

I also use clef transpositions. B flat parts can be read by a C instrument if you imagine a tenor clef, for instance, or Eb parts by imaging a bass clef up one or more octaves. Historically, music for alto recorder (in the first-line G clef) could be played by flute players reading it in treble clef, or vice versa, since the instruments are pitched a third apart. In this situation, the bass player has to imagine baritone clef...

And I'd still rather see a clef change every three bars than those blasted leger lines.

Re: Clefs

Reply #9 –
> And I'd still rather see a clef change every three bars than those blasted leger lines.

Really?!  I have enough of a problem when the tenor line switches from the bass clef to the treble.  I suppose tenors are sufficiently used to seeing lots of leger lines (but not too many, please!)

Robin

Re: Clefs

Reply #10 –
It seems to be a facility that just comes naturally to some people. My daughter is a case in point, she can sight-read viola music on her violin or vice versa, correcting for both the clef position and transposition. But she hates notes on leger lines.

But I, OTOH, find treble and bass enough of a challenge, can muddle my way around alto, and get thoroughly confused by tenor. If I had my way everything would be in treble, with suitable octave up/down indications as needed. ;-)

Fred

Re: Clefs

Reply #11 –
John,

What do you mean by "guitar-style octave treble"?  From what I've seen, the guitar is written in treble clef just as, say, the violin is.  The fact that the guitar sounds an octave lower than the violin when playing from the same score is a feature of the instrument's notation conventions, not of the clef.  In the same way, the cello and double bass play from the same part in many Classical works, but the bass sounds an octave lower.  It wouldn't make sense to say that the bass has a different, "contrabass-style octave bass" clef; it just interprets the standard bass clef differently.

OTOH I suppose there's an argument to be made that the explicit octave-shifted clef (with an 8 hanging from its tail) used, for example, in choral tenor parts is a "different" clef than the standard treble clef.  Even here, though, I'd tend to think of this as a variant rather than a separate clef.  Perhaps that's because octave shifting is a trivial operation, so that once you've learned one of these, there is essentially zero effort involved in reading from the other.

Re: Clefs

Reply #12 –
Wow. I didn't think such a discussion would occur :)
About leger lines: as a flutist, it's a pain to read the highest notes with leger lines. It's "only" 5 at most, but it's too much for me. I prefer the "8" or "16" number written above the G clef. or the "G clef on first line", but it's harder to read than octave shifting.

about octave shifting: yes, on many instruments it's easy, but not on *so* many finally. Keyboards are okay, but not for trumpets, flutes, harmonica, and many others where the note is not produced the same way depending on the octave.
In fact it's easy for the head, not for the hands :)

the "hanging 8" is not only a convention, it's shown to try to represent the actual height of the note, and I've seen many guitar and/or bass scores with such an "8" below the clef (G clef for guitar, F clef for bass). Which seems totally correct to me. As well as for the tenors, whereas many choir directors sing the 4 first-note of an SATB as if there was no "8", thus making the tenor note higher than the soprano and alto. Clearly due to the voice range of the director him/herself, in fact ;) since the same happens for the bass's note :)

Re: Clefs

Reply #13 –
All I can say, marsu, is that you and I must get our scores from different sources entirely.  Not only haven't I seen "many guitar and/or bass scores" with hanging 8's, I don't believe I've _ever_ seen a hanging 8 on a bass clef in a printed score.  If you can point to a counter-example I'd be interested to see it.

Re: Clefs

Reply #14 –
> And I'd still rather see a clef change every three bars than those blasted leger lines.
Me, too!  I play first trombone in a swing band, and there are WAY too many leger lines for me, especially in those handwritten charts (that B looks higher than that C#...).  I’ve rewritten my entire book using tenor clef (a jazzer reading tenor clef?!??!), thanks to NoteWorthy!
> I don't believe I've _ever_ seen a hanging 8 on a bass clef in a printed score.
I haven’t either.  I needed one twenty years ago, when it was all done by hand (I feel so old...), so I just wrote one in.  Imagine my surprise (and pleasure) that it was available in NoteWorthy!

Re: Clefs

Reply #15 –
I played in a band with a great band-leader arranger who also played lead trom.
He wrote and read his own parts in concert treble.

Re: Clefs

Reply #16 –
But then there are too many leger lines below the staff...

Re: Clefs

Reply #17 –
Hey, we could always go back to the Grand Staff, with 11 lines! [ducks]

Re: Clefs

Reply #18 –
<<...too many ledger lines below the staff.>>

He did play lead in a 4 trom section.

Re: Clefs

Reply #19 –
<<...too many ledger lines below the staff.>>

<<He did play lead in a 4 trom section.>>

I also play lead in a 4 trombone section, but on about half the charts in my book, the range extends down to C below middle C, or lower.  There is usually no justification for a clef change in those instances.  Using tenor clef limits me to one (or two) leger line(s) below the staff and two or three above.  Concert treble would give me no lines above (and one wasted staff line) and FIVE or SIX below!

Re: Clefs

Reply #20 –
I do enjoy debate.

Okay, treble-8 isn't really a clef. Granted. But transposing an octave isn't as automatic on a stringed instrument as it is on a keyboard, it's almost like learning a new clef, and for me I think harder. I tried to read bass-8 once (playing some passages down the octave), and it was harder than I'd expected. Same with playing double-bass up the octave, i.e. in untransposed bass clef. It sounds like it should be easy, but I'd rather read tenor clef or even (octave)treble clef for high passages.

My father was a saxophone player, and he went farther than Fred: he thought even bass clef was stupid, and all instruments should use treble clef, with whatever transposition was convenient. And he was a better musician than me. But:

I think I really DO mentally use an 11-line grand staff; I just select whichever five lines of that system are convenient for the range of a given passage. Treble clef is the top five, alto is the middle five, and so on.

So moving to another clef is like scrolling up or down the page on a computer screen.

It makes a big difference to me in score-reading, too - I find it easy to stay  oriented reading a string quartet score, with the viola part (alto clef) using the bottom two lines of the fiddle's clef and the top two lines of the cello's clef. Scores with transposed wind parts, or even SATB choral with the transposed tenor part - I find it harder to see or mentally hear what's going on.

Using a clef with an octave transposition puts you outside the system. It confuses me if I'm trying to figure out voicings between, say, violin and guitar. The note that sounds middle c on the guitar is on a space, not a line, and the note that looks like middle c is really the same c as the low note on a viola. The notation kind of blurs the fact that the guitar is a tenor/baritone range instrument. A lot of guitar players don't seem to know that their instrument isn't written at pitch.

I think guitar music really should be written at pitch on two clefs anyway, ideally (to suit the range) bass and mezzo-soprano, but that ain't gonna happen.

Some jazz guitar players seem to read treble clef at pitch, especially if they're playing lead sheets or horn parts. I wrote some parts for a guitar player (who read both ways) where I wrote the high stuff in untransposed treble and the rest in treble-8, using them as clef changes the way I'd like to see them on the gamba, and he hated it. Said treble alternating with bass clef would have spun his head less.

There's also a big discussion out there about reading music as musical sound, as opposed to reading it as tablature for a given instrument, but that's off-topic, even for me.

Re: Clefs

Reply #21 –
oh, and I think marsu's point about the "hanging 8" wasn't so much that they do use it, but that it would be nice if they DID, to make it clear what the sounding pitch of the parts were. I've seen the 8 on vocal tenor parts (or sometimes two treble clefs, or that weird one that superimposes a c clefon the space), but not much on guitar or hardly ever on bass parts. I always use it myself.

Re: Clefs

Reply #22 –
To my mind the process involved in reading notes following an octave-shifted clef should be identical to that involved in reading notes under an 8va (or above an 8va bassa) sign.  I can't see any reason why one of these should be harder or easier than the other.

You may well be right about what would happen in a rationalized notation system, but I strongly suspect that, like a major reform in English spelling, it ain't about to happen.  Until it does, I think the world becomes more confusing, not less, if you add explicit '8's to the clef for instruments that are already understood to do octave transposition.

Regarding marsu:  he wrote "I've seen many guitar and/or bass scores with such an '8' below the clef".  You're free to make of this what you will, but I read it as a statement that such scores actually exist, not merely that it would be nice if they did.

Re: Clefs

Reply #23 –
While composing my symphony, I had asked our concertmistress whether she wanted a certain passage involving the C three octaves above middle C written with 8va or “as is.”  She said “as is.”  She said she would rather see 32 bars of four or more leger lines (ever see what this looks like on the page?) than to have to do “all that work” (meaning she has too much difficulty “transposing” up an octave).

Re: Clefs

Reply #24 –
 
  • We have Matthew Hindson's freeware Clefs font packed with a musical submission (a Bach concerto or something alike) on the Scriptorium.

    It includes several percussion and key(?) clefs.

    I think it should be offered as a seperate download at the Helpful Stuff section.

  • If only we could set a custom text expresion as a clef or as an element in a key signature!

    Ertugrul
---
mailto: ertugrulinanc-at-ixir-dot-com
 

Re: Clefs

Reply #25 –
Re: "But transposing an octave isn't as automatic on a stringed instrument as it is on a keyboard, it's almost like learning a new clef, and for me I think harder."

I really have no idea what you're talking about. I can transpose octaves on the cello in bass clef and treble clef up or down as easy as pie. If you have the slightest difficulty at all doing this, I can only think it's because you're not solid about the name of the note you're playing.

Re: Clefs

Reply #26 –
I agree.
I had a fifth-grade trombonist who could take everything down an octave at sight because she knew the letter names and not just the positions of the notes.
 

Re: Clefs

Reply #27 –
I prefer the "8" or "16" number written above the G clef...[from Reply 12 by marsu]
Shouldn't that be "8" or "15"?