The Order of Sharps & Flats

Video Transcript

"If we're looking at music, the first thing that you're going to want to know in order to know sharps and flats and know what you're looking at to correctly play this, you're going to need to look in your beginning book, which somewhere in the book, you're going to want to look up the topic of order of sharps and flats, so that you know the note names and what order they go in. They have a specific order that they need to go in for you to know where they start. If, now, let me show you here how I find what they are knowing that I know the order of sharps. I'm going to look at this key signature here and I'm going to see, meaning key signature, meaning that these sharps here are telling me what key I'm going to be in. And they're telling me which sharps are going to follow along in the music and which notes that I need to raise a half step. Here, there happen to be two of them. And, because I know the order of sharps, I know that the first one, at the top here, will be F-sharp. The top line here is F and that sharp means that I'm going to raise all of the Fs in this piece up a half step to an F-sharp. Now, this next one here I know is C-sharp. It fits right in on the space where the C is and so now I know that that note also, within this piece, every time I find a C on that space such as this one here, I know that that's going to be sharped and raise that note and play the C-sharp on the piano."