Sharps, Flats & Naturals in Sheet Music

Video Transcript

" Hi! I’m Will again I’m going to teach you about flats, sharps and naturals. Alright for any note on the staff say it’s a treble clef again, say you have a G which will be represented by a note placed along this line so this is a G. On piano the keys are laid out like this where the white keys represent for here on a white this is an F G A and a B on the white keys. These black keys are represented by certain other notations for instance this black key can be either an F-sharp or a G-flat and the difference is in music when you’ll see these it’ll be written as G-flat and what a flat is it just lowers the pitch by one half step, where a half step is any movement along the piano. So this is one half step, another half step, another half step, another half step and so forth so this note cause it can either be a G-flat or an F-sharp it can also be represented as F-sharp, that’s not a very good sharp that’s a sharp and then if in a piece of music you want to revert it back to G whereas it has been a G-flat that’s a natural. What a natural means is that it moves it from the flat or the sharp back down to the white keys essentially back down to the original pitch. So the three symbols you want to know are sharp, flat and natural and this one raises the pitch one half step, this one lowers the pitch one half step and this one leaves the pitch or reverts it back to the original pitch."