C-sharp Minor & Enharmonics (Unit 5)

Hello and welcome back. I'm Joseph Hoffman. Today we're going to be reviewing flats and sharps, and learning a new pentascale. C-sharp minor. Let's come to the piano to get started. Do you remember what a sharp does to a note? A sharp raises any note up by one half step. Which means the nearest possible note to the right, or one note up. Did I already tell you my trick for remembering what a sharp does? If you get poked with something sharp, oh! It makes you jump up! Let's practice finding some sharps in a few different places. Here's G. Point to G-sharp. If you're pointing right here you're correct. Here is D. Point to D-sharp. If you're pointing right here you're correct. Here's a tricky one. Here's E. Point to E-sharp. Aha! There's no black key to the right of E, so E-sharp is actually a white key. This is E-sharp. Or you could also say F. Now let's play a game. I'll show you a note on the staff here, and your job is to find it and point to it on your screen here with the piano keys. So this one's for practice. If you see a D-sharp, can you point to that on the piano keys? In three seconds the correct answer will appear. The correct answer is right here: D-sharp. Now let's try another one. Okay, here's your next one to solve. Can you find this note on the piano keys and point to it? The correct answer will appear in three seconds. If you pointed here to G-sharp you're correct. Remember here's G, so G-sharp would be one half step to the right. Let's try another one. Can you find this note on the piano? Point to it. If you're pointing right here to F-sharp you're correct. Let's try one more. Where would this note be on the piano? If you're pointing right here to A-sharp, you're correct. Now let's talk about flats. A flat does the opposite of a sharp. A flat lowers any note by one half-step. So this was B, here's B-flat. My trick for remembering what a flat does is to think about getting a flat tire. It makes your car sink down. Let's practice finding some other flats on the piano. Here's A. Can you point to A-flat? That's correct, it's right here. Here is G. Point to G-flat. If you're pointing right here, you're correct. Here is C. Can you find C-flat? If you're pointing right here you're correct. It's another white key flat. Here's D. Can you point to D-flat? If you're pointing right here you're correct. Let's try our game again this time with flats. Can you find this note and point to it on your piano keys on your screen? If you're pointing right here to E-flat you're correct. Let's try another one. Where would this note be on your keys? If you're pointing right here you're correct. It's G-flat. Let's try another one. Where would this note be on the keys? If you're pointing here to D-flat, you're correct. Now let's try a sharp again. Can you find a C-sharp on your piano keys? If you're pointing right here you're correct. Hey wait a minute. This was the same key you pointed for for D-flat. Interesting, this helps us see that every black key actually has two different names. We could call this key C-sharp or D-flat. That's the same with people too I suppose. I'm sometimes called Mr. Hoffman, and I'm sometimes called Joseph. It all depends on the situation. The same goes for keys on the piano. Depending on the situation we could call this key D-flat, but in another situation it may actually be better to call it C-sharp. Maybe it's kind of like a superhero's secret identity. Mild-mannered D-flat by day becomes crime-fighting C-sharp by night. Different names, but it's really the same note. In music the two different names for the same note are called enharmonic. So we could say that C-sharp and D-flat are enharmonic. Let's look at some other examples. Let's see if we can figure out the two different names for this black key. Can you tell me it's sharp name? That's right it could be D-sharp. Or what could it's flat name be? That's right, we could call it E-flat. So D-sharp's secret identity is E-flat. Let's try one more. What are the two names for this black key? If you said F-sharp and G-flat you're correct. F-sharp and G-flat are also enharmonic. They look different, but they're the same key. and what would be enharmonic to G-sharp? The answer is A-flat. Two different names for the same note. Did you know white keys can have enharmonics too? Let's find this note on the piano. That's right, it's an E. What if we wanted to make E-sharp? Since there's no black key a half step above, E-sharp is the same as F. Or another way to say that, E-sharp is enharmonic with F. Now it also works the other way. What if we had or wanted F-flat? Here's F. F-flat is a half step down. So F-flat is enharmonic with E. We could say F-flat equals E. It's really the same key just two different ways of saying it. Now let's apply this to the d flat major pentascale. I mentioned that we choose whether to call a note by it's flat name or its sharp name based on the situation. Well, one of those situations is when you have a scale like this. We could name the five notes of the D-flat major pentascale like this: D-flat D-sharp F F-sharp A-flat And that would be correct technically speaking. However, it kind of looks messy, and it doesn't really follow the flow of the musical alphabet ...