~~~ Accidentals ~~~

These little extra signs that appear sometimes in the music have an influence on the notes for one whole “bar” . That means an accidental affects every note that is like the one it was printed next to… unless another accidental comes along to replace it. They come in 3 common flavours:



Here’s the first line of a folksong from http://sniff.numachi.com/ where you can find hundreds of folk tunes.



There is actually a slightly easier way to write this down, but the complicated version is useful to show how accidentals work.

~~~ 2nd bar ~~~

Here’s the second bar written bigger:



In this bar, we press the sharp button just before playing the second note,

and then press the natural button just before playing the third note.

After the fourth note, we see a barline, so we press the accidental-barline cancel button.


~~~ 3rd bar ~~~



In the third bar, there are no accidentals, so we play the notes as usual.

~~~ 4th bar ~~~

In the fourth bar, the accidental lasts all the way to the barline this time, and there is another similar note along the way.



We press the sharp button again before playing the first note.

When we get to the 5th note, we leave the sharp sign there, because there hasn’t been a barline to cancel it yet. This is the correct note for the 5th note in this bar, so we can just press it again to hear it.

Next... we can either take the sharp away with the barline cancel button, and put it straight back on again for the next note…
…or we can just leave it there until the following bar line.