The Musical Alphabet: How Seven Letters Name Every Note You Will Ever Play

A piano has 88 keys and only seven letter names for them: A, B, C, D, E, F and G. After G the alphabet starts again at A, so the 52 white keys share those seven names, and each black key borrows a name from a white neighbor, with a sharp or a flat attached. Add a number for the octave and you can name every key on the piano and every note on the staff.

You'll learn to find each letter from the black keys, why E–F and B–C are the only white keys a half step apart, why each black key has two names and what C4 means, and you'll see where the letters, do-re-mi and the German H came from. The free worksheets for each step are linked as you go.

Seven letters on 88 keys

Look at the black keys first. Apart from a lone one at the very bottom, they come in groups of two and groups of three all the way up the piano, and they tell you where each letter lives. C is the white key just left of every group of two, and F is just left of every group of three. Moving right, the letters go forward and the notes sound higher, and after G comes A again. The piano keyboard puts the rest in one line: C, D and E sit around the two black keys; F, G, A and B sit around the three.

The seven letters on the white keys, two octaves from C. C sits just left of each group of two black keys and F just left of each group of three; after G comes A again.

Try the sheet's test. Play every C from the bottom of the piano to the top, counting 1 to 8; the fourth, near the middle, is middle C, where much of your first music begins. Then play every F and every G.

Keys so far apart share a name because they sound alike. Play an A and the A above it, and you hear one note in two registers. The upper one vibrates twice as fast. At the usual tuning, the A above middle C vibrates 440 times a second (440 Hz), the A below it 220 and the A above it 880. Western music theory calls this octave equivalence and gives such notes one letter. It may be partly learned: in a 2019 study that asked people to sing back tones, US participants tended to sing the same note an octave or two away, while Tsimane' villagers in the Bolivian Amazon did not.

E–F and B–C: the two white-key half steps

A half step is the smallest move on the piano, from one key to the very next, black or white. Two half steps make a whole step. Most neighboring white keys have a black key between them, so C to D is a whole step. E–F and B–C have none: they are next-door neighbors, a half step apart. Half steps & whole steps shows both kinds, with a Listen panel for every example.

Walk the white keys from C up to C and the steps come out whole, whole, half, whole, whole, whole, half, the recipe of every major scale, as The major scale shows. Start on A and the same keys give whole, half, whole, whole, half, whole, whole: the natural minor. The half steps stay put while your starting point moves.

The white keys from C (top) and from A (bottom). The pattern of steps changes, but both times the two half steps fall on E–F and B–C.

On a guitar the rule is the same: each fret is a half step, so the first fret is C on the B string and F on each E string. Test yourself with Whole step or half step?, and follow its advice: count keys, not white keys.

One black key, two names

A sharp (♯) raises a note a half step, to the very next key on the right; a flat (♭) lowers it to the very next key on the left. So every black key has two names: a sharp name from the white key on its left and a flat name from the white key on its right. The key between C and D is C♯ and also D♭: two enharmonic names for one key (The sharp, The flat). A natural (♮) cancels either sign, and an accidental lasts until the next barline, on its own line or space (The natural).

Every black key takes a sharp name from the white key on its left and a flat name from the white key on its right. Below: three of the pairs as they look on the staff, each pair one key.

Which name you write depends on the note's job. A major scale uses every letter once, in order, with none skipped and none repeated. A major is A, B, C♯, D, E, F♯, G♯: spell the last note A♭ and you would have two kinds of A and no G. Triads, the basic three-note chords, are stacked on every other letter, so the same black key is G♯ in an E major chord (E–G♯–B) and A♭ in an F minor chord (F–A♭–C).

Top: A major uses each letter once, so its black keys are C♯, F♯ and G♯. Bottom: one black key, two jobs: G♯ in E major, A♭ in F minor.

The same rule sometimes gives a white key an odd name. G♯ harmonic minor raises its 7th note, F♯, by a half step; the result must stay an F, so it is F double sharp, played on the key you know as G (Double sharps and double flats). Accidentals on the staff gives you sharps, flats and naturals to name in both clefs.

Where the letters came from

The names took more than 1,300 years to settle, from Boethius's letters to Sarah Glover's te.

How the notes got their names, from Boethius's letters to Sarah Glover's te in England. The sections below tell each step.

The letters are older than the staff. Around 500, the Roman scholar Boethius wrote a textbook of Greek music theory, and in its diagrams he marked the strings and the dividing points of a monochord, a one-string measuring instrument, with Latin letters: A to Z and on to LL in one set, A to O for fourteen strings in another. They were labels, like the points of a geometry figure, not names that come round again every octave.

A diagram from Boethius's Fundamentals of Music (De institutione musica) in a 15th-century copy: Greek string names run along the arcs, and Latin letters along the bottom mark points on the string. Image: public domain, University of Pennsylvania, Kislak Center, LJS 47, via Wikimedia Commons.

Seven letters that repeat came about five centuries later. An anonymous Italian treatise of around 1000, the Dialogus de musica, named the notes A to G in every octave, and the monk Guido of Arezzo (about 991 to after 1033) adopted the system. In a letter of about 1030 he put it simply: just as all writing uses 24 letters, all chant uses only seven notes, "for as there are seven days in a week, so there are seven notes in music." The notes above those seven, he added, are the same, except that "they sound twice as high." Guido wrote the lower seven as capitals and the upper seven as small letters, beginning with A as the ancients had, with a Greek gamma, Γ, for the G below it. That bottom note, later sung as gamma ut (ut is the first of Guido's syllables, explained below), gave us the word gamut.

Guido's letter in an 11th-century copy: the passage comparing the seven notes to the seven days of the week, and the letters written twice, as capitals and as small letters, each numbered i to vii. Image: public domain, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich, Clm 14523, fol. 130r.

Try it at the piano: play the white keys from A up to G, then the same seven an octave higher: the same seven letters, each sounding twice as high.

Guido also gave singers lines to read. Some earlier scribes had drawn a line for one note and labeled it with its letter, most often F or C, and those letters grew into our clefs. Guido proposed a set of lines and spaces, with a red line for F, a yellow line for C and a letter in the margin for every line.

The letters on the staff

The two clefs you meet most are still letters in disguise. The treble clef is a G clef: it curls around the second line and makes it the G above middle C. The bass clef is an F clef: its two dots sit on either side of the fourth line and make it the F below middle C. From those anchors you can say the alphabet up or down the staff, because lines and spaces take turns and each step up the staff is one white key up the piano (The Staff & the Treble Clef, The Bass Clef & the Grand Staff).

The line notes and space notes of both clefs, with the memory sentences from our clef sheets. Lines alone skip a letter (E, G, B, D, F); the spaces fill in the letters the lines skip.

On the grand staff the two staves meet at middle C, which sits on a short line of its own, a ledger line: one below the treble staff or one above the bass staff, the same key either way (Ledger Lines).

One ladder of letters across the grand staff: the left hand reads F to middle C in the bass, the right hand middle C to G in the treble. Both written Cs are the same key.

A few minutes of naming a day builds speed. Start with Name the notes: treble clef and Name the notes: bass clef, then try the grand staff, across middle C and ledger lines versions.

Octave numbers: what C4 means

A letter tells you which note; a number tells you which octave. In scientific pitch notation, which American textbooks also call American Standard Pitch Notation, middle C is C4. The number goes up at every C, so the white key just below middle C is B3, and every note from C4 up to B4 is in octave 4. The 88 keys run from A0 to C8, with eight Cs, C1 to C8: the eight you counted on the keyboard sheet. The acoustician Robert W. Young set out this numbering in 1939, and our Note reading chart uses it for its Cs, C2 to C6.

The 88 keys from A0 to C8. Each C starts a new octave number, and every A vibrates twice as fast as the A below it.

That same year an international conference in London agreed to tune A4, the A above middle C, to 440 Hz. ISO adopted it in 1955 and made it the standard ISO 16 in 1975. With A4 at 440 Hz and today's usual equal temperament, middle C comes out at about 261.63 Hz.

Not everyone counts the same way. The system named after Hermann von Helmholtz, who set it out in his 1863 book later translated as On the Sensations of Tone, writes middle C as c′ ("one-line c"), the C below it as small c and the C below that as great C; it is still common in Europe and is used in the New Grove dictionary. And on screen, middle C is always MIDI note 60, but software disagrees on its name: Logic Pro, for example, can show it as C3 (Yamaha's convention) or C4 (Roland's). Check which one your app uses before you trust a label.

Every C from C2 to C6 with its scientific name and its Helmholtz name. Right: the number changes at C, so B3 is the key just below C4.

Ut, re, mi: the hymn behind the syllables

Guido gave singers a second set of names, and with it a way to remember how each step sounds. His model was a hymn for the feast of St. John the Baptist, Ut queant laxis, whose words are traditionally credited to Paul the Deacon. In the tune Guido used, each half-line begins one step higher than the last, on C, D, E, F, G and A, and the first syllable of each half-line gave its note a name: ut, re, mi, fa, sol, la.

The first verse of Ut queant laxis in the same copy of Guido's letter, its melody marked as short strokes above the words, followed by Guido's remark that its phrases begin on six different notes. Image: public domain, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich, Clm 14523, fol. 130r.

Inside those six notes there is only one half step, between mi and fa (E–F), and the hymn fixed its sound in a singer's ear. Guido boasted that his method could "produce a perfect singer in the space of one year, or at the most in two," where, he said, learning chants by rote took ten years or more. That is his claim, not a measured result, but the syllables lasted. Play C, D, E, F, G, A and sing ut, re, mi, fa, sol, la (or do for ut), listening for the narrow step from mi to fa.

The six half-lines of Ut queant laxis begin on C, D, E, F, G and A, and their first syllables became ut, re, mi, fa, sol, la. The only half step falls between mi and fa.

Teachers, most likely after Guido's time, mapped the notes onto the joints of the left hand, starting with gamma ut at the tip of the thumb. This Guidonian hand carries his name, though it appears nowhere in his own writings and took its familiar form only in the 12th century.

A Guidonian hand in a 16th-century Italian manuscript: gamma ut at the tip of the thumb, then a note on every joint, each with its letter and syllables. Image: public domain, University of California, Berkeley, Music Library, MS 1087 (digitally retouched), via Wikimedia Commons.

Later changes gave us the syllables most people sing. A seventh syllable, si, for the seventh note, appears from the late 16th century, and by the late 1600s many musicians sang do instead of ut, an easier syllable to sing. In England, Sarah Glover's Norwich Sol-fa, published in 1835, replaced si with te, so that every syllable began with a different letter; American books spell it ti.

Fixed do and movable do

The syllables are now used in two ways. In fixed do, do is always C, re is always D, and so on: in Italy, France, Spain, Portugal, Latin America and Russia, among other places, do, re, mi are simply the names of the notes. In movable do, common in the United States and Britain and central to the Kodály method in Hungary, do is the home note of whatever key you're in. In Germany, as in English-speaking countries, the notes have letter names, and the syllables are used for sight-singing and ear training. So one teacher may call a G "do" and another "sol", and both are right; if the syllables confuse you, ask which system your teacher uses.

Fixed do names the letters, so G is sol in any key; movable do names the steps of the key, so in G major, G is do and the seventh note, F♯, is ti.

Round b, square b: why German has an H

Guido's letters had one complication. The note above a could be a whole step higher (our B) or a half step higher (our B♭), so scribes wrote two shapes of b: a square b for the higher note and a round b for the lower. The round b became our flat sign, and the square b became both the natural and the sharp. In German organ notation, which used letters, the square b was written with a small hook that made it look like an h; printers set it with an h, and the name stuck: in German, H means B♮ and B means B♭. German-speaking countries and much of Central and Northern Europe use the same names, from the Czech Republic and Poland to Norway and Finland, though Sweden has largely switched to B since the 1990s. The Latin words for the two shapes, durum (hard) and molle (soft), survive in German as Dur and Moll, major and minor.

Guido (left) and Bishop Theodaldus of Arezzo, to whom he dedicated his Micrologus, with a monochord marked with Guido's letters, a round b and a square b side by side. A 19th-century copy of a 12th-century miniature in Vienna, from Henri Lavoix's Histoire de la musique (1884). Image: public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Bach's name happens to spell a tune in German note names: B♭, A, C, B♮. Johann Gottfried Walther's music dictionary of 1732 credits the discovery to Bach himself, and Bach worked the four notes into the last, unfinished fugue of The Art of Fugue. Schumann and Liszt later wrote whole pieces on them. Play B♭, A, C, B♮ slowly in the middle of the keyboard: that is Bach's name in sound.

B♭, A, C, B♮ read the German way spell B-A-C-H. The natural sign cancels the flat, so the last note is B natural, German H.

Five minutes a day

Names stick through short, frequent practice. Spend about a minute on each step:

1. Find every C and every F, first by looking, then with your eyes closed, by feeling for the groups of black keys (The piano keyboard).
2. Play the white keys up and down from any starting key, saying each letter aloud.
3. Name each black key both ways: C♯ or D♭, F♯ or G♭, and so on (The sharp and The flat list them all).
4. Name ten notes on today's note-naming sheet, from Name the notes: treble clef up to Name the notes: grand staff, then play them.
5. Add the octave number to five white keys between C2 and C6, such as C4, G2 and A5, and check them on the Note reading chart.

The five-minute routine, about one minute per step.

Free worksheets for this lesson

• The piano keyboard — the black-key groups, the seven letters and every C on 88 keys
• Half steps & whole steps — the next key versus skipping one, with audio
• Whole step or half step? — 24 steps to label on keyboard and staff, then 6 to write
• The major scale — the W W H W W W H recipe and where its half steps fall
• The sharp: one half step up — the sharp name of every black key
• The flat: one half step down — the flat name of every black key
• The natural: back to plain — canceling a sharp or flat, and the barline rule
• Double sharps and double flats — two half steps in one sign, and why the letters must climb
• Accidentals on the staff — name each note with its accidental
• The Staff & the Treble Clef — the G clef, its line and space notes, two memory tricks
• The Bass Clef & the Grand Staff — the F clef and the staves meeting at middle C
• Ledger Lines — notes off the staff, anchored on the Cs
• Name the notes: treble clef — 25 notes to name, with answers
• Name the notes: bass clef — the same drill in the bass clef
• Name the notes: grand staff — both staves; check the clef first
• Name the notes: across middle C — one ladder of letters from F up to G
• Name the notes: ledger lines — 25 notes off the staff in both clefs
• Note reading chart — every white key from C2 to C6, staff and keyboard

From seven letters to every note

Seven letters, two white-key half steps, a sharp or flat for each black key and a number for the octave: that is the whole system, and its oldest part, the seven letters, has served singers for about a thousand years. Make it automatic with the five-minute routine and one note-naming sheet a day, starting with Name the notes: treble clef. If you'd like someone to hear where you hesitate, a Tissimo piano teacher can work through note names with you in a live lesson, and you can book a lesson whenever you're ready.

Sources

• A History of Western Music, 10th ed., ch. 2: The Development of Notation (Burkholder, Grout and Palisca) — W. W. Norton
• A History of Western Music, 10th ed., ch. 2: Music Theory and Practice (Burkholder, Grout and Palisca) — W. W. Norton
• Guido of Arezzo, letter to Michael (Clm 14523, fol. 130r) — Bayerische Staatsbibliothek
• Solfège — Wikipedia
• Musical note: B♭, B and H — Wikipedia
• BACH motif — Wikipedia
• Hooked on Sol-Fa: the do-re-mi heuristic for Yorùbá speech tones (Carter-Ényì, 2018) — Africa, Cambridge University Press
• Universal and Non-universal Features of Musical Pitch Perception Revealed by Singing (Jacoby et al., 2019) — Current Biology
• Scientific pitch notation — Wikipedia
• A440 (pitch standard) — Wikipedia
• Helmholtz pitch notation — Wikipedia
• The Major Scale (Robert Hutchinson, Music Theory for the 21st-Century Classroom) — University of Puget Sound