What Actually IS Middle C?

Have you ever wondered why middle c is called middle C? It’s not actually because it’s in the middle of the piano. In reality, it’s the only note with no place on either the treble or bass clefs. The only place it can go is in the middle. Was this obvious to you? Because it wasn’t to me.

Ok, bear with me.

Maybe you’ve always known this, but I only realized this like…within the last couple years. And I’ve played piano professionally for the majority of my life.

So what is it? How did such a seemingly obvious detail not even occur to me for nearly 3 decades??

If you’re reading this with the same questions, you’re in the right place. And if you just think I’m an idiot for not knowing this, well…keep reading anyways.

It’s not what I always thought it was.

Contrary to what the name suggests, middle C isn't located at the literal center of the piano keyboard.

The actual symmetrical division of the middle of the piano would be, technically, 44 keys from the bottom. Half of the total 88.

44 keys from the bottom puts us at E, not C. So why the name?

To understand what’s going on here, we need to take a look at some manuscript.

We all know the mnemonic devices we’ve always been taught to learn where the notes go on the staff like "Every Good Boy Does Fine" for the treble clef and "Good Boys Do Fine Always" for the bass clef. Maybe they were different you. I’m partial to “Grandma Brown Doesn’t Favor Aliens,” but that’s just me.

Here’s the thing, these stupid little phrases tell us the notes that go on the lines and spaces within each staff. But that only covers a tiny portion of all of the notes on the piano.

Enter Ledger Lines

Ledger lines are the secret to writing anything that's not going to fall into those exact notes on the piano that we just played.

When we need to notate pitches beyond the range covered by the staff, ledger lines extend the staff upwards or downwards, allowing us to represent higher or lower notes.

Theoretically we can just keep adding more and more ledger lines to any staff and we’d eventually reach the end of the piano. That would be dumb, there are way easier ways to notate that, but we’ll get to that later.

Check it out:

Regardless of whether we’re coming from the treble clef or the bass clef, we run into an interesting issue when we try to notate Middle C. There’s no line or space on either staff that is reserved for this note. It’s the only note between the two staves that requires a ledger line to write it.

It gets even cooler, though.

Because it’s the only note that doesn’t have a place on either the treble or bass clefs, something really interesting happens when we write one, continuous line of notes through both staves.

Visually, middle C serves as the dividing line on the grand staff.

When the staves are compressed and we remove that giant gap we normally see between the treble and bass clefs, the significance of this becomes a lot more obvious.

Middle C is the only note that goes in the middle of both staves and connects the two to create one line of notes.

Growing up, I literally always just thought it was the “middle of the piano.”

But understanding the concept of middle C and why it’s actually called that can even improve our overall ability to read and interpret sheet music. It’s just more context that we have in understanding how notation works as a whole.

And it’s just kind of a cool anecdote.

I made a video about it, which you can go and check out here.

By the way, these videos are always available exclusively to Better Piano members long before they end up on the Better Piano YouTube channel. You can get access too by become a member!