Three Effective Strategies for Reading Ledger Line Notes

Ledger lines are lines that fall either above or below the regular staff lines in our sheet music. You won’t see them in your music unless you’re going to have to play notes on them. Even though we don’t see them we still know that they are there.

Ledger line notes are harder to grasp into our music reading because we end up learning them after all of the other notes on the regular staff and that takes extra effort to learn and memorize these notes and where they are on the piano. They just aren’t as familiar to us at first as out other notes.

To help alleviate the difficulty of learning ledger line notes, we’re going to learn 3 valuable tips to help with this and then at the end of this blog there will be a video that shows us these tips at the piano keyboard using sheet music so you can really reinforce what we go over here now.

Before starting, make sure that you are already comfortable reading the notes on the basic staff including all of the lines and spaces that you normally see in sheet music. If you need any reviews of these notes, watch this video to help you through them and give you a little practice time on those notes. Then you’ll be ready to move on to ledger line notes.

​Tip #1:

• Count each note from the top or bottom line to the note on the ledger line to find out what the name of that note is. This method is helpful mostly in the beginning of learning ledger line notes and gets you used to how many lines are between the regular staff and a specific ledger line note; but it can also be a bit tedious to do each time you have to figure out what a note is.

Tip #2:

• This method involves starting at the top or bottom line of the staff but instead of counting note by note, you’re going to use what I call the “skip method” to find out what the ledger line note is. I call it this because every note on a line (or even a space) that is above the regular staff skips one note. For example, the note on the top line of the treble clef is an F. The next line above that or the 1st ledger line above the staff is an A. The next note on the 2nd ledger line is a C, and the note on the 3rd ledger line is an E. See how the notes skip the one in between? If you can easily skip these same notes on your piano keyboard, then you’ll be able to name those same notes in your sheet music. Be careful, however, that you don’t skip learning which line a note is on. This method makes it easier to find ledger line notes that aren’t in consecutive order too. You can do this in either treble or bass clef. If you’re learning bass clef leger line notes, remember to count or skip down this time.  It’s easy to say the note names as you play them on the piano, but you also have to visually learn what they look like in your music; so stay focused visually while you are skipping through the ledger line notes verbally and on your piano.

Tip #3:

• This method is neat and you will find some familiar and repeated patterns of notes here. The first four notes in the treble clef starting with the top line are: F-A-C-E. They spell face…and this isn’t the first time we’ve found the word ‘face’ in our note reading. Think about what the names of the notes in the spaces in treble clef are. F-A-C-E. See the repeating pattern? They are exactly the same notes!
• This applies to the notes on the spaces in between our ledger lines as well. Starting with the top space on the regular staff and then going up three spaces above that, we have the notes E-G-B-D. Think about the names of the notes on the lines in the treble clef. They are E-G-B-D…exactly the same. Utilizing the patterns of note names that you already know will really help you to quickly say the note names on your ledger lines and then you’ll be able to start recognizing them much easier visually.
• You can do this same thing in the bass clef as well, although there is one difference. You’re going to be counting the regular staff notes backwards in naming the bass clef ledger line notes. So instead of counting F-A-C-E, you would say E-C-A-F.

Learning to read your ledger line notes quickly is going to be very important in being able to play more advanced music and also in sight reading. Remember, these notes are always “there”…we just don’t see the lines until we need the notes to be there in the music.

The following video will really help you to visually see this in sheet music and on the piano so enjoy working with this as you grow in your piano playing and note reading!

If you like my tips and lessons, you will love the courses over on my website. Whether you are a beginner looking to get a solid foundation to build on or you are looking to take your existing skills to that next level, the online music courses on my website https://www.pianolessonsontheweb.com will help you do just that.