Basics

How many notes are there, actually? The starting point before scales and chords

SMART FRET Team · 22 September 2026

Before throwing yourself at scales and chords, there is a question worth asking that almost nobody does: what is this stuff, and how does it fit together? As in a kitchen, a recipe is easier to learn once you know what the individual ingredients are. Most guides start in the middle of the kitchen, straight at the scales. Musically that is correct, but as a starting point it is the wrong one. Here is the right one.

There are only 12 notes

With millions of songs released it sounds unbelievable, but music gets by on remarkably little material: there are only 12 notes. Those 12 repeat, over and over, endlessly upwards and downwards.

Picture a spiral staircase running off into the distance in both directions. That staircase really consists of only 12 steps, repeating constantly. Those 12 steps are the 12 notes, from the lowest note you can hear, something like the sub-bass outside a club at around 30 Hz, up to a thin high whistle at about 18,000 Hz.

Tap a step or a segment of the circle to hear the note.

From the side

From above

The chromatic scale as a spiral staircase: every step is one semitone, and after twelve steps a new octave starts directly above the old one. Seen from above, every octave of a note falls on the same segment, which is why they all share a name.

Which means: wherever you stand on that staircase, go twelve steps up or down and you land on the same note again. The steps have names: C, C#/Db, D, D#/Eb, E, F, F#/Gb, G, G#/Ab, A, A#/Bb, B, then C again. Some names appear twice, and C# and Db are the same note. That is easier to hear than to read, and on the staircase above you can click it.

Music is limitation: 12 notes, but not all at once

Every song you have ever heard is, at heart, nothing but a decision: which of these 12 notes am I choosing? Think of it as a palette with 12 colours. Use all 12 in one painting and it turns wild, every colour unfiltered. Aim to capture a particular emotion instead and you might pick only blue, grey and pink.

That is exactly what a scale does. It says: I have 12 notes available, I choose a particular selection of them, usually seven, and that selection has its own rhythm of small and larger gaps. That is what the next articles are about, when we build major and minor properly.

Pick a root note in the circle.

From the side

Root note

Pick a root note in the circle and switch between major and minor. Only the seven notes of the scale stay lit on the staircase; the rest step back. The distances never change, and only the starting point moves.

Why this limitation in particular? Because when we listen, our brain finds the gaps between the notes pleasant. A selection that does not allow everything creates tension, expectation, a sense of “this is happy now, or sad”. That is why the pentatonic, a scale with five notes instead of seven, sounds so reliably good: it limits harder still.

Foreground and background: chord and melody are the same material

When you paint a picture, you need a background and something standing in front of it. In music the chord is the background and the melody the foreground, the brushstrokes that go over it. Both come out of the same selection of seven notes, and only the amount played at once differs.

Those seven notes become a chord when you focus on three of them: the 1, the 3 and the 5. Those three largely decide whether something sounds happy or sad (that is the 3), and the 5 gives the whole thing its solid ground. Everything you play on top of that, the 2, 4, 6 and 7, is melody over that background.

This is why so many guitarists treat chords and scales as two separate worlds, although they are made of the same material. A melody uses the intervals 1 through 7, a chord uses 1, 3 and 5. The same seven notes, one narrower selection and one wider. The chord sits inside the scale, not beside it. How every chord type falls out of that is in the article on chords.

The seven degrees of a major scale in a row, 1 to 7. Degrees 1, 3 and 5 are picked out in red and bracketed as “chord = background”, all seven together as “melody = foreground”. — The same seven notes. Three of them are the chord, all seven the melody.

Why a single note says nothing

A single note has no feeling yet. Only in relation to another note does one appear, and that relationship is called an interval. Because there are 12 notes, there are also 12 possible intervals: 12 different feelings a second note can create against a first. Some of them sound bright, some dark.

Exactly how is the subject of the next article. But it is worth knowing already: intervals, not half steps and whole steps, are the real blueprint behind why a scale or a chord sounds the way it does.

Music changes over time, the way a film is made of scenes

A painting you look at holds still. A song does not. As a film consists of several images in sequence, a song consists of several chords in sequence, each of them a brief emotional moment, a scene. Change the order of the chords and the whole picture changes, exactly as it does when a film is recut. Some songs stay in one scene for a long time, others move quickly.

This is why you can write an unlimited number of different songs with the same 12 notes. It is not only about which notes you choose, but also about the order they come in and how long you stay on each one.

In short

There are only 12 notes. They repeat endlessly upwards and downwards, like a spiral staircase with 12 steps.
Music is always a selection from those 12 notes, usually seven of them. That is a scale.
Chord (background, usually the notes 1-3-5) and melody (foreground, all seven notes) come from the same selection. Two perspectives on one material, not two subjects.
A single note has no feeling. Only the distance between two notes, the interval, creates one.
A song is several chords in sequence, the way a film is a sequence of scenes. Order and dwell time shape the effect at least as much as the choice of notes.