What are Flats, Sharps & Naturals in Sheet Music?

Video Transcript

On behalf of Expert Village, I'm Eric Williams and I am here to tell you about reading music. Let's talk about flats and sharps and in some cases, naturals. Down here at the bottom of our staff, I have some examples. Earlier we talked about the flats and sharps on the piano keyboard and their function and how many times a black key on a piano can have two different names; a a-sharp or b flat, a d-sharp versus e flats what they call in harmonic spellings. Now it is time to see what some of these flats and sharps look like on manuscript paper reading music. Here we are in the base clef. We have a b because we know that is b because is good boy does fine always so our second line up from the bottom is b. Our next note presented to us is also on the b line but it has this weird symbol in front of it. That is a flat symbol and that means its not just b, but b flat which is lowered to a half step from what a normal regular b would be. So we go b, b flat and the next note is also on the b line but it has a weird symbol in front of it again. It's not a flat, it's called a natural and people say what is up with that. Well, here's the story. Once you flat or sharp for matter any note in a measure, that symbol is supposed to carry over and hit the other notes in that measure that might be on the same line and since this is a b and this is a b, and in most cases, you would have b flat here and this note would also be a b flat because that is the way music works. If you don't want that to be flatted, you have to cancel that by putting a natural sign in front which is what we've done. So we have b, b flat and b natural. This note and this note are exactly the same. This is a b flat. So people say then how come this note doesn't have a natural in front of it. The answer is this one doesn't need a natural in front of it because every note is assumed to be natural unless you add something to make it different. So here we have b natural understood, b flat because of the flat sign and b natural because we need to cancel out the flat that was here.

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