Staff Paper

Print free staff paper and blank sheet music in the layout you need: a single music staff, a piano grand staff, guitar tab, staff with tab, bass tab, ukulele tab or empty chord charts. Choose large staves for children or standard and small for everyday writing, add bar lines, title and composer lines, and a note name helper for beginners. Letter or A4, portrait or landscape.

Learn to read notes: a staff game

A note appears on the staff. Tap its letter name to score a point and hear it played. Switch to Tap to play notes to touch any line or space and hear how it sounds, or change to the bass clef for piano left hand, cello and bass.

Ready-to-print staff paper (PDF)

Open any page as a PDF and print, or press Customize to change the size, bars, color or paper.

Which staff paper do I need? Music staff paper and printable staff paper

Every sheet below is printable staff paper, and the first row is plain music staff paper for melodies. Guitar tab paper, bass tab and chord charts are on the same page.

How to remember the notes

• Treble clef lines (bottom to top) are E, G, B, D, F: “Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge”.
• Treble clef spaces spell F A C E, “face”.
• Bass clef lines are G, B, D, F, A: “Good Boys Do Fine Always”.
• Bass clef spaces are A, C, E, G: “All Cows Eat Grass”.
• Middle C sits on a small ledger line between the two staves of the grand staff.

Turn on the note name helper in the maker to print these letters beside every staff, then turn it off once your child knows them.

Notes on the staff and how high they sound

Each line and space of the staff is one note, and each step up the staff is a higher pitch. These tables list every line and space with the note name and its frequency in hertz, using the standard tuning where A above middle C is 440 Hz. Middle C (C4) is 261.63 Hz, one ledger line below the treble staff and one above the bass staff.

The staff gives each note a fixed place, so a line of music is easy to read once you know the positions. For the history and conventions, see Wikipedia’s staff (music) article.

How long is a note? Note values in a bar

Bar lines divide the staff paper into bars (measures), and each bar holds a fixed number of beats. In 4/4 time there are four beats in a bar, so the length of each note decides how many fit:

A bar can mix values, such as one half note and two quarter notes. Choose 4 bars per line on the generator to write four bars of 4/4 across the page.

Parts of a music staff and guitar tab paper

• Staff (stave): five lines and four spaces. Notes higher on the staff sound higher.
• Bar lines split the music into measures. Choose 2 to 6 bars per line, or none for free writing.
• Final double bar: a thin and a thick line that mark the end of a piece.
• Tablature (tab): each line is a string, and numbers show which fret to press. The top line is the highest string.
• Chord chart: vertical lines are strings, horizontal lines are frets, and the thick line at the top is the nut.

More printable paper

• Lined paper for lyrics and notes.
• Graph paper.
• Dot grid paper.
• Printable paper maker for every other kind of paper.
• All printable paper.