In E major you wouldn’t have E and Eb (I can’t even conceive of a place Eb would be used but no doubt there is one somewhere lol)…but you would have A and A# (A# leading up to B)…or D# and D (D leading down to C#). They’re just simply chromatically altered notes. I’m really talking about altered notes here…not the ones that are in the scale…in the scale, yes of course you’re going to have one note per line/space…but many pieces and tunes have some sort of altered note in it…Crested Hens, which started this topic, has several such cases…it’s in E minorish-something or other…it has both C and C#, as well as D and D#.
I tend to use C# as a standard rather than Db…some of it might come from the ordering in keys…Bb is much more common than A#…F# much more common than Gb. The first two flats are Bb and Eb (both more common than their enharmonic equivalents)…first two sharps F# and C# (both more common than their enharmonic equivalents)…G# and Ab I guess are equally as common…but as a wind player, I tend to see Ab more than G# so I tend to go that direction.
At any rate…I’m babbling…which I’m good at! lol Merry Xmas!
Sorry, this doesn’t make any musical sense to me. Musical notation aside, you could talk your way, insofar as I can make sense of it, but it would be very confusing and I can’t see any advantage in it. Suppose you are playing in D and go down a half step and straight back. Was that Db you went down to or C# according to this ‘direction’ way of speaking?
A Polish cello player explained to me the two fundamental rules of western notation when expressing diatonic scales:-
Every letter must be used
there should be no mixture of sharps and flats.
So the E major scale that Wombat raises should be expressed as
E F# G# A B C# D# E+
Under the above rules an expression of that scale using Eb would necessarily go:-
Fb Gb Ab Bbb Cb Db Eb Fb+
which is pretty awkward.
That is why the preferred expression of the E major scale is the first one.
Now if you are playing a piece in D major
D E F# G A B C# D+
but the piece requires an accidental Eb/D#
then, according to the rule the accidental would need to expressed as D#
because the stem scale only has sharps in it.
The above rules cannot often work well for many exotic scales.
Eg the Indian Bhairav Scale or the Middle Eastern and Eastern European Hejaz scale
whose interval ratios are 1:3:1:2:1:3:1
could only be reasonably expressed in, for example with D tonic, as:-
D Eb F# G A Bb C# D+
as the alternative following the above rules would be:-
Ebb Fbb Gb Abb Bbb Cbb Db Ebb+
!!
Thanks. That’s pretty much exactly what I’m getting at. I think when you reflect on it you’ll see how it makes good sense given the form of notation used. Other forms of notation might favour a different system.