If you've been playing music for a while, you might already have a handle on the basics: note names, sharps, flats, reading the staff. If that's you, try the quick checks below. If they feel easy, you can skip ahead.

Can you name these notes?

And a few vocabulary questions:

If those felt comfortable, you're good to move on. Try the Rhythm check next, or skip straight to Keys and Scales. If anything tripped you up, stick around. The lessons in this unit are short and the concepts are genuinely simple, but having them solid will save you a lot of friction later.

If you knew the notes, but it took you a while, then maybe go spend a little time with our Note Trainer to practice and brush up before moving on.

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Here's a fact that you probably already know, though there's a chance you haven't really put much thought into it just yet: there are only twelve different notes in Western music. That's it. Every song you've ever heard — every melody, every chord, every solo — uses some combination of these twelve pitches.

They are:

C - C#/Db - D - D#/Eb - E - F - F#/Gb - G - G#/Ab - A - A#/Bb - B

After B, the pattern starts over again at C and the pattern repeats indefinitely. The same twelve notes, repeating forever in both directions.

Ok nerds... maybe you've heard of microtonal music, or certain types of ethnic music that use MORE than 12 notes. We know about those, they're a little bit out of scope for this beginner music theory course. You don't have to email us about it.

There are some funny symbols in that table up there:

• The sharp symbol (♯) raises a note by a half step.
• The flat symbol (♭) lowers a note by a half step.

HALF STEP: the smallest distance between two notes in our 12 note system. It's the distance between two adjacent keys on a keyboard, or one fret on a fretted instrument like guitar. We'll talk more about this shortly!

So, a C# is just slightly higher than a C and slightly lower than a D.

Furthermore, you'll notice some of those notes have two names. C# and Db are the same pitch — the same key on the keyboard, the same fret on the guitar. Two names for one sound. This is called an enharmonic equivalent.

Why two names? Because the name you use depends on context — specifically, which key you're in. Don't worry about that yet. For now, just know that C# and Db are the same note, D# and Eb are the same note, and so on.

Notice that E and F are right next to each other (no sharp or flat note between them, or no black key between them on the keyboard), and so are B and C. These are natural half steps — they'll matter a lot when we get to scales.

A quick note about the symbols. The flat symbol is ♭ but it looks an awful lot like a lowercase b. The sharp symbols is actually ♯ but looks an awful lot like the # sign... since there are no keys on a normal keyboard for ♯ or ♭ you'll VERY OFTEN (even in this curriculum) see people just using b and #. It's no big deal really. Just something to be aware of.

When you play all twelve notes in order, you get the chromatic scale. It's not a scale you'll use to write songs (usually), but it's the complete set of notes that every other scale, chord, and melody is carved from.

The above information is all you really need for now. If you want to dive deeper, or look a little farther the following resources are pretty good.

Videos

• 12tone - What's a note? it's a building block lesson, quick and to the point.

• Andrew Huang — "Learn music theory in half an hour" — First five minutes or so covers all of this at a really quick pace. He also covers a lot of the material we'll be getting to throughout this course in the rest of the vid. We wouldn't blame you for peeking ahead!

• David Bennett Piano — "Why are there 12 notes in music?" — Goes deeper into why twelve and not some other number. It's a fascinating dive into how this all works. He talks about concepts we'll be covering in much more detail later, so don't get discouraged if you're lost! You can come back to this one.

Articles

These are way more than you need right now, but I know some of you are thirsty for this stuff.

• Wikipedia — Chromatic scale — Technical reference. Not where you'd learn this for the first time, but useful for looking things up.

• Wikipedia — Enharmonic — If the "two names for one note" concept is confusing, this explains it in detail.