You will come across a variety of printed music in your search for suitable pieces to play and don't be put off if at first some of it seems a bit strange.? As has been said before, music is surprisingly easy to understand once you know the basics.

Music can be written with 1 stave, (the treble,) 2 stave, (treble and bass.) or 3 stave which we will cover in a later lesson.? Below is an example of the 2 stave version which you will see much of.

As you can see? the top stave has the treble clef at the beginning and the bottom stave has the bass clef at the beginning.

These two staves must be played together, simultaneously, and not one after the other.? You can see how they are joined together by a vertical line indicating that they should be read together.? To emphasize this point a bracket is placed before the stave in proper music, like this { to further indicate that the two staves are joined.? This bracket is called a brace.?

It's a good idea to break a piece of music up into smaller segments for practice purposes.? In our example you could concentrate on the first 9 notes only until you get it right, then try the next 4, then put the two segments together.? When you feel you have got that right you can move on to the next segment until eventually you can play the whole thing.? This is much better than trying the whole thing all at once.

Now the really good thing to know is that most guitarists simply read the treble stave and they can pick up all the information they need from that plus the chord symbol.? However you should know what the bass stave is all about.? You cannot play lower than your open 6th string which is E anyway.? But in future an understanding of the bass notes might help you in playing "fill ins" one octave up.?

When you find notes on the bass stave below the range of your guitar you can move the whole thing up on octave but this might place some notes too high for the mood of the piece you are playing.? An alternative is to move up only those notes which are below your range.? For example:? If you had the notes C, E and G on the bass stave, the C only is below your range so instead of moving all 3 up an octave, which sound a bit high, you could try just moving the C up an octave and play the notes in the order E, G and C.? Remember we are dealing here with base patterns, not melody.? Obviously you could not change a melody around like this.