When you delete the account and choose Keep on My iPhone (iPad), contacts, calendars and other synced data will remain on your device. When you sign in with your new ID to create your new account and choose Merge, these will be uploaded to your new account. Synced notes and photo stream photos are exceptions to this, which is why you have to take steps to save them prior to deleting the account.
If you don't have notes turned on in Settings>iCloud, your notes aren't being synced with iCloud and will not be effected by deleting the account as they are stored locally on your device rather than in iCloud. You can confirm this by going to icloud.com and checking Notes there. If you don't see your notes, they aren't in iCloud so you don't need to email them to yourself prior to deleting the account.
Also, if you have multiple devices, you only need to migrate the data to your new account on the first device. On the second device you can just delete the existing account and choose Delete from My iPhone (iPad) rather than Keep (since your iCloud data is already in the new account). When you sign into the new account on the second device your iCloud data will download to it.