Does Every Good Boy Do Fine, actually?

 

Most of you will probably recognize the phrase in the title of this post. Someone came up with it decades, if not centuries, ago, as a way to learn the notes on lines in the treble clef. "All cows eat grass" was the phrase for the spaces in the bass clef. Theortically, if you know these, every other note would just be one note away from one of these. But in reality, if you see the note at the space above all the lines in the treble clef, you might have to say "every good boy does fine" to find the F on the top line, so you can find the G on the space above it. That would be too slow for real-time playing. Instead, you'd want to just know that top line is F, for example, rather than having to repeat the whole phrase to yourself. (See below for how to do this.)

But the main problem with this method is that it focuses on the absolute note names instead of the intervals, or distances, between them. Navigating by interval is the ONLY way to become proficient at sight reading. Even if you think you learned the E-G-B-D-F method (which you may very well have), your mind eventually figured out the distances between notes and switched to reading by interval.

Another problem with the E-G-B-D-F method is that it is hopeless for reading in ledger lines, the notes that are written above or below the clefs. Almost all of my students who came from other teachers still have trouble reading in the ledger lines, and have to count the notes up (or down) to the one they see, and then they often resort to writing the note name in the score so they won't have to keep counting up to it. If you are playing -- or want to play -- advanced pieces, there will be many notes on ledger lines, so it's imperative that this be just as easy as reading the notes which fall on the staff.

However great reading by interval is, sometimes you need to find a note by its absolute name, such as the first note of the piece. For this purpose I have a set of "landmarks," which are all the Cs, Fs and Gs on each clef. (Middle C is the same for both clefs.) In the treble clef there is middle C, written on a ledger line, then G on the second line (indicated by the "curl" of the treble clef symbol"), then C on the third space up, and F on the top line. In the bass clef you have middle C, then F on the second line going downwards (indicated by the two dots around that line in the clef symbol), the C on the third space down, and lastly G on the lowest line. Looking at it as a mirror image, the Cs correspond, the Fs and Gs flip. This way you are never more than two notes away from any other note, and the same system works for both clefs. With the every-good-boy-does-fine and all-cows-eat-grass, you have different systems for each clef, and they do not match up well (one is on lines, the other on spaces). 

Of course, after a period of playing, these landmarks will become internalized, and in fact, so will all the notes on the staff. You won't have to think about their names at all. And that is the point. Don't think about note names. See my post titled Sight Reading from March 2015 for a fuller discussion of these concepts.