INTERESTING TITLE AND COOL GRAPHIC

Sorry about all this text. Pace yourselves!

Okay. You’ve looked at the seven note names. You’ve looked at tones, semitones and accidentals.
If you can’t remember, just revisit earlier posted content to refresh your memory.

Being able to identify the written pitches is a very good skill. Hooray if you’re getting better at doing
that after studying and having a few goes of the quiz. However, we’re going to want to apply that
knowledge and get creative. Turning the notation into sound is important. And not just individual
notes, but patterns and shapes – melodies and harmonies – music!

We could just randomly string a whole lot of notes together – and it might occasionally sound good –
but it’s kind of like throwing a whole lot of random ingredients together and hoping you get a nice
meal. It can help to know some essential recipes. We can tweak the recipes later to our taste.

Sorry if the culinary metaphor is getting confusing.

Now, we’ve got A, B, C, D, E, F and G as our pitch names. There are, of course, more than seven
pitches we can use. The easiest way to see this is by referring to the keyboard:

As we go up through the pitches, we start again with the pitch names. Over and over until the
keyboard runs out. On the above keyboard, you can see four Cs, three Ds, three Es. If you start at C
and count up through the white notes until you get to the next C, you will count eight notes. Same
deal with D and E, etc. The name for this musical distance (or “INTERVAL”) is an OCTAVE. You know
– octopuses have eight tentacles; octagons have eight sides. Easy. (If you count every single,
different pitch within the octave, you’ll notice there are 12. We’re including the white and black
notes, of course. More about that later).

So, on the above diagram, the C to the far right can be described as being three octaves above the C
to the far left. We can sometimes number these octaves, so we know which C or which D we’re
talking about. When you go back into that music theory site, you’ll notice that the virtual keyboard
numbers the Cs as C3, C4, C5 and C6.

On the lesson “The Stave, Clefs and Ledger Lines”, reference was made to “middle C” as being the
note on the ledger line between the treble and bass clefs – that is, in the middle. This particular C
corresponds to C4 and, conveniently, is the C closest to the middle of actual piano keyboards. How
convenient!

Back to the kitchen! Essential recipes and all that. Rather than every single pitch (including those
sharps and flats), much music tends to use a selection of certain pitches. It can help the music to
sound coherent. We call this selection a SCALE. Some scales are more common than others. On
that note (heee!) let’s get you onto the MAJOR SCALE. Follow this link:
https://www.musictheory.net/lessons/21

Remember to change it to “British” in the gear icon (settings). Have fun!