Loud and soft are relative · From Zero to Mozart

How loud to play is written as lowercase letters under the staff, from the Italian piano (soft) and forte (loud). The crucial thing about them: they are relative. A p means "soft, for this music, right here" — not a fixed number of decibels.

The ladder

Mark	Name	Sense
pp	pianissimo	very soft
p	piano	soft
mp	mezzo-piano	medium-soft
mf	mezzo-forte	medium-loud
f	forte	loud
ff	fortissimo	very loud

Beyond the ends: ppp, pppp and fff, ffff turn up in Romantic and later music for extremes. Classical music — Haydn, Mozart, early Beethoven — lives almost entirely between pp and ff; if you're playing that repertoire and you've reached for fff, you've probably overshot.

The mark sits below the staff, lined up with the note where the new level begins, and holds until the next mark changes it.

Hear it

Same seven notes, twice. First soft, then loud — notice it isn't "the same thing at a different volume," it's a different mood.

80 bpm

Marked p. Soft — but the tone still has a centre to it. Quiet is not the same as weak or breathy.

80 bpm

Marked f. Full and open — but not forced. Forte is a lot of sound produced easily, not a small sound produced hard.

Context sets the level

80 bpm

The p in the second bar sounds much softer than the p in the first example did — because a loud bar came right before it. The letters are read against what surrounds them.

Try it

Try

On the open D string, play one long bow as soft as you can while the note still speaks cleanly — no scratch, no breathiness. That's your p today. Now one long bow as loud as stays clean and round. That's your f. Everything else is somewhere between those two.

The usual mistake

Making p by going faint — less bow, barely touching — so the note whistles or disappears. Piano keeps a full, ringing core; it's just smaller. And making f by pressing until the string chokes. Forte is more sound made easily — more bow, more of the string's ring, not more force.