Theory Thursday: The Basics

What is music?

Music has been called the art of noise, and in some sense, that’s one of the best descriptions of music that we have. We all know intuitively what music is, but describing it can be tough. How does one adequately describe a phenomenon that encompasses variety as wide as Tibetan Buddhist monk overtone throat singing, garage rock, hip-hop, and dub-step? What all of these have in common is an organization of sound and silence over a defined period of time.

By this definition, our first entries into the realm of music theory will be a description of these three concepts: sound, silence, and time. We'll take them one lesson at a time.

Sound

Before we get any further in discussing sound (as it relates to music), there are a number of terms that we need to define that can unfortunately sometimes be used interchangeably. I'm going to define these terms now, but their meanings will become clearer as we progress. These terms are tone, pitch, and note.

Tone - a musical sound

Pitch - the degree of highness or lowness of a tone

Note - a single tone having a specified pitch and duration

Basically tones are our most basic unit of describing musical sounds.

Modern electric guitars have 6 or more strings and 20 or more frets, but even on a 9 string guitar with 30 frets, there are only 12 unique tones. On any of our instruments, there are just 12 tones.

Take a look at your guitar’s fretboard or the guitar in the photo. If you have fretboard inlays, often times the 12th fret has a special design — maybe something as simple as two dots instead of one — but there’s usually something that offsets fret 12 from the rest of the frets. This is no accident!

Try playing an open string on your guitar — even if you haven’t tuned the string. Now on that very same string, finger the 12th fret and play the string. It sounds the same, just a bit higher, right?

The same thing will happen if you finger the first fret, then again the 13th fret, then 2nd & 14th, and 3rd & 15th, etc.

On a guitar, every 12 frets, the cycle of tones repeats. The same thing happens on a musical keyboard: every 12 keys, the cycle of tones repeats. On a keyboard, it’s easier to visualize because there is a repeating visual pattern:

Take a look at the image of the keyboard above. Using a toothpick, fingernail, or anything else with a point, find one of the white keys just left of a grouping of two black keys. Now count 12 keys to the right, including the black keys. You should land again on a similar-shaped white key that is just left of another grouping of 2 black keys. If you have a keyboard available, try playing keys that are 12 apart. What do you notice? They should sound like the same tone, but the leftmost key will sound lower than the rightmost key. As an experiment, try separating by 24 or even 36 keys.

What all of this means in practical terms is: everything we’re going to learn about music theory uses only 12 tones. All of the music we love — and even the music we don’t — is all formed using a system of 12 tones.

The 12 Tones

The 12 musical tones have names corresponding with the English alphabet. First, there are the 7 pitches that correspond to the repeating white keys on a keyboard. These are simply:

A, B, C, D, E, F, G

If you look at the white keys on the following diagram of a musical keyboard, notice that the pattern of tones just repeats over and over.

Where things get just a bit more tricky are the “in-between” tones — the ones represented by the black keys. These still use the same letters as the white keys, but they have modifier symbols called accidentals that tell us the tone is just a nudge higher or lower than its letter name. The "♯" symbol is pronounced sharp, and the "♭" symbol is pronounced flat, so "A♭" is pronounced "A flat".

Notice that these black keys have two different names on each key. Don't worry about this just yet -- you don't need to memorize right now. Notice however that there is a pattern to the names. For example, the black key tone named C♯/D♭ is both higher than C and lower than D. Soon enough we'll learn when to use which tone name, but for now just try to see the pattern, understanding that "♭" means lower than and "♯" means higher than.

Summary

So for today's lesson, you should memorize the following:

• Tones are the most basic unit of musical sound.
• There are 12 unique tones.
• The "♭" symbol is pronounced flat and it means lower than.
• The "♯" symbol is pronounced sharp and it means higher than.