LESSON 2 - Musical Alphabet

In our last lesson we learned to identify the staff, number the lines and spaces of a "staff", and break the staff into smaller segments called "measures" using "bar lines".  I mentioned that we'd later learn to identify the name of a note based on which line or space it sits on.  In this lesson we're going to learn the basic musical alphabet so that we can start putting notes on the staff and labeling them.

Alphabet:

Every note in music is given a name based on the musical alphabet.  The musical alphabet is the same as the first SEVEN letters of the English alphabet.  

Since there are more than 7 different notes in music (the piano, for example, can play 88 different notes) we have to reuse these letters many times.  If we start the alphabet at A and count all the way to G the very NEXT letter in the musical alphabet will be A and we begin all over again.  If you were looking at the keys of the piano this alphabet cycle would look like this:

Now that we understand how a staff works and we know our musical alphabet we're almost ready to identify what lines and spaces get what letter names.  BUT, before we do that we'll need to move to LESSON 3 and learn about the "G Clef".