In the last section you learned the so-called white notes of the electric bass. They are called white notes because they correspond with the white keys on a piano. By now you should know where to find any white note in the musical alphabet, A through G, on the bass. You even know two options on each note found in differing octaves, with the exception of D. However, the musical alphabet is regularly modified by the use of halfway points (also known as half steps) between the alphabetical notes. These halfway points are better known as sharps or flats, depending on usage and musical context.

With the exception of B, C, E, and F, all the notes in the musical alphabet contain a sharp or a flat in between them. This sharp or flat represents a halfway point in pitch between each alphabetical pair of notes. On the bass guitar, this corresponds to the frets that fall directly between the white notes (also called naturals) that you learned earlier in the chapter. These sharps or flats correspond to the black notes on a piano. When playing these notes on the bass guitar fretboard, simply use the fingers that are adjacent to the fingers used to play the white notes. In other words, if you want to play a low F-sharp instead of F natural on the E string, use finger two since F-sharp falls between F natural and G natural, which use fingers one and three respectively.

In general, there are two ways to encounter sharps or flats in musical notation. First, you may see the sharp or flat written right next to the note on the staff. This is called an accidental. It is called an accidental because, in a sense, it is an accident — an accident whereby a note normally consonant in a given key is altered by sharping or flatting it. When it is sharped or flatted, it is taken outside the realm of the normal key.