Theory:Lesson 1

Ok, the basics are basics,and it's really important that you understand the theory behind the music very well no matter which musical aspect you will be studying.

So first of all, let's learn the notes that are used in music.
The notes,as you may know are 7 which are : A,B,C,D,E,F,G these notes are the natural notes that many people heard of. But actually the notes are 12 because each note has the alternations and these alternations are the black notes on the piano.We will get into that a bit later.
I really believe though that you should learn the natural notes with different sequence. I believe it's much easier to start recognizing them starting from the C note. It would be better if you remember them as C,D,E,F,G,A,B. But again that's just my opinion,and you will understand why i'm saying that when you get into theory a bit more.

For the sake of easier understanding i will use the piano keys to explain the theory.
So,look at your piano if you have one or at the image below.

As you can see,you can easily find where each note is located on the piano keys. The black Keys,which are the alternations of the seven basic notes are following the same sequence each time they are repeated. The sequence is 2 black notes-3 black notes as you can see on the image.

So to find out every time where the C note is you find the two black notes and the white one before the first of the two black notes is always C. As you noticed all the notes are repeated each time on the keys. The block of notes between two same notes is called an octave.For example all the notes between F and the next F is an octave. As you can easily see in the next image.The natural notes within an octave are 8.But of course you can see that there are also the black notes. So, what are those black notes? As i said these are the alternations of the natural notes. Each note has two basic alternation the Sharped note (#) and the flatted note(b). The sharped note is a note which is a step higher than the natural note. So the black note after the F is the F#(G Sharp).After the G is the G# etc. The flatted note is the one that is one step before the natural. So the black note before A is the Ab(A Flat).

Now you know what are the white and the black notes. But what about the spaces between the black notes? Does the C note has a flatted note? Well, yes it does. The Cb is actually the B note because it's one step before the C. The same applies to the B# the E# and the Fb. That step as a distance between the note (The distance between two notes is called an interval) is called half-tone and as you can see there are no other notes between a half-tone step.Don't get confused about the intervals,i will discuss them on another lesson but for you just have to know that to find the natural's sharp or flat you have to do a step up or down on the keys.

Note that this lesson is very basic, the only thing that you have to remember is where each note is located on piano, so don't get frustrated if you can't understand a thing or two that i mentioned here,i will discuss everything else in my next lessons.

So, here are all the notes together with the flats and the sharps (The alternations are marked Red):


There are also the double flatted and double sharped notes but i will get into them in the next lesson where i will be discussing how to read notes from the staff. Good luck.