Music is a language. It has its own alphabet, grammar, and way of expressing thoughts and emotions.
In music each unique sound is called a pitch, or note, and given a name. Those pitch names make up the music alphabet.
The music alphabet is based on the first seven letters of the english alphabet:
In addition to these seven letters there are also five other special symbols called accidentals.
♭ (flat)
♮ (natural)
♯ (sharp)
𝄪 (double sharp)
Typically you will see the pitch names paired with either the ♯ (sharp) or ♭ (flat) accidental. The other accidentals usually only appear in sheet music, which we will get to in a later lesson.
If we take into consideration all the naturally occurring sharps and flats in the music alphabet it expands from 7 to 12 characters, and it looks like this:
Using sharps:
Using flats:
And, rather than thinking of the music alphabet as a straight line, with a beginning and an end, it is better to think of it as a circle that keeps repeating. In fact, you can think of the circle as the fundamental shape of music because much of what we will study will be based on circular patterns!
You might notice that some notes appear in the same position, but are named differently depending on whether a sharp or a flat is used. These are called enharmonic notes.
Enharmonic means two notes that are named (or notated) differently, but have the same sound (or pitch).
For example, A♯ and B♭ are enharmonic. They are two different names for the same exact pitch.
All of this is actually quite easy to visualize on the piano. You can see that A♯ and B♭ are just two names for the same key.
Note: The piano is the easiest instrument to visualize music theory on. That doesn’t mean that you have to start playing the piano. Rest assured that everything we talk about in theory applies equally to all instruments - the piano just lays it all out clearly in front of you.
OK. Now you know your ABCs. Next time won’t you read with me :)
You can download a cheat-sheet of everything covered on this page from here: Alphabet