I’ve never been a musical person but would like to learn an instrument. I can’t get my head around the letters and things like E flat etc. Is there a way to better understand it please?
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If you’re talking about flats and sharps, the best way to understand it is to look at the piano keyboard. There are all of your notes, from C to B. But there are more keys than 7, the black ones. These are your sharps and flats. If the pitch is higher, it’s sharp, lower – flat. The black key right next to D is D sharp at the right, and D flat at the left.
Learning music is always easier when you can reference a piano keyboard. For example, a piano has 88 keys, but they repeat the same notes across several octaves. Octaves are the same note at different pitches (high or low). Like the note “C”, which appears 7 times on a piano keyboard, is always going to be recognized by your brain as the same note, whether it’s played as a super shrill high pitched noise or a low bass noise.
The white keys are:
C D E F G A B C
The black keys are sharps (#) and flats (b) of the white keys.
The white and black keys with sharps, played in order:
C C# D D# E F F# G G# A A# B C
The white and black keys with flats, played in order:
C Db D Eb E F Gb G Ab A Bb B C
Compare the notes column by column. The same key on the piano can be a sharp or flat depending on its notation. Flats lower the pitch (B > Bb), and sharps raise the pitch (C > C#). But it’s important to note that C# and Db for example are the same as far as pitch goes. It’s just how music is notated that separates them.
Music notation is a way to express specific sound frequencies. As an example, most Western orchestras tune their instruments so that one specific note is at exactly 440 hertz frequency.
However, music works in a certain pattern. Every time you double the frequency, all of the relations that held for the original frequency remain exactly the same as before. Humans “hear” two notes as being closely related, higher-pitched versions of one another if the first note is (say) 110 Hz, and the second is 220 Hz. Each band of notes where the top note is twice the frequency of the bottom note is called an “octave.” This is because, in Western music notation, we choose to divide up that space into a scale with seven distinct steps, plus the final note that is double the original note, making eight notes.
However, even though there are 8 notes, we do not have 8 equal-sized steps. Doing that would make sounds that are discordant and unpleasant to listen to. Instead, traditionally, Western music divides each octave into thirteen “half-steps.” Two half-steps is a “whole step.” For a regular, “major” scale–which sounds bright and positive–the notes of the scale are always in a specific arrangement of steps: whole, whole, half, whole, whole, whole, half.
In English, we call the notes by letter names: A, B, C, D, E, F, G. The note I mentioned above, tuned to 440 Hz, is called “A4.” On a piano, it is the A key just above the C note right in the middle, also known as “middle C.”
Because of the quirks of how music works, however, the scale that starts with A is not the simplest scale. It turns out that the scale that starts with C is the simplest scale: C D E F G A B C. This is because the gap between E and F is only a half-step, and the gap between B and C is only a half-step, while all the other gaps are whole steps.
When someone speaks of “E flat” or “G sharp,” they are talking about moving half a step away from the note in question. Flat (which uses a little b-shaped symbol) means you go a half step down. Sharp (using a # symbol) means you go a half step up. Because E and F are only half a step apart already, this means that “E#” is exactly the same as “Fb”. Likewise, “B#” is the same as “Cb”. For all other notes with flats and sharps, because they’re two half-steps apart, the sharp of one note is the same as the flat of the next note up, e.g. F sharp is the same as G flat, G sharp is the same as A flat, etc. Most of the time, you use whichever one makes for a simpler way of talking about the notes, so it’s very dependent on context.
When you see the sets of lines on sheet music, that’s called the “staff.” It uses positions on the lines (with little extra lines added if needed, above and below) to indicate which note needs to be played. There are different “clefs”–the fancy, curly symbols on the left-hand side of the staff–which tell the reader what note each row or line means. The “trebel” clef, also known as the “G” clef, is one of the most common symbols associated with classical music–the fancy curlicue-S-like thing. It indicates that the second line of the staff, just above the bottom (passing through the center of the curlicue’s small circle) is the note G4.
The only way to really learn music notation, however, is to take music lessons and practice, practice, practice. It’s a language, it takes time to learn. Once you have learned it, you can read pretty much any music anyone shows you and get an idea of what it would sound like even without hearing it. Obviously hearing it is also useful! But reading sheet music can give you a sense for the piece (especially the rhythm) before you hear or play it.
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