What are Accidentals in Sheet Music?

Video Transcript

"On behalf of Expert Village, I'm Eric Williams and I'm here to tell you about reading music. So following up with our discussion of flats, let's take a look at sharps. If we move to the next measure, we have an f and we know that because we are in the base clef and the base clef has the dot above and below f line so that is a dead give a way; if you want to try your good boys does fine always and it will also bring you to f. Anyway here's f and the very next note is f with a sharp symbol in front of it. That means to raise the f a half step higher. Then the very note is also on f but we have that natural sign in front of the f. So I'll bet by now you'll understand why that's there but let me tell you anyway. This f sharp would normally impact this f and make it a sharp also because that is the rules of accidental. Accidentals by the way is the name for all of these things we are talking about. Accidentals incorporate flats symbols, sharp symbols and natural symbols. So the accidental on the f sharp would normally make this an f sharp but since in this case we don't want this to be sharp, we have to use the natural sign to reduce this back to regular f. We have f, f sharp and f natural. Again, why we don't have a natural sign in front of this f is because it is understood it is plain f and we don't need to put a natural in front of it. That would just confuse people and you don't want that. So we've got f, f sharp and f natural because all of this is already confusing enough. Hopefully this makes more sense. This explains flats and sharps and naturals. "