Overview:

You don’t need music theory to make music. However, we’re going to be covering some concepts and terms that will be much easier to understand if you have even a very basic grasp of music theory.

Don’t worry about trying to remember everything from this lesson. We’ll only cover the very basics, just so you can get a better understanding of what some of the elements of the Logic interface refer to and how to use them.

• The musical notes/pitches used in Western music are: ABCDEF and G
• There are no notes after G (so there’s no H, I or J in music), so if you keep on going up past G you get to A again.
• The distance, or interval, between A and G is seven notes.
• If you go up one more note to A, you are now eight notes up. This interval is known as an Octave, which is sometimes written as 8ve for short.
• So the distance between C and the C above it, or as another example, D and the D below that (counting backwards), is an 8ve.
• When people talk about “Middle C” they mean the C key right in the middle of a piano keyboard.
• In Logic and other MIDI applications, each octave has a number, i.e. C1, C2, C3, C4, C5, C6.
• Middle C in Logic is called C3.
• With the Computer MIDI Keyboard turned on, the notes A to G correspond to the A-L keys on the computer keyboard.
• There are also ‘half’ notes, or semitones, between each note from A-G. They are played on the black keys on the piano and are represented by the sharp symbol, which looks like the hash symbol.
• There are 12 semitones in each octave: A-A#-B-C-C#-D-D#-E-F-F#-G-G#
• On the Computer MIDI Keyboard, the black keys are W, E, T, Y, U and O.
• Just to confuse you, the sharps can also be written as flats, so that A# can also be written as B flat.
• Notes that are neither sharps nor flats are called Naturals.