What music is: tones, pitch and the musical alphabet

It all starts with a tone

Every piece of music, whether you play it on guitar, ukulele or piano, is built from tones. A tone is simply a sound with a definite pitch - it can be high like birdsong or low like a humming bass. Music theory is just the language we use to name those tones and connect them to one another.

The musical alphabet has only seven letters

In Western music we name tones using the first seven letters of the alphabet:

• A - B - C - D - E - F - G

After G the sequence repeats: A comes again, just sounding higher. This repeating cycle is the foundation for everything that follows - scales, chords and melodies.

Pitch: high and low

Pitch tells you how high or low a tone is. As you move toward the thinner strings on a guitar, or higher up the neck, the tones get higher. The same letter, say C, can appear low or high - it sounds 'the same' but in a different register. We unpack that relationship in the article on octaves.

In the next article we look at what happens between these seven tones - that is where sharps (♯) and flats (♭) live.