A beginner-level YouTube lesson by guitar teacher Lauren Bateman explaining the musical alphabet for guitar students. The video defines the seven natural note names (A, B, C, D, E, F, G), explains that there are 12 total chromatic notes including sharps (#) and flats (b), and uses a piano visual to show white keys (naturals) and black keys (sharps/flats). Bateman maps these notes to guitar frets, demonstrates ascending (sharp) and descending (flat) sequences, and emphasizes that beginners should focus first on the seven letter names because chord names derive from those notes. The video ends with a subscribe/CTA.
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Hey, guitar enthusiast Lauren Bateman here. In this lesson video, we're going to go over a little bit of beginner level music theory. We're going to be going over what are the notes in the musical Alphabet? Just the letters, not the actual sight reading notes. So let's get into the lesson.
So as a guitar teacher that specializes in teaching beginners, I don't often throw a lot of music theory at my students from the get go because I, I think it's, it can be very confusing and overwhelming for beginner students. So I really focus on you guys having fun as soon as possible. But I think it's super important to at least know the musical Alphabet. And not, not talking about sight reading, I'm just talking about knowing the actual names of the notes because when you start learning chords and stuff in, you know, down the road, all these chords, their names are derived from the notes of the musical Alphabet. So I want to go over those here. There's essentially 12 notes in the musical Alphabet. But first let's start off with the actual letter names. Now I'm going to put a piano up here because so much easier to see on a piano because you have white keys and black keys. And we'll talk about what those black keys are in a little bit on a guitar you can see I just have frets. And each one of these frets represents a note and some of those notes you can find on the piano. But we don't have those black and white keys. So it's much easier to see on the piano. So we're going to talk about just the white keys for right now. And the letters of the musical Alphabet are the letter A, B, C, D, E, F and G. And that's it. We go right back to the beginning of the Alphabet. So it goes A, B, C, D, E, F, G, A, B, C, D, E, F, G. A, B, C, D, E, F, G. And you're like, well, Lauren, you told me that there's, there's 12 notes in the Alphabet and you only gave me seven. So those are just the white keys on the piano. And just so that you guys know what it's called, those are called natural keys. All right. When it's just the letter, we call that a natural, our natural note. What we do have now on the piano that we don't have on the guitar, but these notes do exist on the guitar. We have what we call sharps, which looks like a hashtag or a tic tac toe. I didn't have hashtags when I was A kid, we had tic tac toe signs. So we have A sharp. And a sharp tells you that the note is going higher. All right? Sharp, high, the opposite, A flat, which looks like a little B. So think of a flat tire. When your tire goes flat, the tire goes down. So flat notes are moving down in pitch. Sharp notes are moving up in pitch. So in the beginning, I always teach students in terms of sharps.
Not to confuse them too much. So if I were going to start on my A string on my guitar, this way I can line it up as best as possible. With the piano, we have A. And then on the piano we'd have a black key, A sharp. Then we have B. Now, you'll notice after B there's a special thing that happens here. There's no black key. We go right to another white key. So we have C.
And then we have C sharp, a black key, D. Then D sharp, a black key, E. And you'll notice again here, after the E, there's no black key. So we go from E right to F. Then we have F sharp. Then we have G, G sharp, and then back to A. All right, so those are all the notes of the musical Alphabet. Let's do that again, starting on the fifth string first. Open. Open string A. A sharp, B, C, C sharp, D, D sharp, E, F, F sharp, G, G sharp, and back to A. All right? Those are our notes. Now, that was us moving from low pitch to high pitch. What if we move backwards high pitch to low pitch? All right, so we're lowering the pitches. We're flattening the pitches. So we would have A. We would have A flat lat.
G.
G flat.
F. There's no black key. So we go from F right to E. We have E flat.
Then we have D. Then we have D flat.
C. There is no black key between C and B. So we just go right to B. Then we go B flat, and then we go 2A. So you'll notice that those black keys represent both sharps and flats, depending on which way you are moving through the notes. But the most important ones for you to know as a beginner are A, B, C, D, E, F and G, the seven letters, okay? Because when you're learning chords in the beginning, that's mostly what you're going to be sticking with. Not so much sharps just yet. So those are the seven notes that are most important to the beginner. A, B, C, D, E, F, G. And that, my friends, is what you need to know right now about the musical Alphabet. I hope you guys enjoyed this lesson. Don't forget to subscribe to the channel because you'll see more videos just like this one. If you really enjoyed the lesson, make sure to give me a thumbs up. YouTube is going to pop over a couple suggestion videos over there. Go watch those, check those out and I hope to see you guys in another lesson video.
