For many years I asked music professionals why was it so illogical - no one seemed to know. Eventually, the best answer I found was that early harpsichord type instruments had only white keys. They consisted of banks of seven notes. Each bank formed a scale which 'sounded pleasing and natural to the ear', with the an eighth note finishing off the scale and beginning a new tonal scale higher than the last.
Hence the 'octave', Greek origins for eight. So, there was a kind of 'natural ear' logic to the seven note scale but when half tone notes were introduced, what was natural to the ear, and what was mathematically true, uncovered two different realities. This can be best highlighted by visually seeing and counting the semitone half tone divisions on the fret board of a stringed instrument such as the guitar.
Mathematically, there are twelve semitones in an octave; six whole tones and six semitones on a single string. This is unarguable, they're 'just there'. What or how they are named, is where the real problem lies. Working from logic it would be best to number them 1 to 12, with the 13th note being the first note of the octave above.
The reality is, that the transition from note B to note C, and the transition from note E to note F, are mathematically actually only semitone steps, not whole tone steps.
The problem lies with the fact that the original layout of the harpsichord had seven 'whole' notes white keys already physically in place, and to make up the full compliment of twelve semitones, required the addition of only five black keys.
Hence, the odd spacing system of seven and five to make the 12 semitones. It would have been more logical to re-jig the keyboard layout at that point, into a symmetrical system of six white notes and six black notes. However, it seems that history, tradition, laziness or un-willingness to change won out, and we have an odd key layout, with a dogs breakfast of a nomenclature system, and complex transposition rules for changing keys.
Some have suggested that it would be difficult to navigate a symmetrical keyboard. This could be overcome by colour coding or tactile coding of certain notes as a reference point. Musicians can be very adaptable in any case. The advantages of a symmetric keyboard is that finger positions for chords and scales would be more consistent and transposition from one key to another would be easier. It's possible to have notes between any adjacent semitones. There could be as many extra notes between G and G as between E and F.
Note that on some instruments,e. The OP's theory, I'm guessing, is to make a keyboard white, black, white, black, etc. Difficult to find one's way around, and two notes only from a microtonal system. Makes it unwieldly and the two microtonal notes would hardly fit for 'ordinary' playing.
There are some ambiguities in the way your question is stated. It is difficult to interpreted it in a non-arbitrary way; if you suggest adding one key for E in addition to the present F key why not suggest for example the addition of two keys for B-flat and A-sharp respectively? And if you suggest reinterpreting E as the quarter-tone between E and F , why not add a bunch of other quarter-tones to the keyboard?
If we leave out your suggested changes to the keyboard layout the question is clearly about a seemingly inconsistent system behind the keyboard layout. And I'll try to address that. There are historical and physical reasons to why the keyboard looks the way it does, but alternative systems are possible and have indeed been used to a small extent for example there have been experiments with quarter-tone pianos.
One alternative that I think is in line with your question is not to have seven white keys and only five black keys but have an equal distribution with every other key as white and every other as black. Leaving out most of the mentioned historical and physical reasons I think it could be productive to think of the differences between transposed and untransposed instruments.
The idea behind transposing instruments is basically this: The notation system is built around the scale of C major in the way that it has no sharps and flats and is thus easier to read. If an instrument is built around another scale for example by ease of fingering , it can be more practical to sync the notation with the instrument by transposition. For untransposed instruments the easiest scale is in fact C major or presumably it doesn't matter or it doesn't matter enough For a keyboard it is easy to see that the former is the case - the keyboard layout mimics the notation system with the white keys as unaltered notes and the black keys as sharps or flats.
And that is I think in very short the answer to why the keyboard layout looks the way it does. I'm well aware that this forwards a bunch of questions from the keyboard layout to the notation system, but that not was not really put to question in the OP as I read it. I think you are focused on the wrong question. The banks of the river the top and bottom of the diagram are the top and bottom of the octave.
And the intervals are the planks that cross the river. See later in the article to hear why. Rather than starting from scratch and going from A to L which we should have done in my opinion , we tried to meld the old system with the new.
Notice how the planks in the 12 note bridge are all exactly even. So, back then, the musicians had a problem where they wanted to add 5 more notes to the original 7 note scale, but where to put them? There was no gap between E and F and B and C, but there was room for another note in between the rest of the notes.
Thus, a likely reason why we have no E or B today is because new music systems had to be designed to work with old music systems. What makes far more sense is to not think of a sharp as one half-note higher, but instead one semitone. A semitone is the distance of one interval in the 12 note scale. These are single guitar notes. A chord is made when we stack guitar notes together and play them all at the same time.
The chord has a larger and fuller sound because we hear several guitar notes played at the same time. You can learn easy versions of every guitar chord in our Easy Chords section. One of the worst mistakes you can make as a beginner guitarist is to try and learn all the guitar notes on the fretboard.
Objectively, this is a more successful approach. If you do you will make slower progress and your guitar journey will be more difficult than it needs to be. You will also become a very lop-sided guitarist. This is NOT essential knowledge for an absolute guitar beginner, but it will deepen your understanding of the instrument if you want to learn more. Read on only if you want to learn more about the musical alphabet and how guitar notes lay across the fretboard.
Guitar notes are the same as violin notes and piano notes. The musical alphabet is the same across all instruments. After all, the normal alphabet has 26 letters and the musical alphabet only has 12 notes.
However, we have to remember our sharps and flats which appear between most though not all of the letters. The musical alphabet and hence, order of guitar notes looks like this:. Sharps and flats are the same thing, just looked at from a different angle. We can describe all sharps as flats. If we do, the musical alphabet looks like this:.
A and Bb are the same note. If it were 9. Both descriptions would be accurate and both describe the same thing. Each fret has a number and it goes up one by one as we ascend the fret board:.
The best way to practice the musical alphabet on a guitar is to start on the open A string 5th string and count up one fret at a time, naming the notes as you go until you get to the 12th fret the one with two dots on it :. Once you feel comfortable working on the low E string, I want you to try finding all the natural notes on the A string, the D string, the G string, and the B string. As you look for the natural guitar notes, notice that the placement of the naturals changes depending on the strings you use.
Now, I want to focus more on sharps and flats. Do you remember that whole-step between A and B? Think of this exercise as a mental walkthrough of the fretboard, just to make sure you are understanding guitar notes effectively. These are just two examples of how you can better understand guitar notes and the relationships between each one.
Do you remember the workshop I told you about earlier? Read My Story. I play piano, lassical mostly….. I have mini Martin, I pay by ear and written music on piano, and already I can pick up the guitar chords on guitar..
I played piano, xylophone a lot. However, i personally think that learning the notes on the strings would be a wise decision to do. Thank you so much! This was extremely helpful and easy to understand.
Please log in again. The login page will open in a new tab. After logging in you can close it and return to this page. Guitar notes … what are they and why should you care? This lesson on guitar notes will cover… Notes vs.
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