The clef

Take a look at any page of printed sheet music, and the first thing you’ll see at the start of each set of five lines (or ‘stave’) is a weird-looking squiggly thing that could be one of several possible shapes. These are called clefs, and the reason they exist is to let the player know which of the five horizontal lines on the stave corresponds to which notes when playing the music. Each clef represents a different range of notes, and allows all notes on the stave to be interpreted more easily at a glance.

You may wonder what relevance, if any, the clef symbols used in traditional notation have in relation to the music we make on our computers. It’s a fair point. If