Seven Second Saturday: your weekly glimpse into music theory...

Let's talk about the black notes on the keyboard.

If we start on C and play all of the notes, black and white, up to the next C, it sounds like this: https://youtu.be/9yph84lCmVI

This is called a chromatic scale, chroma being the Greek word for colour. The chromatic scaled uses all of the ‘colours’ on the keyboard.

We know that the white notes are described by letter names, A, B C etc. So what do we call the black notes? Depending on context, they are either sharps or flats.

As seen in the attached image, if we take a C and go to the black note immediately to its right, it’s called C sharp,

If we take a D and go to the black note immediately to its left, it’s called D flat.

C sharp and D flat are physically the same note, but the note will be called one name or another, depending on context.

More on that another Saturday!