But on a staff (stave ), the flat, like all the other accidentals, is written before the note, and here is a B flat:Īnd here are flats in the key signature of D flat major scale: With letters, we write 'E flat' or 'E♭' for short. The position of the flat: The flat can be placed in front of a note (it is an accidental) or next to the clef in the key signature. This does not mean that it is impossible to play an F flat or an C flat, but we will see it later. You will also notice that there are no black keys between the E and F notes and between the B and C notes, because as you just understood there is only one half step between E and F and between B and C. Here are all flat notes (this is the descending chromatic scale): We will be able to play these black keys with accidentals and in particular with flat notes (notes lowered by one half step). You will notice that there are black keys between the keys C and D, D and E, F and G, G and A, A and B. And off course, one whole step equals two half steps. The smallest distance between two notes is a half step, and in the C major scale, there is one whole step between two consecutive notes except between E and F and between B and C where there is only one half step. The white keys on the piano keyboard correspond to the notes of the C Major scale, that are: C D E F G A B. Little reminder of the half step and whole step concept: The flat in front of a music note, lowers the sound of the note by a half step (semitone ). I think I saw another post where Daniel said these other ‘sized’ unicode glyphs will be added/updated at some point in the Steinberg SMuFL document.In music theory, flat is a musical sign from the family of symbols called accidentals. This also works with ‘Lyric Input’ without any other changing of fonts etc, and does seem to work with almost all fonts as he says. Marc is correct though: If you use (In unicode mode, holding option/alt) 266D the flat symbol will be the same size as the font you are using. You can resize it of course and change the baseline.

If, for example, you use the code E260 from the Steinberg Document, (in Unicode Mode) you will get a flat, but it will be small. However, if you change your keyboard input to Unicode Hex Input you can just punch in the numbers while holding down the ‘option’ key on a Mac or ‘Alt’ on a PC. You can indeed copy and paste the Glyphs from the Steinberg SMuFL document that Dan linked to in post #4 above…you will then have to resize them and edit the baseline to get them to line up with your other text. Thanks everyone! I have finally got to grips with the previous mysteries of Unicode, so I will share my findings:

Flat symbol keyboard