What Is the Most Common Note in Music?

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today I’m going to answer a question from a viewer: What is the most common note in music? In the English language, E is the most prevalent letter. Is there a note that is the most common note in music?

There are two things to consider.

First, we need to ask: what kind of note? It could be the pitch of the note or the type of note rhythmically. The first one I’m going to cover is the type of note because it’s so simple. There’s whole notes, half notes, quarter notes, 8th notes, 16th notes, 32nd notes, 64th notes, and it goes all the way up to 128th notes. Each of these can be triplets as well. This is so easy because the most popular time signature is 4/4 time. It’s so common that it’s referred to as common time! What does it mean? It means there are four beats in a measure, and the quarter note gets one beat. So yes, the quarter note is the most popular and most common note in music.

Pitch is a little bit more complicated.

Let’s consider a few aspects. First of all, of course, A is not only the first letter of the alphabet, it’s also the note that an orchestra tunes to. So there’s a great significance to that note, naturally. And then we can talk about different groups of instruments and what notes are really intrinsic to them. On stringed instruments, E is a very popular note. Think about the guitar. I don’t play guitar, but there are two chords I can play on a guitar: E major and E minor. In fact, the highest and lowest strings on a guitar are both E’s, so E is really common. The lowest note on a bass is also an E. All string instruments have E’s on them, as well as A’s. So there’s a case to be made for E.

For wind instruments, flat keys are really common.

For example, the trumpet is pitched in B-flat. So is clarinet, generally. Of course, there is earlier period music where the pitches of the instruments were not set yet. Saxophones are usually E-flat or B-flat, and trombones are B-flat. So flat keys are very common as well. So where does that leave us with all of this?

There’s one note that, as a pianist, you look at all the time.

That note is C. Middle C is right in the middle of your keyboard. It’s all over the place! C is the highest note and one of the lowest notes on the piano. And when you play all white keys, you’re playing a C-major scale. So C is really common. But there’s more to it than that.

I mentioned all these transposing instruments. That is, when a trumpet plays C, a B-flat comes out. So even though the instrument is pitched to B-flat, their score, written in C, comes out in B-flat. So it presupposes C as the standard, from which all the other transpositions are derived. It’s the same with a clarinet in B-flat. It plays in C, but it comes out in B-flat. For the French horn, all the repertoire before the horn had valves was written in C. The horns themselves would be tuned with a series of extra pipes called crooks. That is what would change the pitch of the instrument. The modern French horn is pitched in F, yet the parts may be written in many different keys like, E-flat, D, or others, but the part’s are always written in C. So C is the standard pitch. When a conductor looks at a score, all the transposing instruments are in C for the conductor, and they must figure out the absolute pitch relative to the transposition of the various instruments.

I’ve got to say that C is the most common note in music!

A good case can be derived for other notes, as I mentioned earlier. What do you think about this? Let’s get a lively discussion going in the comments here at LivingPianos.com! Thanks again for joining me, Robert Estrin, here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Store.

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