The Banded Staff
Five lines and one tinted band. On this staff every C sits on a line, in every octave and on every staff, so a tune looks the same wherever it is played. It also gives the eye a landmark, which may help readers who find rows of identical lines hard to hold still.
On the standard staff the three Cs fall on a ledger line, in a space, then on a ledger line again. On the banded staff all three sit on a line. Coloured notes on this page are only there to point things out: a banded score is printed in one ink, with the pale band as the only tint.
Seven notes don’t divide into lines and spaces
A staff alternates line, space, line, space. An octave has seven note names. Go up seven positions from a note on a line and you land in a space, so each octave of the same melody takes a different shape. Readers learn every register twice, and then learn a second clef that moves all the names again.
In standard notation the second half flips: notes that sat on lines move into spaces. On the banded staff both halves are the same picture.
Anatomy of an octave
Between G and C the staff leaves a double-height gap that holds two notes. The upper half of that gap is tinted. That makes the octave eight positions tall instead of seven, so it repeats exactly.
- Lines
- C, E and G. The major triad is always three lines.
- Spaces
- D and F, each in an ordinary space.
- Clear half
- A, in the lower half of the band, just above the G line.
- Tinted half
- B, in the upper half, just under the C line.
The band is three ordinary half-steps tall, so each half is three quarters of a space. Keeping it compact keeps every interval close to its usual height; the thirds below show why that matters.
Everything else stays the same
The banded staff changes one thing: which positions have lines. Every other part of music notation is exactly as it is now, so a musician who switches keeps almost everything they know.
- Note heads, stems, flags and beams
- Durations, dots, ties and rests
- Time signatures and bar lines
- Key signatures and accidentals
- Repeats, endings and navigation marks
- Dynamics, articulation and ornaments
- Tempo marks, lyrics, chord symbols and fingering
- Higher on the page is higher in pitch, read left to right
The pitch data in a score file doesn’t change either, so any existing MusicXML, MEI or ABC file can be engraved on a banded staff as it stands. The renderer below does exactly that.
Written with dyslexic readers in mind
A standard staff is five identical, evenly spaced lines, stacked into systems of ten or more. Many dyslexic musicians describe those lines blurring or swimming, and evenly spaced stripes are a known source of visual discomfort for some readers. The banded staff breaks that grating: a pair of lines, a band, then three lines. Every line gets an address you can see without counting.
A study of 72 Dutch children aged eight to thirteen, with and without dyslexia, found that the children with dyslexia made significantly more pitch-reading mistakes. The most common mistake was reading a note a third away: landing on the neighbouring line, or the neighbouring space. Enlarging the staff reduced mistakes, as did writing every stem in the same direction. Colouring the staff lines did not help, and sometimes made things worse.
Flach, Timmermans and Korpershoek, International Journal of Music Education, 2016.
Third errors are what you would expect when neighbouring lines are indistinguishable. On the banded staff they are not: G is the floor of the band, C is its ceiling, the bottom E is two lines below the band, the upper E one line above it. A note can be read by where it is relative to the band rather than by counting from the edge.
What this does not yet show
Nobody has tested the banded staff with dyslexic readers. The finding on coloured lines is a real warning: the band has to stay a quiet tint behind the notes, not a colour code. It is compatible with the two changes that did help, larger staves and same-direction stems, and should be tested alongside them.
One clef that only names the octave
Because every staff is identical, a clef has one job: say which octave the staff is in. The double bar marks the start, the wedge points at the C line, and the number is the octave of that C in scientific pitch, where middle C is C4. A staff marked 5 does the work of the treble clef, 3 the bass, and 4 sits between them for viola, tenor voices and a left hand in the middle register.
The same seven notes in three octaves: the same picture with a different number. Changing clef never changes what a line means. Cs are coloured for reference.
Real piano music
The opening of the Minuet in G from the Anna Magdalena Bach notebook, engraved three ways. The left hand is lightly simplified.
Piano music usually needs room between the staves for stems and ledger notes from both hands. Where it doesn’t, the staves can sit at their true pitch distance, the continuous spacing sometimes suggested for standard notation. On a banded grand staff the space between them then reads as one more octave of the same pattern, with middle C on its ledger and the band beneath it.
Either spacing works. It is a typesetting choice, like line spacing in text.
Ledger lines and ledger bands
Outside the staff, a short tinted patch counts as a ledger, exactly like a line. A note gets every line and patch between it and the staff, including its own. The band is always drawn whole, so a note in either half of it gets the patch: a high A sits under its tint just as it does inside the staff. A ledger C below the staff also gets the patch beneath it, so C looks the same everywhere: a line with the tint just under it.
Any score, on a banded staff
This is a full music engraver running in your browser. Pick one of the sample scores or open your own, then switch between the standard and banded staff. Nothing is uploaded: the file is read and engraved on your own device.
The engraver loads when you reach this part of the page.
- Export from your notation program. In MuseScore, Sibelius, Dorico or Finale, choose File, Export, MusicXML.
- Open it here, or drag the file onto the page above.
- Pick a layout. “Bass in 4” moves bass staves up an octave, which suits most piano left hands.
Clefs are read from the score: a treble staff becomes 5, an alto or tenor staff 4, a bass staff 3. Stems at the centre of the staff are redrawn for the band, and everything else is engraved as written.
What it costs, and the answers
Thirds stop looking alike
This is the real price. On a standard staff every third is line-to-line or space-to-space. Here, thirds that cross the band (F–A, G–B, A–C, B–D) each have their own shape. Their height barely moves, though: with the compact band each one is within an eighth of a space of a normal third, so judging intervals by distance still works. In return each chord has a fixed picture tied to its notes: C major is always three lines, G major always the G line, the tinted half and the D space.
A wider band would give each half a full space, but it would make G–B and A–C a space and a half tall, the same as a fourth. That is why the band stays compact.
The band halves are narrow
Each half is three quarters of a space. Two things make up for it. The halves are told apart by the tint rather than by a line between them, so A and B never have to be judged by a gap alone. And enlarged staves, the one change shown to cut dyslexic readers’ errors, scale the band with everything else: at a larger size a three-quarter space is as easy to read as a full space at normal size.
The staff is taller
A banded staff spans ten notes, E to G, against nine on the standard staff. That makes it about an eighth taller. That extra note means fewer ledger lines at the top of each staff.
It depends on a tint
The band differs from the page in lightness, not hue, so it survives greyscale printing, photocopying and colour blindness. Where a printer cannot hold a flat tint, a fine stipple does the same job. Because coloured staff lines did not help in testing, the tint should stay pale and never carry meaning by colour.
Almost all existing music is in standard notation
Most scores are now rendered from data such as MusicXML, MEI or ABC, and the pitches in those files do not change. A renderer can produce a banded edition of anything already encoded, and a reader can switch per score, much like choosing a typeface. The one on this page already does.
Teachers and players know the old staff
Only the staff changes. Note heads, rhythms, rests, accidentals, key signatures, dynamics and articulation are all the same, so most of what a musician knows carries straight over.
Treble readers may misread by a step
The bottom two lines, E and G, are the same as on the treble staff. Above the band, though, the lines are C, E and G where a treble reader expects B, D and F, so old habits would read those notes one step off. The band is the defence: it makes the staff look different at a glance, so it reads as its own system rather than a treble staff with a mistake. It is also a reason to present it that way, as a staff that shares middle C with the old one, not as a modified treble.
The space between the hands is busy
With staves two octaves apart, A3 to D4 falls between them and needs ledgers, as the minuet shows. A 4 clef on the lower staff puts that register back on the lines, and since every staff is identical, the change costs the reader nothing to learn.
Alternative notations usually fail
Most, like Klavarskribo and the many chromatic staves catalogued by the Music Notation Project, replace the whole system. This proposal keeps the diatonic staff and every symbol on it and changes one thing. A smaller change is a smaller ask.
How to find out
The claim about dyslexic readers is testable, and cheaply, by repeating the design of the 2016 study.
- Pitch-naming tasks on a standard staff, an enlarged standard staff, and a banded staff at the same size.
- Readers with and without dyslexia, children and adults.
- Count third errors and octave errors separately, and ask readers how comfortable each page was to look at.
- Repeat after a week of practice, since every new notation starts at a disadvantage.
If the band cuts third errors without the cost seen for coloured lines, the case is strong. If it does not, it should be dropped.