Notes : The Currency of  Music !

A musical note basically is just a set frequency and there exist a total of 7 natural notes similar to the ABCs of English (literally) .

A  B  C  D  E  F  G 

*By convention this series is usually taken starting from C but we can't help ourselves with some dad jokes.

Now each of these notes can occur in various registers, what that basically means is that there’s an identical but more annoying twin (a higher frequency) of the note after every 6 notes, and each higher register is roughly twice the previous identical twin. Weird to understand ? lemme give an example .
A1 the first note of the “A”s has a frequency of roughly 55Hz
A2 the second note that occurs after 6 more notes has a
frequency of 110Hz (which is 55 x 2)
And A3 the third note that occurs after another 6 notes has a
frequency of roughly 220Hz (which is 110 x 2)

Now you might ask - DUDE !! What the hell do you mean by AFTER 6 notes … !!! Well, see the musical notes really just keep repeating themselves , So the series is simply just a set of  7 notes repeating themselves.

All notes with the same subscript ( i.e 1,2,3…) form an octave ( 8-notes)
(dw we’ll talk more about octaves in another article)

A1  B1  C1  D1  E1  F1  G1  A2  B2  C2  D2  E2  F2  G2  A2 …

Well that’s all about notes !!!!  Our work here is done……

HA just kidding - music theory ain’t that simple  :)
We have now simply covered the basics of NATURAL NOTES.

Now each of these Notes can acquire an ACCIDENTAL to become a slightly different note by increasing or decreasing the frequency. Now what are accidentals ? What do they do ? and how do we use them ?... we’ll be answering all these questions in a later article (and I promise it’ll be much shorter 😭)
But for now , know that we can either increase the pitch using an accidental that looks like # and we call the resultant note a SHARP note or we can slightly decrease the pitch by using an accidental that looks like ♭ and we call the resultant note a FLAT NOTE.

For Example , A + increase pitch = A # (A sharp)
                      B + increase the pitch = C (huh ? ,,, you’ll see :) )
                      C + decrease the pitch = C ♭ (C flat)
                      F + decrease the pitch = E (huh?! ,, I know…music theory is weird :) )

Now to answer your “Huh?”s from the previous examples,, the thing is—  actually the notes “E” and “B” don't really have SHARPS and similarly the notes F and C don't have flats ( Lowkey greatest mysteries of the universe). To get a better sense of all the notes and how they occur, here’s the ✨️ CHROMATIC SCALE. ✨️ 

A  A#  B  C  C#  D  D#  E  F  F#  G  G#  A…

*PS- The above Chromatic scale just means all the notes in the order in which they occur.

Now we can't just play random notes out of this progression of 7 notes and their accidentals and pray that it sounds good. That's why we have specific patterns of notes from the above chromatic scale to make what we call SCALES (basically a group of notes that sound BEAUTIFUL together).

And that’s All for this article ! To quench your intrigue and clear the plot holes that we created in this lesson do check out our other articles .

PEACE ! 🎼 👈 that’s a treble clef btw :)