Hey, how ya doin? Justin here. In this lesson, we are gonna be talking
about the note circle, and sharps and flats, so let's get our note circle out
first of all over here..and what you're looking at now is all 12 notes that we
have in western music. Okay, there are only 12 pictures; that's why we have on
the 12th fret, we have a double dot 'cause this note, this is the note E...and that's
the note E; this distance or one lap of the note circle is something that we call
an octave, so we'd say this note is one octave higher than the other one, or that
one is 1 octave lower. That's the significance of the double dots on the
12th fret on most guitars; some guitars have blocks or whatever, some don't have
dots and all but most will have double dot on the 12th fret to help you navigate
your fretboard. Now, you noticed that there's notes that are natural notes which
don't have a sharp or flat attached to them and they are A,B,C,D,E,F,G; we don't
have the letter H. In German, confusingly they have a letter H. I think it's really
not a good system. It was an accident apparently by a monk who, wrote some stuff
wrongly a long time ago, it's not relevant so we're just thinking A,B,C,D,E,F,G.
That's all of the white notes, the natural notes that we have; and in between natural
notes, we have a sharp or a flat note. Now each one of those notes can be described
two different ways. If you want the fancy pants name for it, it's called an
enharmonic equivalent that's 2 notes that sound the same but have different names.
If you look in between the notes A and B, you'll see that note can be described as
A sharp or B flat, okay? Now a sharp means raise a note by one semitone, which is the
same as one step around the note circle, so each step, I call it the clock face
sometimes 'cause there's 12 hours in a day and 12 notes on our note circle.
Each one step around the circle is called a semitone, okay? Really important. Semitone.
It's worth noting that the Americans tend to call a semitone, a half step.
Now I think this can be a little bit confusing because it's one step around the
note circle and if we talk about a whole step and a half step, especially when
we're going from a sharp to another sharp, it's just like, don't think it's the best
language to describe that, so we're gonna call it always a semitone is one step around
the note circle. Worth noting that two steps around the note circle, we call a
tone. So a semitone is one step around the note circle and a tone is two steps around
the note circle. So from the note A, we go up one semitone, we have A sharp. So sharp is
always raising, going higher by one semitone, the best way to think of it is
that if you sat on something sharp, you'd jump up, okay? Here's the A on the guitar,
you don't have to know that yet, we're gonna talk a little bit more about the
notes on the fretboard, a little later but that's the note A at the 5th fret on the
thickest string. If we go to A sharp, we go up, one semitone higher, one fret
higher, each semitone step around the note circle equates to one fret on the guitar.
Okay? So there's A, there's A sharp. If we go up one more step, we get to the note B.
Okay? So A, one step up, we sat on something sharp, so we went up, and then
one more up, we've gone to the note B; one further step higher around the circle.
Now, if we wanna go backwards from B, and we go down a semitone, down one fret, we'd say
this note would be B flat, so A sharp and B flat are the same note, okay? They sound
the same but they've got different names, enharmonic equivalents to impress your
mates, okay? A sharp or B flat. From B to C, there's no sharp or flat. What's going
on with that? I thought I had this for a second and now there's no sharp or flat there.
To understand why there are not sharps and flats between some of the notes
is really super complicated, something that I can explain to you way further
down the journey if you wanna get into that. It's included as part of my music
theory course. I don't recommend you even worry about it now, but if you have a
look at a piano keyboard, you'll notice that there are two notes that don't have a
black note between them, and those are notes B and C; and E and F, okay? So you
just have to remember at this point that B and C; and E and F don't have sharp or
a flat between them. You might wonder, is there such a thing as B sharp? Well, if
you're on B and you sharpen the B, that sharp, remember, means move up one semitone
higher, you'll end up on the note C, so actually, B sharp would be the same as C,
sound the same as C, and C flat would sound the same as B; same with E and F,
you'd have E sharp would sound the same as F, and F flat would sound the same as E.
So, sharp and flat is just to do with steps around the circle; that's the easiest way
to think about it. They do exist, you're not gonna find them in anything that we're
doing in this beginner's course, but later on in the grand scheme of things, it might
be worth understanding that those, you know, conceptually what's going
on with your sharps and flats. Now we're gonna be putting this stuff into
practice pretty quickly and it'll be really helpful for you to understand the
names of the notes of the open strings and therefore, even be able to work out
what the notes are in the chords that you're playing, so this kind of understanding
the note circle and sharps and flats is the most basic music theory that you can
get and I think it's worth having an understanding of it,
even at this early stage in the course.