Music Hub › Guides › Getting started › Do-Re-Mi note names versus letters: reading the fixed-do and German systems

Two systems, one music: what this guide is for

On the Music Hub, chord grids are written with letters, Am7, G, Cmaj7, exactly the notation you already read without thinking twice. That is not a quirk of this site: it is the near-universal convention of lead sheets, chord apps, tab sites and DAWs everywhere, English-speaking or not. Sit down with a French, Italian, Spanish or Latin American musician, though, and the same chords come out of their mouth as la mineur septième, sol majeur, do majeur septième majeure, because that is how they were taught to name notes at school, do ré mi fa sol la si, not A B C D E F G. Open a score or a piece of notation software set to German, and the letters themselves shift meaning, since German B means what you call B flat, and the natural note you know as B is written H.

None of this describes two different musics, or two competing theories: it is two, in this guide's case three, vocabularies laid over the exact same twelve notes of the octave. Once the correspondence is learned, it never needs relearning, because it is nothing more than a fixed translation table between seven letters and seven syllables, never a system to reconstruct from scratch each time. This guide covers it in full: where the letter system and fixed-do system each come from, how they line up, why Germany kept a separate letter for the note you call B, and how to read a complete letter-based chord symbol, from the simplest to the most loaded, a system you already use daily but that is worth having spelled out end to end.

Where fixed-do comes from: Guido d'Arezzo and the hymn to John the Baptist

The do ré mi fa sol la si system is not ancient: it was born in the eleventh century, around 1026-1028, in the treatise Micrologus by the Italian Benedictine monk Guido d'Arezzo. Guido was looking for a way to teach young monks to sing far faster than by rote memorisation alone, which could take years to get right. His idea: lean on a hymn everyone already knew by heart, Ut queant laxis, originally composed for the feast of John the Baptist. Each of the hymn's first six phrases opens on a note one step higher than the last, and, crucially, each also opens on a different syllable. Taking just those first six syllables, ut-re-mi-fa-sol-la, gave Guido a fixed name for each of the first six notes of his hexachord, the six-note scale that formed the basic building block of medieval music theory.

A seventh syllable was still missing for the seventh note. It appeared a little later, built from the two initials of the hymn's final line, Sancte Ioannes: si. The word ut posed a practical problem of its own: its closed final consonant cuts off the vocal flow a singing exercise depends on. In the seventeenth century, the Italian theorist Giovanni Battista Doni had ut replaced with do, an open syllable that vocalises more easily, probably chosen as an echo of his own name or of Dominus, Latin for Lord. The change caught on quickly in France and Italy, and it is that version, do ré mi fa sol la si, that has carried through to today across every country of Latin and Slavic tradition. English-speaking countries took a different, separate turn in the nineteenth century: the British educator Sarah Glover, working on what would become tonic sol-fa, swapped si for ti, so that none of the seven syllables would start with the same letter as its neighbour, a constraint specific to English ear-training pedagogy of the time. That reform is the reason you may already know do-re-mi-fa-sol-la-ti-do as a singing exercise, but as a movable pitch pattern for ear training, not as fixed names for actual notes the way it works in France or Italy.

The word gamut carries its own piece of this history: Guido built his system on a twenty-one-note scale called the gamut, a contraction of gamma and ut, gamma being the Greek letter used to name the very first, lowest note of the whole system, sitting below even the modern cello's low C. The word later slid from naming that one specific note to naming any scale of notes at all, the sense it still carries today in English.

Where the letter system comes from: from ancient Greece to Boethius

The letter system is in fact considerably older than fixed-do, even though it only settled into its current shape well after its earliest beginnings. As far back as Greek antiquity, around the first or second century, theorists were already using letters of the Greek alphabet to mark the notes of the scale theorised by Pythagoras, an abstract notation reserved for scholarly treatises rather than the daily practice of working musicians.

It was the Roman philosopher Boethius, in the sixth century, who carried this principle into the Latin West and adapted it in his treatise De institutione musica, one of the standard references on music throughout the Middle Ages. Boethius took over the Greek note system and dressed it in Latin letters: he assigned the letters A through O, fifteen letters in total, to the fifteen degrees of the so-called perfect system, the grand Greek theoretical framework meant to cover the entire usable range of the human voice. That luxury of fifteen separate letters did not last: as theory simplified and the octave, two notes of the same name separated by an interval that sounds identical to the ear, took hold as the organising principle, medieval theorists settled back on a cycle of just seven letters, A to G, repeating identically from one octave to the next. It is that seven-letter cycle, inherited from Boethius who himself inherited it from the Greeks, that English, German and most Germanic languages still use unchanged today, fifteen centuries later, and that you use every time you read a chord chart.

The two systems, syllables and letters, therefore coexisted from the very start, in the very same medieval treatises: a twelfth-century monk could quite happily name the same note by its Boethius-derived letter one moment and its Guido-derived syllable the next, neither ever competing with the other, both simply naming the same sound. It is that same double habit, left untouched ever since, that the world still carries today, split between letter-naming countries like your own and fixed-do countries like France or Italy.

The correspondence table: the same note, two names

History aside, the correspondence itself is entirely straightforward once it's laid out in front of you: every fixed-do syllable matches one fixed letter, always the same one, with no exceptions or special cases.

That table alone is enough to translate any fixed-do chart into letters and back, since the order stays identical in both systems: only the names change, nothing else needs to be learned by heart beyond these seven correspondences. Countries that use fixed-do as everyday note names, France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, most of Latin America and a good part of the Slavic world, call this usage do fixe, fixed do: in that system, do always and only designates the note C, whatever key the piece is in. That is the same fixed-do convention this guide uses throughout. English-speaking ear-training traditions also use a form of do-re-mi, movable do, where the syllable do names the tonic of whatever key you are in rather than one specific pitch, the tonic sol-fa method that traces back to Sarah Glover. That second usage stays a listening and ear-training tool, unrelated to reading chord grids or sheet music note names, and this guide has no further need for it.

Why German writes B natural as H

One last detail appears to complicate the table above: in Germany, Austria, a good part of Central Europe, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, and several Scandinavian countries, the note you call B is not written B at all but H, with the letter B reserved exclusively for B flat. The reason is nothing like a modern German quirk: it traces back to the exact same medieval hexachord as Guido d'Arezzo's system.

In medieval chant theory, the note si, the one you call B, posed a particular problem: depending on the melodic context, it sometimes had to be sung slightly lowered, which would later become B flat. To tell the two versions apart in writing, scribes used two different shapes of the letter b: a rounded form, b rotundum, for the lowered note, and a square, almost angular form, b quadratum, for the natural note. Those two shapes are the direct ancestors of the French words bémol, from b mol, the softened version, and bécarre, from b carré, the square version. In manuscripts copied in German-speaking regions, the square b, with its right angles, ended up looking almost identical to the letter H of the local Gothic alphabet, and that visual mix-up hardened into a lasting convention: the natural note became its own letter, H, while the letter B stayed reserved for the flat, the descendant of the b rotundum.

This difference is more than an antiquarian curiosity: it has a musical consequence well known to musicologists. Johann Sebastian Bach signed several of his works, most famously left unfinished in The Art of Fugue, with a four-note motif spelled directly from the letters of his own name in German notation: B, the flat, A, C, and H, the natural note. That four-note motif cannot be spelled the same way in your own letter system, since English letter-naming has no letter H standing for a note at all: it can only be described, never written as a straightforward four-letter word the way it is in German. Dozens of later composers, from Schumann to Liszt to Rimsky-Korsakov, borrowed the same motif as a tribute, proof that this German particularity has long travelled well beyond its own borders.

Reading sharps and flats in each system

Once you know the base letter or syllable, the next question is where and how sharps and flats attach in each system, since the underlying logic changes from one to the next.

In fixed-do, as in other solfège languages, the word for sharp or flat is placed after the note name, like an adjective: fa dièse, F sharp, si bémol, B flat, do dièse, C sharp. In your own letter system, the symbol attaches directly to the letter, with no space or word in between: F# for F sharp, Bb or B♭ for B flat, C# for C sharp. The # sign always stands in for the word sharp, and an attached lowercase b, or the ♭ symbol, always stands in for the word flat: that compactness is exactly what lets you write a full chord symbol like Bbm7 or F#maj7 without ever needing a space or extra punctuation.

German adds a third variant on top of both: the sharp is marked with an -is suffix attached to the letter, fis for F sharp, cis for C sharp, while the flat is marked with an -es suffix, or just -s after a vowel, like es for E flat or as for A flat. German B flat breaks its own rule: since the letter B already means B flat on its own, there is no derived form for this particular case, the plain letter B is enough; and a theoretical, vanishingly rare B natural sharp would be written his, never to be confused with the plain B.

In all three cases, the underlying principle stays the same: an accidental never changes the name of the base note, it only refines it. An F sharp is still an F raised by a semitone, never a separate note with a completely different name, whichever of the three systems is used to write it.

Reading a complete letter-based chord symbol: the logic behind a chord symbol

Letter naming does not stop at note names: it is also the system used to write out entire chords on almost every lead sheet, tab site and DAW out there, including the grids on the Music Hub, and it is very likely the system you already read without a second thought. It is worth spelling out the logic in full even so, since it lets you translate on the fly when a French, Italian, Spanish or Latin American musician calls out the same chord by its fixed-do name instead. Once the logic is clear, a letter-based chord symbol, however loaded, always breaks down the same way, block by block.

The letter alone, capitalised, gives the root and defaults to a major chord: G reads as G major, D as D major, with no need to write maj for a plain three-note major chord. A lowercase m attached directly to the letter flips the chord to minor: Am reads as A minor, Dm as D minor. A digit attached next specifies added notes: a bare 7, with nothing else, defaults to what is called a dominant seventh, the version most common in blues and jazz, while a major seventh is always spelled out in full, maj7, to avoid any ambiguity with the previous one; a minor seventh is written m7. The symbol sus, followed by a digit, 2 or 4, marks a suspended chord: the third, the note that normally gives a chord its major or minor colour, is swapped for the second or fourth of the same name, giving the chord a deliberately neutral colour, neither clearly major nor clearly minor.

One last symbol deserves particular attention: the forward slash, as in F/A. It never means a choice between two possible chords, and it is not a fraction: it marks a chord whose root stays the one written before the slash, F major here, but whose bass note, usually the lowest key on a piano or the lowest string on a guitar, is different from that root, A here. This kind of chord, called a slash chord or an inverted chord depending on the case, allows bass lines that climb or descend step by step underneath a chord that itself does not change.

These few building blocks, the letter, the m, the digit, the sus, the slash, combined with one another, cover the very large majority of chord symbols you will run into on a standard letter-based chart. More advanced cases, ninth chords, altered fifths, precise piano inversions, belong to a finer level of theory than this notation guide sets out to cover in full; the Music Hub guides Seventh chords: dominant, major 7, minor 7 and Suspended, diminished and augmented chords each dig into those points in detail.

Moving between systems without losing your footing

In practice, an English-speaking musician playing with francophone, Italian, Spanish or Latin American musicians rarely has to pick one single system for life: it is more a matter of switching mentally depending on who is talking and what is written in front of you. Sheet music, chord charts, tab sites and most software, wherever they were made, tend to write chords in letters regardless of the country; but the musicians themselves will very often speak chord names out loud in fixed-do, exactly as they were taught at school, even while reading the very same Am7 or C#m off the page. Hearing la mineur septième or do dièse mineur called out across the room, you need to translate it straight back to Am7 or C#m without missing a beat, and vice versa.

The most effective habit for building this reflex is to force the translation out loud for a few weeks, on purpose: running across a Bm7 on a chart, say to yourself B minor seventh in your head, or listen for si mineur septième from a bandmate and think Bm7, rather than only ever recognising the shape of the chord without ever naming it in the other system. This habit feels a little clunky at first, but it fades on its own after a few dozen charts worked through this way: the correspondence table, through sheer repetition, ends up read at a single glance.

One practical trap worth flagging: do, the syllable recited first in the fixed-do sequence, do ré mi fa sol la si, never corresponds to A, the first letter of your own alphabet, however tempting that alignment looks at first glance. Do corresponds to C, and A corresponds to la, the sixth note of the C major scale, not the first; the letter order A-B-C-D-E-F-G historically starts from la, not do, a direct inheritance from the Greek system and Boethius, where the first letter of the alphabet named the lowest note of the reference theoretical system, and that lowest note was not do.

What notation never changes

After all this historical detour, one point is worth repeating plainly: neither system changes the music itself. An A played on a piano vibrates at the exact same frequency whether you call it A or la. A G major chord sounds exactly the same whether you write it as G or call it out loud as sol majeur. Notation, whether letters or syllables, is never anything more than a label laid after the fact on an acoustic reality that depends on no language and no writing convention at all.

It is this distinction, between the sound itself and the name given to it, that lets you read any notation without apprehension: learning fixed-do syllables does not require relearning any of the theory you already know through letters, not the intervals, not how chords are built, not how a key works. It is only a new vocabulary laid over knowledge you already have, the last missing piece for reading any Music Hub chart effortlessly, whether it is written in letters or spelled out in do ré mi.

Common pitfalls to avoid

Explore in the Music Hub

More guides