Chromatic Staves
Chromatic staves offer significant advantages over the diatonic staff used in traditional western music notation.
In traditional music notation the staff is based on the diatonic pattern of notes from the key of C Major (the white keys on the piano). Each of these notes is given its own line or space. This leaves five notes (the black keys) that have no place of their own on the staff. These notes must be represented by altering the other notes with sharp or flat signs, either in the key signature or as an accidental.
A chromatic staff is based on the full set of twelve notes found in the chromatic scale. Each of these twelve notes is given its own unique position on the staff, generally either a line, space, or ledger line. Notation inventors configure their chromatic staves differently using various patterns of lines and spaces (see Music Notations). The six-line staff above is just one possible example that clearly illustrates the principle.
Chromatic staves address all of the issues with traditional notation that are summarized on our Home page.
Key Signatures and Accidentals
On a chromatic staff there is no need to remember a key signature or
refer to accidental signs in order to play the right notes. Each note
is directly and immediately identifiable based solely on its position
on the staff. What you see is what you get. This makes all the different
keys equally easy to read and play. This represents a significant improvement
upon traditional notation where it is much more difficult to read music
in some keys than in others.
Clefs, Staves, and Octaves
Additionally, unlike the traditional diatonic staff, chromatic staves
generally repeat with each octave, on the octave. This "cycling
on the octave" means that a note has the same appearance regardless
of the octave in which it appears (see the figure on the right). This
makes notes easier to recognize and play, and means that there is no
need for different clefs. This improves upon the use of four different
clefs in standard notation (treble, bass, alto, and tenor), four clefs
whose staves look identical but whose notes are different.
Interval Relationships
Finally, though it may seem that chromatic
staves are best suited for atonal, non-diatonic music, they are actually
very well-suited for diatonic music. Unlike traditional notation,
they give a consistently accurate representation of the intervals between
notes, including the intervals of the diatonic scale and those found
in diatonic music. In the C major scale in the diagram below, note how
easy it is to distinguish between half step and whole step intervals.
This difference is obscured in traditional notation, though it is fundamental
to diatonic scales - both in how they sound and in how they are played.
Chromatic staves make it easier to recognize and understand these and
other important diatonic intervals such as major or minor thirds, fourths,
fifths, and chords. (For a more in-depth look, see our Intervals
Tutorial.)
Perhaps the only disadvantage to chromatic staves is that they require more vertical space on the page than the standard staff, since they include five additional notes per octave. Several notation inventors have addressed this issue in their notation systems. These include Leo de Vries' Diatonic and Chromatic Twinline notations and Tom Reed's Twinline notation.
Note: We have used Johann Ailler's untitled notation to illustrate some of the advantages of the chromatic staff. This should not be taken as an endorsement of this system over any other notation system. Any of the notations featured on this site could well have been used for these illustrations, as the principles they illustrate apply to all notations that have a chromatic staff. Ailler's notation and similar 4-line notations did fare well in the MNMA's Research Project. We encourage everyone to explore all the various Music Notations on our site.