What are Half Step Notes?

Video Transcript

On behalf of Expert Village, I'm Eric Williams and I am here to tell you about reading music. All right there are a couple more details we can add to this. The e and f notes on the piano keyboard if you notice they don't have a black key in between. So people will sometimes say that means there is no sharp or flat that goes there. That is only half true. Technically if you take an e and raise it by a half step, it becomes a note called e sharp. But it is also known as just plain f. So this f that we see here can be called e sharp and it does happen in music sporadically so don't let that scare you or confuse you. The same note f can be called e sharp. Conversely there are times when the note e is labeled as f flat because f being lower by a half step is f flat but it can also be called e. Very important to know because if you are playing certain styles of music or music in certain keys you may bump in those and it is good to know they have two different names. Now let's follow that reasoning up to the b and the c. The note b is you sharp it by a half step, b sharp becomes the note c and if you take a c and lower it half step to c flat, it can become the note b. So these have two different names as well. Again, the piano keyboard using this piano keyboard makes it much easier to see how these keys relate to each other. They are called enharmonic spellings and two different names for the same pitch. If you try this on guitar, it's doable but it is very easy to get confused by going from one fret to the next. You can miss a notch here, a notch there and get way off track. Even on your wood instruments and your brass instruments, all of these same pitches exist. The whole step and the half steps exist, the enharmonic spellings exist but they are a little bit harder to study and really visualize. Whenever we use piano keyboard with the way the black and white keys stack up, it makes it very easy to grab on to.

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