All About That Bass . . . and Maybe Some Treble

This is more for the guitar and music theory nerds, I'm afraid. =)

My buddy from work (a great guitarist) and I were having a discussion last week about guitar notation, specifically how it tends to be strictly written in the treble clef one octave up. Then the question was brought up: why not the grand staff? 

Here's the range of guitar notes on the treble clef alone (typical guitar notation): 

Notice the number of ledger lines that must be written above and below: 3 below, and this picture only goes up to the 17th fret of the first string, A; if we kept going up to D for a 22 fret guitar, it would require two more ledger lines. Unless you write 8va, but it would create more confusion, in my opinion.

Here with the grand staff, you would need only one ledger line below (the lowest note is actually E, unless you did Drop C tuning but that's a whole other post), and for a 22 fret guitar you're already set because the D would be in the space right above that 2nd ledger line on top of the treble clef, and for a 24 fret guitar you just need one more ledger line as opposed to six with just the treble clef. Plus you wouldn't have to worry about being an octave up. The tones are the same as on a piano.

Coming from piano, while I have improved my sight reading, I still find it easier to digest the idea of reading using the whole grand staff. On guitar threads I've seen, the most common reasons why guitarists (if they read) use the treble clef alone are space saving and ease.

Maybe this won't be some sweeping movement where all of a sudden more people will use the grand staff. But the late great jazz guitarist Johnny Smith was a huge proponent of the grand staff, and his book from Mel Bay, "The Complete Johnny Smith Approach To Guitar" emphasizes right off the bat why he prefers using the grand staff for guitar notation as opposed to just the treble clef.

This is my next guitar experiment, playing off the grand staff. I'll be transposing some easier pieces, such as those from the Gibson Learn and Master Guitar series, onto grand staff using Musescore (I'm totally doing product placement), and we'll see how it goes. Maybe a month from now I'll go back to being all about the treble. Who knows?

(Disclaimer: I actually loathe Meghan Trainor, but I thought having this title would get me a least a couple more views. LOL)