The AKA of notes and chords (Part 1) Intro:- There are a couple of topics that occasionally cause some of you a bit of confusion, and so I would like to address them in more detail than I am able to during a meeting. This will involve a certain amount of musical theory but I will try to minimize that as much as I can. The issue can be summarized briefly into a single question; why are some notes and chords called by more than one name? This question opens up 2 main subjects:- 1) The use of sharps and flats 2) The naming of chords by 2 or more names. I will address the first of these in this document and then cover the second in a Part 2 document. In both cases, the answer to the question lies in an understanding of the Major Scale. I'm sure you know that songs and other musical compositions aren't just a random set of notes, rather they arise out of what you might call packets or collections of notes that we call scales. Musical scales have existed for many centuries and they lie at the very heart of all music. Sharps And Flats Some individual chords and notes are called by both sharp and flat names. It is easier to explain this by looking at the naming of individual notes and then it will be much easier to see how the same principle applies to chords, at least as far as sharps and flats are concerned. hord-shapes are also given extra names for other reasons I will cover this in Part 2. There are different types of musical scale, and the differences arise from the way the steps of the scale are arranged, as these steps are not the same distance from each other it's rather like climbing the stairs at home in a mixture of double steps, with a few singles mixed in here and there. Although there are several types of these scale-arrangements, we are only concerned here with the one that stands out paramount above all of the others - The Major Scale ; this is what you could call the King Of The Scales. If the major scale is the King Of The Scales then the King Of Kings is the scale of -Major. This puts quite a different light on -major, as many people seem to think that the key of is mainly for beginners! The reason that the scale of -major (usually called the key of ) is the king is that it has no sharps and flats in it, so you might say that it is, in a sense, a purer scale than the others. This is true of no other major scale; all of the other major scales must have one or more notes adjusted in order to make the scale sound correct. We generally use the word key rather than scale because the hristian monks called
the starting note of the scale the home key, although they also called it the root note as is the case today. The term key is also used in the term key signature which is the symbol or symbols used at the beginning of formal sheet music; this symbol tells the musician which scale the music was written in. If the notes of the major scale could have been set an equal distance from each other then sharps and flats would not have been needed. The sound of the major scale is lost in pre-history -it's a sound that appears to be intuitive in human appreciation of musical sound, so the writers of the scales worked with this. When song-writers came to put compositions into a different range of musical pitch they found that starting on a different root note and just playing the natural notes unadjusted just didn't sound correct. This is because the pattern of the scale was disturbed. Starting on any note other than just wouldn't work, so they had to adjust notes to get the pattern of the scale back into the right order. When they were experimenting with different root notes a strange thing emerged; when the 6 th note of the -scale was used as a starting note a pleasant new sound emerged. This wasn't a major scale sound but it sounded good the minor scale was born! Some of the songs that we sing are written in minor scales; these have a more reflective or even sad sound to them, as do the chords of minor names. I have often said to you that each major chord has a best friend in the minor family and this is because the minor scale in question uses exactly the same notes as the major scale it is best friends with. The scale of -major shares exactly the same, unadjusted notes as those of the scale of A-minor and that's why the chords of and Am are best friends, often found together. The strange mood change in A-minor is created simply by starting the scale from a root note of A instead of. So here is how sharps and flats come about in the major scales from this adjustment process. It is best explained with a diagram: Here is the scale of -major:- 8 7 B B 6 A A 5 G G 4 F F 3 E E 2 D D 1 The scale has 7 letters in it and you will notice that I have marked an eighth note in red; this eighth step takes us back to but at a higher pitch. This is called the
octave note and, from there, you could just carry on and create another rising scale of -major starting from that higher root note of. This is how the term octaves arose. The same principle applies if you move down the staircase - you can keep climbing down in the scale of -Major. You will also notice that there is a smaller gap (the musical term is interval ) between the notes of B and and between E and F. This is the irregular pattern of steps that I referred to earlier; there is a smaller change of pitch between those notes than in all of the other notes. The hristian monks only used the first 7 letters of the alphabet for their musical notation and that was fine if they were singing or playing in the scale of but, as you know, you can't sing everything in, without growling like a bear or screaming like a banshee! I mentioned earlier that if you start your major scale on any note other than you hit a problem: if, for example you take D as your root note then the scale just won't sound right if you just go D EF G A B D If you look back at my diagram you will see that the gap between the 3 rd and 4 th notes and the 7 th and 8 th notes needs to be small, but here with D the gap between and F and a G is big and so is that between and D. For this reason it was necessary to adjust the notes of F and to bring them closer to G and D above them the terms F# and # thereby arose! After those adjustments the major scale sounded right with D as its root note. It soon became obvious that if you wanted to sing or play in a scale that has a root note other than then you had to adjust one or more of the notes. The adjustment for the scale of D-major is just on 2 notes but if, for example, you start on the note of E, then you have to sharpen the F,, G and D notes, simply to make them fit the pattern! With some scales you have to drop the pitch of a note in order to make the pattern work; this is called flattening the note. For example, if you play in the key of F-major you have to flatten the note of B. You will see from my diagram that you cannot sharpen a B or an E, nor can you flatten a or an F there isn't enough of a gap between them. I have been talking about big gaps and small gaps but the correct term is tone and semitone respectively. On your ukulele a tone is a movement of 2 frets and a movement of a semitone is just one fret. Between the notes of B and and the notes of E and F there is no fret-space. There is no such note as B# or E#, nor are there such notes as -flat or F-flat. On a piano the sharps and flats are on the black keys you might say that they sharpen or flatten the white keys. Another point worth mentioning is that the notes of the scale can be numbered from 1 to 7 (the 8 th note is the octave note that starts as note 1 in a higher pitched version of the same scale). These numbers (except 1 and 8) feature in our chords e.g. chords like G7 6 E7aug5 sus4. These numbers in a chord-name are telling the
musician what has been adjusted in the basic chord formula, to make it sound different. I'll say more about this in part 2 when we look at why chords can have more than one name. When the musical designers had finished their grand tour of the scales each having a different starting note or root note,they found that they had created 5 new notes. This brought the total number of musical note-names to 12. It is an interesting fact that it doesn't matter whether your name was Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart or Buddy Holly, you only had 12 notes to work with unless you moved up or down into higher or lower octaves involving those same notes at higher or lower pitches of sound. As you have seen, only 5 of the 7 notes could be sharpened, as B and E couldn't. I mentioned that it was also necessary to flatten some notes in certain scales, so you are perhaps wondering why 10 new notes weren't created, instead of 5; this lies at the heart of the confusion that has arisen when we call these adjusted notes by 2 names. Again, a diagram will help, I hope. Here is that diagram again, but now I have inserted the sharps and flats:- B B A# Bb A A G# Ab G G F# Gb F F E E D# Eb D D # Db If you look across from one side to the other on any of the unadjusted notes you will see the same note. The same is also true for the adjusted notes but the name is different; it is, in fact the same musical note-pitch but it is named differently. Now you might say, Why didn't they call these notes just by their sharp name or their flat name? Well there are 2 reasons for this:- 1) It is a well established musical convention that when you climb up a scale you call the little steps by their sharp name but, on the way down, you use their flat name. 2) More importantly, the name used refers to what had to be done to the note
when a scale was constructed e.g. in the scale of F=major the B had to be dragged down a little to make the scale sound right. So you can see that whenever you have a half-way pitch of sound between 2 notes you can call it either a sharp or a flat, depending upon which natural note you are using as your reference point. Take and D; if my starting point is then as I move up in pitch towards D I pass through a note that I can call #. If I am starting from D and moving down in pitch to then I pass through the same note, but this time I call it Db. If I move up from G to A I pass through G# but if I move down from A to G then I pass through exactly the same note but now call it A-flat. It's the same note on the same fret of your ukulele. hords When we name chords of different pitch we are not moving up or down a scale but the same principle of climbing up or down in small steps is the same as it is for notes. A G-chord shape moved up by one fret gives you a G# but you would also be playing the chord of A-flat. A barred version of D7 shifted down by one fret would give you a Db7 but you would equally be playing the chord of #7. For this reason it is quite a good idea whenever you are dealing with sharps and flats to convert the name to its AKA name. For example, in many song sheets you can find the chord of A# and you might feel unsure of it, until you convert it to the much more familiar name of Bb. I hope all of this has helped you to understand this apparent anomaly over sharps and flats. The multi-naming of chords is our other challenge and I will deal with that in Part 2!