Sharps, flats, etc. It seems so needlessly confusing to a layman.
In: 8
You are a blacksmith in ancient Greece, and you’ve heard that the army needs a bunch of new swords, all the same size.
So you make one sword as a standard, and this goes “clang” when you hit it. You soon realise that if another sword is too big the clang is lower and if the sword is too small the clang is higher. Not just that, but comparing two different clangs has a odd warbly kind of sound whereas two identical swords have no warble at all.
Well, the army think your swords are fabulous. The general calls round one day and orders a bunch of daggers, half the size of the swords. So you get a sword sized block of bronze, chop it in half and make two daggers. You accidentally drop on onto the sword, and although the clangs are different, there’s no warble. Hmmm.
The army love these daggers too, and you make so much money that you can retire at the age of 25. But you’re still curious about the difference in weight and the difference in tone, so you make a middle piece based on the next simplest fraction, 3/2. This gives another pleasant tone. So you keep going until you have six pieces between the sword and dagger, all based in increasingly complex ratios, and you label the sword “A” and the other pieces “B” to “G”, and the dagger is another “A”.
So now you can play a tune in what is known as the Aeolian mode (what we call a Minor key) from A to A. Then you experiment starting on B, but you run out of notes so you add a full set and you have two octaves.
Playing B to B is … weird. We call this the Locrian mode, and uniquely it has a flat 5.
Playing C to C is lovely. Sunny and bright, like a nursery rhyme. This is the Ionian mode or what we call Major.
D to D is Dorian, E to E is Phrygian, F to F is Lydian, and G to G is Mixolydian.
These all sound different because the gaps betwwen notes aren’t equal. In modern terms we would say that they are all two semitones apart, except B&C and E&F which are just one semitone apart. And it’s where this smaller gap appears in the scale that makes the mood.
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FINALLY you might want to play G Ionian, but you don’t have the right bits of metal. Due to the way the spacing goes, you need a new piece between F and G, so we call this F#.
And then work your way through the other scales adding sharps (or flats if there are too many sharps) until you can play all keys in all modes. It just so happens that you never need a B# or an E#.
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