The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away.

I remember this phrase from my school days. It popped into my mind this morning. I thought, "This is evidently why Catholics eat lots of takeaways."

Nae, but seriously folks.

At the moment there are quite a few people trying to explain the entire music theory system on Facebook. I, and many other people, have spotted many mistakes in their thinking. Some are posting huge diagrams of chords, modes and scales. Gosh, if I didn't know about music theory, it would be enough to make me want to give up.

They're really talking about the structures that make up Western music - the type of music that comes originally from Europe. In Europe, sometime around 1750 (I think), a system called Tempering was invented. This was a man-made system where twelve notes were evenly spaced. 

Pianoforte

There are seven different white notes and five black notes on the pianoforte. These simply repeat at different octaves (higher and lower sounds). The black notes each have two names because, before tempering, they were slightly different notes. 

The twelve notes are called:

A    A sharp (#) or B flat (b)    B    C    C# or Db    D    D# or Eb    E    F    F# or Gb    G    G# or Ab

If you play the white notes in this order - C D E F G A B C - you get what is called the C major scale. There are two notes that don't have black notes between them. This happens between B & C and E & F. The distance between these two sets of notes is called a semitone - the two notes are right next to each other. The other notes all have another note (black in this case) between them. When you have to skip one note to get to the next note, we call this distance a tone. 

Here is the shape that makes up the C major scale - tone tone semitone tone tone tone semitone.

If you were to start on another note, and keep the same pattern of tones and semitones (remembering that each note must have a different letter name), we would get another major scale.

Take a bit of time and check these three out:

G A B C D E F# G

F G A Bb C D E F

F# G# A# B C# D# E# F#

Wow! That last one has an E#! Where is that?  Remember that I said each note must have a different letter name? Well, E# is really the same note as F. That little trick is called enharmonic - when a note can have two names. Hey, don't get hung up on that, I just put it in to show you.

There is also a scale that contains all the possible notes. This is called a chromatic scale. You just play all the notes (C C# D D# E F etc.) one after the other.

Okay, that's most of the simplest stuff covered. Obviously, Robert knows all this - it's really simple stuff for him. Peter probably won't have read it. Hey, the only instrument that I know he has played is the bagpipes, an instrument that missed out on tempering - listen to when a piper tries to play something like a pop tune. You'll hear some very unusual notes!

Just as a side note, on sheet (written) music a lot of the instructions are in Italian. You'll see words like allegro and forte. A lot of English speaking people will tell you that these two words mean fast and loud. They actually mean happy and strong. I think that this makes a big difference to how you play music. I'd much rather aim for happy than trying to rush everything. 

A thing I'm also into is playing your instrument like a singer. Just think of a tune and play it. A singer can do it, so an instrumentalist should be able to do it too.

Ciao tutti.