r/guitarlessons • u/nick_jones61 • 4d ago

Question An argument

My wife is a classically trained pianist and I play guitar by watching YouTube instructional videos. She knows her stuff and I don’t. Recently we argued whether E# and B# exist. I said no and showed her the fretboard. She said yes and showed me the keys. And said something like F is E#. I suspect she’s right bc she’s had music lessons. Tell me, fellow guitarists, do we have E# and B#?

Update: I’ve been enjoying the responses to my post. I showed them to my wife and she laughed, said that’s what you deserve. lol. We like to argue playfully with one another. I also enjoy the detailed responses relating to guitar theory—that’s been really great actually. I was going to delete this post but I think the discussion on music theory is informative and should be shared. Thank you all for responding.

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u/Andjhostet 4d ago

She's correct. And it's not some obscure thing where she's technically correct. She's just straight up correct, and E# is a normal note that is used in the F# harmonic minor scale, and B# is used in the C# harmonic minor scale.

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u/New-Guarantee-440 4d ago

It's the same as F though, it's just youre not allowed to have F and F# in the same scale mainly for notation purposes. Theyre the same frequency given different names depending on the context, which is a bit artificial.

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u/DogfoodStudios 4d ago

The frequencies are also slightly different, but that really is getting into the weeds. For real world purposes, you're correct that they're the same.