Lauren Bateman explains the musical alphabet in a beginner-friendly video. She introduces the seven letter names (A–G), shows how they repeat, and explains sharps and flats. Bateman demonstrates that there are 12 distinct pitches when including sharps (A, A#, B, C, C#, D, D#, E, F, F#, G, G#), notes the absence of black keys between B–C and E–F, and clarifies enharmonic equivalents (A# = Bb, C# = Db, D# = Eb, F# = Gb, G# = Ab). She emphasizes why knowing note names matters for chord naming and basic music theory.
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In this short review video, what we're going to do is we're going to go over the musical Alphabet. So the musical Alphabet is a little bit different than the regular Alphabet in that there's not as many letters, we're using the same letters, there's just not as many of them. So we have the same letters, A, B, C, D, E, F and G. And then once we get to G, it starts all over again. So we go A, B, C, D, E, F, G, A, B, C, D, E, F, G, A, B, C, D, E, F, G, so forth E and so on. And this is sometimes easy to see on a piano because a piano has white and black keys. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to take us over to a whiteboard quickly where I can show you this because sometimes it's easier to see things than it is just to hear them. So I'm going to go over to the whiteboard and we're going to talk a little bit more about the musical Alphabet and why it's important for you to at least know the basics of it. Okay. Welcome to the whiteboard. So I've written out here the musical Alphabet. And. And as I said before, the letters are A, B, C, D, E, F, G. Awesome. So technically there are seven letters in the musical Alphabet. But there's also a few other important things you should know about the musical Alphabet. So in the musical Alphabet we have these things called sharps.
Also what you would call a hashtag, but they're not hashtags, they're sharps earliest, that's what we call them in music. So this is going to be A sharp. We also have these things that look like a little B and they are called flats. Alright, in music, anything sharp is higher. Anything that is flat, think of a flat tire is lower. So sharps go up, flats come down. So moving from the bottom, in this case our A, we're going to go from the bottom to the top. So in the musical Alphabet we have an A. We also have a note called A sharp. This would be a black key on the piano. Keep moving. There is no black key between B and C, so there is no B sharp, but there is a C sharp. Here we do have a D and a D sharp. Again between E and F. If you looked at a piano, there is no black key. So there is no E sharp, but there is an F sharp and we do have a G sharp. So in our musical Alphabet, we have 12 notes. A, a sharp, B, C, C sharp, D, D sharp. E, F, F sharp, G and G sharp. We also have these notes that are flats. Now, this can sometimes be confusing for people, but we'll try to make it not so tricky. These notes kind of overlap. So, for example, there is a B flat, B flat.
And A sharp. They're like identical twins with different names. They're the same note. It just depends on which direction you're coming from. So if you're going from A and you want to go higher, you're A sharp. If you're coming from B and you want to go lower, it's B flat. It's just semantics at this point, at least for now. So A sharp and B flat are the same note. D flat and C sharp are also the same note. E flat and D sharp are the same note. G flat is the same as F sharp, and A flat is the same as G sharp. So in the musical Alphabet, just know there are seven letters. A, B, C, D, E, F, G. And sometimes in between some of those letters, we have sharps and flats. Between B and C, we have no sharp, no flat, and between E and F, we also have no sharps and no flats. So there is no B sharp and there is no E sharp. So the musical Alphabet, if we just use sharps, is A, A sharp, B, C, C sharp, D, D sharp, E, F, F sharp, G and G sharp. Why is this important? Well, because all the chords that we're going to be learning get their names from these notes. So you want to know what we're talking about. So when I say, hey, we're going to play a C chord, you're like, oh, it must have something to do with that C note. And it does. So I just want to let you know there is a musical Alphabet. You'll learn more about it as you get into more music theory. But this is just the basics of the musical Alphabet.
