The musical alphabet

Music uses just seven letter names: A B C D E F G. After G it starts again at A, round and round, each time a little higher.

These seven are called the natural notes. They are the white keys on a piano.

Between most pairs of natural notes there is one more note. It takes its name from the notes either side of it:

• a sharp (#) means one step higher: the note between F and G is F#, "F sharp";
• a flat (b) means one step lower: that same note is also Gb, "G flat".

F# and Gb are two names for exactly the same sound. Which name is used depends on the key a song is in, which you will meet in the keys section. For now, use sharps.

Here is the one fact about the alphabet you really must remember:

There is no note between B and C, and none between E and F.

Every other pair has a sharp between them. So the full list of all twelve notes is:

On the piano these are the places where two white keys sit side by side with no black key between them.

On the guitar, moving up one fret moves up one note in that list of twelve. That step is called a semitone or a half step. Two frets is a whole step.

So on any string you can work out the notes by counting: take the open string's name and walk up the list, one note per fret, remembering that B to C and E to F are single frets. The next lesson does exactly that on the low E and A strings.