Now let's see how the notes are laid out on two instruments. We start with the piano, because it makes the notes easiest to understand. It puts all of them in a single line, in the same order as the musical alphabet (the letters A to G, with the sharps and flats in between). Here are the twelve notes from A up to the next A:
All are white keys. The sit in between as black keys, wherever there is a whole step between two natural notes. The piano has 88 keys in total. Here are 13 keys from the middle of the piano. Click a key to hear it:
Like the musical alphabet, the keys go from A to G and then start again at A. This pattern repeats all the way along the keyboard. Each time it repeats, the notes are an higher: every A has exactly double the frequency of the A below it, and sounds the same, just higher. Here is the next octave as well:
To tell the octaves apart, each note gets an octave number. The keys above run from A3 to A5. The number goes up at every C, not at A: B3 is followed by C4. The piano starts with A0 and B0, then comes C1. The C near the middle of the piano is C4, also called middle C, and the A just above it is A4.
On a guitar, each string plays one note when you pluck it without pressing it down. That's called an open string. Along the neck run thin metal strips, the frets. Pressing a string down just behind a fret makes the vibrating part shorter, so it sounds higher. Each fret raises the note by a .
Here we see the high e string, the highest of the six (written with a small e to tell it apart from the low E string). Its open note is E, the first fret is F, the second fret is F♯, and so on. The notes follow the same order as on the piano; they just start on a different note.
The six strings are tuned, from the lowest to the highest, to E, A, D, G, B and E. The lowest and the highest string are both E, two octaves apart. This tuning makes and scales easy to play, but the layout is less simple than the piano's single line (the next page shows the pattern behind it). Most guitars have between 20 and 24 frets; here are the first 12. Each string runs through all twelve notes, and at the 12th fret the note of the open string comes back, an octave higher.
This layout means the guitar can play the exact same pitch in several places, on different strings and at different frets. The piano can't: the note names repeat every octave, but each exact pitch has only one key. That's why guitar players often think of the fretboard as a grid rather than a line. It makes the guitar a bit harder to learn than the piano, but it also gives you several places to play the same melody or chord.
Next: The Guitar Fretboard