Grade 1:4 - Letter Names of Notes
Updated: Jun 14
Previous: Lesson 3 - Time Value of Notes
Now we have looked at the basics of rhythm, we will start to look at pitch. Remember rhythm and Harmony make up melody, these are the fundamentals of music.
Music is made of different pitches, each pitch is a different ‘note’. The keyboard represents all these notes, each key is a different pitch, with the lower pitches on the left getting higher as it goes to the right.
The pitch is the sound the note makes, it is caused by the frequency, which is how many times the sound wave occurs per second. It is measured in hertz (Hz). The higher the frequency, the more times the wave occurs per second, and the higher pitch the note sounds.
This is a basic illustration. Humans can hear pitch between around 20 to 20,000 Hz, so we can hear sound waves which occur around 20,000 times per second! The range of a standard piano is between 27.5 Hz as the lowest note up to 4,186 as the highest note.
You do not need to learn the frequencies for the grade exams, but it may help some people to understand how it works and why.
Letter Names of Notes
Each pitch has a corresponding letter name between A & G
These are the only 7 names, and they repeat up and down. Let’s see as an example on a keyboard. We will explore this more later on.
The letter note names repeat, but they don’t sound exactly the same.
Each time the note repeats, it doubles the frequency. For example if the first A is 440 hertz, the next one would be 880 hertz, and the next would be 1,760. It sounds as the same note, but at different octaves.
An octave is the name we give for the different notes of the same letter name. They are 8 notes apart. The blue letter notes are all different octaves of A - the frequency will exactly double as it gets higher, and half as it gets lower.
Every instrument plays these same pitches, but with different sounds. An ‘A’ on a flute, piano or guitar is the same note but they will all have a different character. They are all an ‘A’ because they are the same frequency. If a guitar was out of tune, it would mean it was playing the wrong frequency when a note was played.
The letter notes go in alphabetical order. And, they do stop at G where they repeat, there is no H, for example.
For your grades, you just need to know the notes and their names.
In the next lesson, we will look at how the notes are represented on the stave.
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