MusicaLexica

There are twelve notes in Western music.  We can identify all of them using seven letters and sometimes adding a sharp (#) or flat (b) symbol.

The seven letters are: A B C D E F G

This cycle keeps repeating.  Before A comes another G, and after G comes another A.  The distance between one note and the next note of the same name is called an octave.  Two notes with the same letter name, an octave apart, sound "the same" to our ears…just at a different register.

If you play all the white keys on the piano from A to the next A, you will have just played a minor scale.  The minor scale sounds familiar to our ears…it is used for music that usually has a sad, thoughtful, or spooky sound.  But most of us are more familiar with the major scale, and this scale is used as the basis for how music theory is described.

You can play any scale starting from any key.  The major scale that uses only white keys is the C major scale, so this is often used as a reference point for talking about all the rest of music theory.  Certainly for my own simplified way of looking at music theory, I begin with the C major scale in mind.

The C note on the piano is the one just to the left of the pair of black notes.  Whenever you see two (and only two) black notes together, the note just to the left of them is a C.  If you have a piano or keyboard handy, try playing from a C to the next C now.

To sharp a note means to take it to the very next note up.  To flat a note means to take it to the very next note down.  So, C# refers to the next note up from C, which is the black note between C and D.  D# is the next black note. 

Notice that if you sharp E, you don’t go to a black note…you go to the next white key, F.  Since there are seven white keys and only five black keys, there are two situations where this happens.

The cluster of three black keys can be identified as F#, G#, and A#.

So, using sharps, we can identify all twelve notes in one octave:

C  C#  D  D#  E  F  F#  G  G#  A  A#  B

We can use the flat notation to identify the same notes.

C  Db  D  Eb  E  F  Gb  G  Ab  A  Bb  B

So, each black note can be identified in two different ways: it’s the sharp of the note to its left, and it’s the flat of the note to its right.  Generally there’s a clear reason to call it one way or the other in the particular song you’re in, but otherwise either way of naming it is fine.

There are reasons sometimes to show that normally one note would be played, but we’re going to play the next note down for an effect, or the next note up for an effect.  Let’s say normally in this song we would play a G, and that would give a very perky sound, but we’re writing movie music and the door just opened and there’s the bad guy who we thought had perished in a car accident but is now back for revenge, so we play a Gb.  Makes sense.

But if the normal note was an F, and we wanted to drop it down a bit, do we write E (the next note down from F) or Fb (which doesn’t have a black key associated with it)?  The answer is Fb.  The reason is that it shows the musician that we are modifying the note that would normally be played in this key.

So, a note with a # or a b attached to it doesn’t always refer to a black key on the piano.  It just depends upon what note is being modified.