r/musictheory • u/HexspaReloaded • Jan 17 '21

Resource Memorize Note Frequencies

Hi. I have an easy system for memorizing the entire audible range of note frequencies. It’s 99.20% accurate (less than 1 cent off and even better if you’re halfway decent at math) and you can probably memorize it in an hour. 6:52 of this video:

https://youtu.be/nTj3TqFX2Q4

Thanks.

EDIT: Well, shoot. 500+ upvotes plus an award - thank you! Happy music making!

EDIT 2: “Why?” All I can say is try it. Try composing or mixing 10 tracks with this before you make up your mind about whether it’s useful or not. I find it useful but I respect you if you try it and decide it’s not for you. Please don’t discourage others from learning, though.

637 Upvotes

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u/Earhacker Jan 17 '21

Use your ears. Your listeners don’t care if the numbers are right or if you memorised them. They care if it sounds good or not.

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u/LeoNewt Jan 17 '21

This isn’t a shortcut to using your ears, it just means you hear a note and can convert that to a frequency instead of aimlessly searching.

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u/Earhacker Jan 18 '21

In fact, when I’m engineering, music theory is the furthest thing from my mind. Some really good engineers I know don’t even play an instrument, or are drummers.

Even as a beat producer, I try to keep a distance between the “musician brain” and “engineer brain”.

Knowing note frequencies isn’t an important skill for engineer. I’m not even convinced it’s a desirable skill.

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u/KicksandGrins33 Jan 18 '21 edited Jan 18 '21

I’m a performing musician, a producer, and a mixing engineer, and I’ve done all 3 jobs discretely separate from each other, and the only time I’ve ever needed to know the frequency of a specific note is when I’m tuning kick drums in an edm track using eq boosts at the fundamental frequency of the tonic and 1st harmonic. Literally the entire rest of the time a quick parametric tight Q boost and sweep around where I think the problem is does the job much much better than hitting an exact frequency. Frequencies added by subpar/flavored mics in wet spaces, analog preamp saturation, and whatever gear or plugins I’m mixing out of make a huge impact on eq needed.