The Notes on Your Instrument

Twelve notes, then it all repeats. That is the whole of the instrument's alphabet, and every instrument lays the same twelve out in its own way: up a string a fret at a time, across a keyboard in the white-and-black pattern, up the ladder one rung a semitone. Nobody learns the notes by memorizing every position. You learn the twelve, learn where one octave ends and the next begins, and learn the few shapes that connect one note to the same note elsewhere — and then the instrument fills itself in.

Above is every note on the guitar, named; the picker under the figure changes the instrument, and tapping any note plays it. The figure follows the text from here.

Twelve notes, one octave

The twelve, round the wheel

The chromatic scale is all twelve notes in order — C, D♭, D, E♭, E, F, F♯, G, A♭, A, B♭, B — a semitone apart, and after B comes C again, an octave higher: the same note, twice the frequency, the same name. The names themselves are not neutral: the seven letters are the C major scale, and the five between them are named from it — the flat of the scale note above, except F♯, the sharp of the one below. That is the convention the scale degrees follow — ♭2, ♭3, ♯4, ♭6, ♭7, the fifth never moved — so the note names of C and the degrees of any key are one spelling. The figure is gray for now because twelve notes have no root to color from; the color comes when we pick one. On a string a semitone is one fret, on a keyboard the next key whatever its color, on the ladder one rung; twelve of them and you are back at the start. So the whole instrument is one octave's worth of names, repeated — fact one, and the reason there is less to learn than it looks.

One note, everywhere

Here is every C. Notice how few there are and that they are not scattered: they sit in a constellation, the same distances apart wherever you look. Now every A, then every E: the same constellation, moved. Knowing where one note lives is knowing where every note lives, because the pattern doesn't change — only its position does. On a keyboard the constellation is trivial, one key per octave, always the same place in the pattern of black keys; on a string instrument it is a shape, and the shapes are the next section.

The octave shapes

On the guitar the same note recurs two strings over and two frets up from the E or A string, and two strings over and three frets up from the D or G string — the B string's tuning shifts the pattern by one. Those two shapes join every C on the neck to every other C, and they are the same for every note. On a bass, tuned in fourths throughout, it is always two strings and two frets; on a mandolin, tuned in fifths, an octave is the next course five frets up, or two courses over and two frets down — or the same string, twelve frets up, on any of them. Learn the shape for your instrument once and the octave is the ruler you measure everything else with.

The landmarks

You don't find a note by counting from the open string. You find it from a landmark: a fret you know, a key you know. On a guitar the fifth, seventh and twelfth frets have dots for exactly this, and the twelfth fret is the open strings an octave up. On a keyboard the landmark is the group of two black keys — C sits just to its left, every time — and the group of three, with F to its left. A C major scale drawn across the whole instrument is what those landmarks look like once they connect: every note of the key, labeled by degree, from one end to the other.

A key is a subset

Set the figure to a scale and most of the instrument goes quiet: seven of the twelve stay, five are gone. That is what a key is on the instrument — a filter over the twelve — and it is why learning the notes and learning scales are the same job done from two ends. A minor is the same seven notes as C major, and the figure shows it: nothing moves, the numbers change. Intervals — the distances the twelve are made of — comes next, and The major and minor scale takes it from there.

On the guitar

Six strings, twelve frets before it repeats, seventy-two places for twelve notes. The open strings low to high are E, A, D, G, B, E; every fret a semitone; the twelfth fret the open strings an octave up. The two octave shapes above cover the neck between them, and the B string's one-fret shift is the only irregularity to remember.

On the piano

The keyboard has the twelve in plain sight: seven white keys a letter each, five black keys the sharps and flats between them, and the pattern of twos and threes telling you where you are without a label. There are no octave shapes to learn — an octave is the same key eight white keys along — so the work on a piano is not finding notes but finding scales: the white keys are C major and everything else is a pattern of black and white to know by feel.

On the ukulele

Four strings, tuned G, C, E, A — and the G is usually tuned high, above the C, so the lowest note is on the second string and the octave shapes don't run in one direction. The twelve-fret rule holds, and the C and E strings are a major third apart like the guitar's G and B, so that part of the guitar's map carries over.

On the bass

Four strings in fourths, E, A, D, G — the guitar's low four an octave down — with no irregular string, so every shape is the same on every pair of strings: the octave is two strings over and two frets up, everywhere. The bass is the easiest neck to learn the notes on and the easiest to play them in tune on your own.

On the mandolin

Four courses in fifths, G, D, A, E — a violin's tuning — so the neck is the bass's turned inside out: an octave is the next course five frets up, and a scale spans more frets on one string than on a guitar. The same twelve, the same twelve-fret repeat, a different ruler.

What NoSheet does instead

The app never asks you to name a note. It plays a phrase and you play it back, and the instrument on screen shows the degrees — 1, 3, 5 from the root — not the letters, because the ear hears distance, not names. The names come as a side effect of knowing where the root is. The loop on this site is the same game without the microphone.