Musical Alphabet Complete Chart

Previous articles I have posted about major and minor scales have not looked at a complete grid of the musical alphabet. Sometimes a student may need to learn something from a different viewpoint and this is one different view. The concept is to start for example at the letter A and continue on to the octave A, then start at A#(Bb) and go through to the octave A#(Bb) again, etc through every letter of the musical alphabet.

This then creates a 13 X 13 chart, but really should be considered as a 12 X 12 chart because the octave is only a repeat of the first letter on the left side of the chart. You may want to print out several copies of the chart to use. If you have a highlighter and you highlight the C on the left, then highlight the D, then highlight the E, then the F, then the G, then the A, then the B and finally the octave C you have highlighted the notes of the C major scale.

These highlighted notes represent the pattern 1 1 1/2.......1........1 1 1/2 that I had previously described as two tetra-chords separated by a whole tone which is the major scale pattern for all major scales. This means that if you simply start at another letter on the chart and see where you have highlighted for the C major scale you can then highlight the same position for the relative notes and figure out all the notes for any other major scale.

It is important to note that for this type of chart the sharp and flat of a particular note name have been considered as "enharmonic" or the same although they are technically different on some, but not all instruments. The goal here is to look at the musical alphabet now as a "linear" pattern rather than a cyclic pattern as was previously described in other articles. My intention is to give you another way to look at this process in a linear manner with a type of paper ruler method.

The linear method is more representative of stringed instruments like the guitar, banjo, mandolin etc. These instruments are technically stringed keyboards. You press down on the fret board and this is like pressing down on the key of a piano.

You might consider making two copies of the 13 X 13 chart and cutting out the entire chart and then pasting the charts together by placing the first A column of the second chart on top of the octave A of the first chart making a much longer chart, but now allowing you to look at two octaves in one row. Many of the other charts on music theory that I have written about have been developed from this more complete chart. If you look again at C and then look at the position of C, E, and G this forms the notes of the C major chord or the root, third, and fifth. You can then move up or down on this chart and as long as you maintain the relative position you have the names of the notes in any other major chord. Many other types of chords can be calculated from this chart.