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Yep, this is the brilliance of the staff and the associated notation system. All chords and scales are spelled the same, just with different accidentals. For instance, all variants of triads starting on all variants of D are spelled D-F-A. The one with no accidentals happens to be D-minor. D-major is D-F#-A. D#-minor is D#-F#-A#. D#-major is D#-F##-A#. And so on. By holding this pattern, chords always look the same on the staff no matter what key you're in, which makes reading and writing tonal music easy, once you get the hang of it. The key signature captures everything that varies between keys. Although, on instruments that represent pitches differently in how you physically play them, the difference between keys is very noticeable. The problem with dozenal notation is that intervals have to be identified by subtraction instead of their shape on the staff, which is a lot of mental effort. That said, the staff requires its own mental effort depending on what you're doing. For example, translating from staff notation to guitar fingering is a difficult exercise in real time, which motivates the need for tablature. For some styles of music and some instruments, I can see dozenal being nice. But for the most part, it would be more useful to use standard pitch notation (e.g. C#5), because it makes intervalic/tonal relationships more obvious, at the cost of an occasional additional glyph per note. |