The Significance of the Bass Clef

The bass clef on the piano usually sounds deeper in tone and is typically played with your left hand while the treble clef plays higher pitched notes. So if you wanted to be a minimal one man band, your left hand would typically be the bass guitar while your right hand is lead guitar.

When you look at the bass clef, your bottom line on your staff is a G. As you climb up, the notes follow in the same order:

G A B C D E F G A....

This pattern can go on as much as you like. You can find the bottom line G on the piano by locating middle C and moving an octave down to the next C and then moving down again to G. As you go up on the staff, you will climb up on the piano. While you can go and play all the notes on the piano on the bass clef as much as you want, there are more practical ways to play higher pitched notes.

Here are some examples of how a composer can achieve this:

Sometimes when musicians need to reach higher notes, they will change to treble clef and notate that it is to play with the left hand (usually by annotating with L.H.). Once they have hit all the high notes, they can change back to the bass clef.

Another way to hit high notes on this clef is to notate to your players to move an octave up which is an italicized 8va with dashed lines along the top. The dashed lines will keep going as long as the composer wants you to go with the higher octave. Likewise, musicians can notate to move an octave down.

Now don't think that you will always be playing the deeper notes on the bass clef. If you listen to the vast variety of piano music (and I don't mean just classical), you will find that there are plenty of songs are soft in tones and sometimes you won't even go past the bottom G. And on the flip side, you will find songs that are deeper in tone.

If you check out Schubert's Serenade, you will see that most of the song is like a whisper with just deep notes here and there which are played softly as to not dominate the other notes in the song. It's a very expressive piece of music and I highly recommend you check it out.