Why are the white notes C major not A major?

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Using C as the default scale reminds me of computers. The main hard drive of your system is not A:\, it is C:\. Why? Because A:\ was used earlier for floppy drives, which were still in use when hard drives came out, and since B:\ was also a floppy drive, C:\ became the default hard drive of your computer.

As a guitarist I appreciate F being the hardest chord

Fun fact: that optional extra low G below the A at 5:11 was called “gamma ut” - gamma being the Greek word for G, and the solfege name “ut” (precursor of “do”, as David explains later) signifying it was the lowest note of a given scale - which gives us our modern word “gamut” meaning the maximum possible range of something.

When you click on a video thinking you’ll get an interesting little factoid about the piano keyboard and you get 15 centuries of music history. This is why I love this channel 😂

I don't know about everyone else, but I'd love to see more history themed videos like this! I love all your content, but this scratches an itch for me that I didn't know needed scratching.

Showing the 7 modes on the white keys blew my mind. I finally get it.

My last Music Instructor taught me this. It went in one ear and out the other. I'm gonna download this video for later references.

when I was younger, for a long period of time I actually did think the white notes started with A. So I was accidentally playing songs in the wrong key completely. I felt so stupid when I realised I was playing it all wrong 🤦

You forgot to mention the role of temperament in the development of scales, but I think as an overview this is pretty good.

A bunch of us teachers deep dived this a couple years ago when we had too many students ask us the same question we wondered ourselves. Our short answer became: 1)The musical alphabet came first, where A was the “start”. 2)Then the instruments we put the alphabet onto came after. 3)Singers of a different culture ended up singing in the key of C Major. 4)The piano key layout was created after the need to make multiple keys of any common scale available, making the black keys necessary. Our shortER answer: Traditions Personally, I like to call the piano the “minor” instrument. But I know Aeolian was not meant to be the default scale just like Ionian was not.

I think you could have immensely simplified the initial question that you tried to clarify in the first 1 minutes 20 seconds of the video by asking "why did we call C C and not A".

Why was I not taught this when I was in school? Something like this would have been a light bulb moment for me to grasp the fundamentals fully. Good stuff here, thank you!

These are the questions that keep me up at night.

I imagined that the reason was similar to why computer keyboards have the letters where they are; it tested well with typewriters, and it would take much more time to fix it than to just keep it and deal with finding the darned m key

Its interesting how sharps and flats were originally variations, kinda like half-sharps/flats today

"Uppercase, lowercase, and double lowercase were taken, they used gamma" My disappointment in how that sentence didn't end with him saying they used GG

I believe this is the main reason why it is so difficult for some people to sight read

The sharp/flat note keys were added when they started making instruments that were a pain to re-tune between performances (like you would do with e.g. a harp) but also too bulky to swap out for a different instrument (like you would do with a flute). The pipe organ is the poster child for this: changing its intonation would take several hours of swapping out pipes (some of which are larger than a man), and swapping it out for a different organ entirely would mean moving the concert to a different venue. So you just build the organ with pipes for every note you're ever going to need. It's easier that way. This is also where well and eventually equal temperament came from: the ancient Greeks used just intonation, exclusively, but that's not practicable for a pipe organ, and it's not extremely convenient for a harpsichord or piano either. These days we used A440 TTET even for a lot of electronic instruments, despite the fact that it would not be difficult to set them up with a whole library of intonations and switch between them at the push of a button. We don't try to do that because A) they're often playing alongside traditional instruments, and B) most musicians have never studied how to write key changes involving a shift from one just intonation to another.

That makes sense. I always assumed organs used a c-compass because length of “c” pipes are base 2. Ie 1”, 2”, 4, 8, 16, 32, etc