The 12 music notes

In western music notation there are 12 notes.

Let's have a quick look at them now to help you understand how your instrument works and how music works too.

Pitch.

Pitch is how low or high a note will sound.

A lion has a low pitch roar, a bird has a high pitch chirp.

In your guitar the thick strings will produce a lower pitch and the thinner strings will be higher in pitch.

In the piano the keys on the left are the low ones the ones to the right are the high ones.

How it works.

Different cultures use different standards of tuning and some cultures will use more notes than the 12 we will be talking about here.

In western culture music the tuning system consists of 12 notes. So when you look at a piano there are only 12 notes on it, spread on different octaves.

What is an octave?

The 88 keys on the piano are the 12 notes repeating themselves on different octaves.

Every set of 12 notes is one octave. It is the same note sounding higher or low but still the same note. So you have A B C D E F G in one octave and on the next octave again the A B C D E F G but this time sounding higher if you went to the right of the keyboard or lower if you went to the left.

I still don't get that, they are the same but they are different?

To help you understand what an octave is, let's look at the the actual letter A.

You can have a letter a this size A, or this size A.t We could say these two letter are in different octaves.

One is bigger than the other, but the meaning is the same, they both mean A.

In music more or less the same thing happens. You can have an A note sounding really high and thin or an A note sounding really low and strong, but they are both an A note.

The musical alphabet and the 12 Notes.

We name the notes using the first 7 letters of the alphabet

A B C D E F G.

And for the other 5 notes missing we use a # sharp or a b flat.

Sharps and flats are the black notes on a piano.

So the 12 notes are these:

Using sharps

A, A#, B, C, C#, D, D#, E, F, F#, G, G# - note that B and E have no sharp.

Using flats

A, Bb, B, C, Db, D, Eb, E, F, Gb, G, Ab - note that C and F have no flat.

On the instrument.

Piano

Usually on a piano the very first note on the left is an A.

So you will have the first 12 keys going like that A, A#, B, C, C#, D, D#, E, F, F#, G, G# and when you get to that G# the next note will be an A again, so you will have all the 12 notes happening again in the same order one octave higher. And so it goes until the end of the keys.

Guitar

The lowest string (the thickest one) on a guitar is E.

So that string open is E, then on the first fret is F, second fret is F#, third fret is G, fourth is G# and it goes like that order until the 11th fret on that string that is the note D#.

On the 12th fret on a guitar you usually have a double dot marker to tell you it's the 12th fret and the octave is starting again. On that 12th fret the note will be E again and the sequence starts again one octave higher this time.

You can check more info about music theory here.