This ONE Rule Makes Sharps And Flats Make Sense On Guitar!

Added: 2026-05-12

[00:00:00]The gaps between the notes are where most guitarists start getting lost. If you know A B C D E F G and A, then the next question is obvious. What lives in these gaps? In this lesson, I'll show you exactly how sharps and flats fit those gaps on the fretboard. And the A string on the guitar is the best model to show you that. But first, let's just recap on the musical alphabet. We have A B C D E F and G. When we get to G, the musical alphabet stops and we go back to A. And we can also see that B and C are neighbors and E and F are neighbors.

[00:00:42]That means there is no fret in between B and C and no fret in between E and F.

[00:00:48]However, you can see there are gaps in between A and B, C and D, D and E, F and G, and G and A. And this is where the sharps and the flats come in. Let's talk about sharps first. When we take a natural note like this A here and we move it up one fret, so here it's on the zero fret or the open string, and move it up one fret, we retain the alphabet letter, but we add a symbol to it. And the symbol that we add is this symbol here. It's not a hashtag, guys.

[00:01:22]It's a sharp symbol. And whenever you see that, it means to raise the note a half step, which is one fret. So, if I take our A note and we raise it up one fret, then that means we get A sharp.

[00:01:36]So, here at the first fret, if we held that note down and played it, we would get an A sharp. And when we look at the guitar neck, the way we think of it is is sharps go up the neck towards the body of the guitar. Now, this is important to understand that this is up on the guitar and this is going down because sharps go up and flats come down. But another way of thinking about it is if I play these notes 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12, you can hear the pitch rising. But another clue is the fact that the numbers of the frets are going up as well. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12.

[00:02:24]So, let's get back to our sharps. We have an A sharp here at the first fret.

[00:02:29]Now, if you look at the B and C, like I said, there is no fret to fit in a B sharp. So, we don't have one. But you can see here between C and D on the fourth fret of the A string, we do have a gap. So, what we do is we take the natural value here of a C and we raise it a half step.

[00:02:49]So, that's what the sharp does. So, when we see that, we think that's going to be C sharp. Let's look at the D. I'm sure you know what's going to happen next. If we look at the sixth fret, we know that something is going to live here. This is a D. We're going up the neck, so it's going to become a D sharp. Let's look at E and F. Can we have an E sharp? No, because the F's in the way. Here, we have a gap. Now, the role of the sharp comes into being. We take the F, we raise it a half step on the ninth fret of the A string and we get an F sharp.

[00:03:23]Now, you can see this lonely G note here on its own and if we move up to the A, there is a gap in between. Can you guess what's going to happen here in between the G and the A? Yes, we're going to get a G sharp. But this isn't the full story. I said sharps, but we also get the opposite of a sharp, which is a flat. The symbol for a flat looks like a B symbol like this. And what this does is it does exactly the same thing as a sharp, but it lowers a note a half step.

[00:03:54]I kind of think of it as like if a car gets a flat tire, it drops down to the ground. A flat note does the same thing.

[00:04:01]It goes down. So, where sharps went up the guitar neck, flats go down the guitar neck. And the same thing happens with the pitch and the numbers. So, I'm going to start at the A here at the 12th fret. Remember, A to A, this is the octave. So, if I take the A natural here and drop it down one fret into the gap, I get an A flat. And you can see that we get a G sharp and an A flat. Now, these are the same sound, but the name of the note changes depending on the musical context and the key that we are in. This is called enharmonic equivalents. That's a posh, fancy way of saying same note, but two possible names. Let's carry this all the way down. So, if we have a G natural note and we lower it one fret, we get a G flat. Here's F. Do we get an F flat? If not, why don't we? Yes, it's because we are next door to an E.

[00:05:01]There's no space for a flat to get in there. So, let's go to the E. Let's drop down from the E one fret there and get the E flat. And we can see that the enharmonic equivalent of the E flat is a D sharp. Next to the D. And if we drop that down one half step, we get a D flat. And the enharmonic equivalent of the D flat is a C sharp. Here we are again with B and C. Do we get a C flat?

[00:05:28]No, we don't cuz we just need to remember B and C and E and F are next door to each other. But in between B and A, yes, we get a B flat.

[00:05:40]And the enharmonic equivalent of the B flat is an A sharp. Now, what you should be able to see is I can use these different labels for these note names and I end up having 12 of them. A, A sharp, B, C, C sharp, D, D sharp, E, F, F sharp, G, G sharp. 12 notes. Or I can use the flats. A, B flat, B, C, D flat, D, E flat, E, F, G flat, G, A flat, A.

[00:06:12]That gives us a total of 12 notes.

[00:06:15]You've got the natural notes A B C D E F G and now you've got the sharps and the flats that fill the gaps in between them. Now, what happens is when you put every single one of those notes in order, you get the chromatic scale. This is the full map of notes that we have available to us. Not just the alphabet street houses, we get the whole street.

[00:06:35]Every fret, every note, every step.

[00:06:38]Click on the video on screen now because in this next lesson, I'll show you how the chromatic scale works on guitar and why it unlocks the whole fretboard.