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Chamber music
Create the right atmosphere in your home or office with timeless chamber music.
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Music Notation Basics Part I - Notes and the Musical Staff
(26 Jun 04)
Notes and Note Names
You can create music from any sound you choose. But it would be hard to read and write music, or even to talk about it, if there weren't a way to refer to standard musical tones.
Lack of a common definition for these tones was a major problem until some standardization began to take hold, specified tones were each given a name, and rules set up to define how all tones would be related to one another.
So, a musical note is a tone that meets a very specific set of rules. If something is a note, then it is a tone that has a specific pitch. Each musical note has its own specific pitch, and so only specified pitches are notes. So, while every note is a tone, not every tone is a note!
Every note has a name and the letters A through G are used in naming all the musical notes. Since that is only seven letters and you probably know there are more than seven tones used to make music, each of those letters is used to name more than one note.
If you have a guitar you already knew this—there is a low E and a high E string. Same note name, different pitch. But, our musical forefathers ensured that all notes having the same name are related to one another in a very specific way. I won't explain that now.
On the piano keyboard, the white keys correspond to the notes A through G. The picture below shows how the note names relate to a short section of the keyboard.
The piano keyboard has up to seven such sections, side-by-side—plus three more white keys to end on 'C'. See the larger example section below. The 'C' key that is near the center of the keyboard is called Middle C, and we'll refer to it later.
Finally, here's where Middle C appears on a full, 88-key keyboard:
As another reference, the dark circles on the guitar fretboard below show the locations where Middle C can be played:
On the keyboard sketch above, I did not label the black keys. But, I said earlier that all notes used in music are named using just the first seven letters of the alphabet.
The musical notes named using only the letters A through G, with no other modification, are called the 'natural' notes, or the 'naturals'. But, the black keys must also have names that somehow use just the seven letters A through G. To do it, we modify the letter names using two new terms: sharp and flat.
Each note name (letter) can be changed (that is, altered) to two new note names by adding either of the words 'sharp' and 'flat'. For example, the note name 'D' is re-used as 'D sharp' to name a different note. On the keyboard, the first black key to the right of a white key has the name of that white key, plus the word 'sharp'. The black key to the right of 'D' is therefore 'D sharp'.
In the same way, the first black key to the left of a white key has the name of that white key, plus the word 'flat'. So, for example, the black key to the left of 'D' is 'D flat'.
Notice that all black keys are both to the right of a white key, and to the left of some other white key. Look at the black keys that appear between each pair of 'C' and 'D' keys. It seems like that black key is 'C sharp', but it also could be 'D flat'. Which one is it? The answer is: both. Every black key corresponds to a single note, but that note has two equivalent names.
Definition: These equivalent names are called 'enharmonic' names, and sometimes you may see the phrase 'enharmonic notes'. Guni's Chord Scales articles provide some idea of when you should select one name over the other, but I won't discuss that here.
You will seldom see the words 'sharp' or 'flat' written next to a note name in music. Instead, the symbol ' ' is used as an abbreviation for sharp and looks like what is often called the 'pound sign'.
The symbol ' ' is used for flat, and is a mark that looks something like the lower-case letter 'b'.
Please note that I will use this same "pound sign", ie "#" throughout the text of this article to represent the "sharp", and a regular "b" to refer to a "flat".
These symbols are always written to the right side of the note name. So, for example C sharp is written C#, and D flat is written Db. These two symbols, the '#' and 'b', are called accidentals. There are other accidentals that we'll get to later in the series.
Here is the same keyboard diagram we saw before, but now with the black keys labeled. I have chosen to use only the sharp accidentals to label the black keys in this diagram.
You may have noticed there is no B# or E#. I can't explain why, but you can see for yourself that if you want to use only seven letters of the alphabet to name all of your notes, and if you want to have only twelve musical 'steps' to get from A to the next A (instead of fourteen), then two steps have to be taken away.
If you begin counting the steps from one A to the next, with A# being step 1, B is step 2 and so on, you'll see that you must make twelve such steps to reach the next A.
This is how the old-timers set things up—twelve musical 'jumps' from any note to the next note of the same name (for example, from A to A, or from D to D, and so on). B# and E# were chosen as the two 'extra' notes that simply had to go.
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