Pitch and the musical alphabet

Pitch is how high or low a note sounds. It is determined by frequency: faster vibration, higher pitch.

Music names pitches with seven letters — A B C D E F G — and then starts over. That is the musical alphabet, and it is the first thing to get straight, because seven letters have to cover twelve available pitches.

The letters are not evenly spaced

Look at a keyboard. The white keys are the seven letters. Between most pairs of white keys there is a black key; between two pairs, there is nothing.

E–F and B–C are the close pairs. Every other pair of neighbouring letters has a gap with a black key in it.

That irregularity is not a design flaw, and it is not arbitrary either — it is what makes the major scale pattern land on the white keys starting from C, and it is why key signatures exist at all.

Naming the notes in the gaps

The five black keys get their names by reference to the white keys either side:

• C♯ is a semitone above C. D♭ is a semitone below D. They are the same key.
• The same applies to D♯/E♭, F♯/G♭, G♯/A♭ and A♯/B♭.

Which name is correct depends on context, not preference — see enharmonic notes and accidentals.

After G comes A

The alphabet wraps. Above G is A again — a higher A, but the same letter, because it sounds like the same note. That repeat is the octave.

Do, re, mi

Many countries name notes with solfège — do re mi fa sol la si/ti — rather than letters. In fixed-do systems, do is always C. In movable-do systems, do is whichever note is the tonic of the key.

Neither is more correct. If you learned solfège, C = do, D = re, and so on through the fixed system.