In musical terms, ’steps’ refer to the distances between individual notes. You probably already know that the musical alphabet consists of seven notes: A B C D E F and G. This would be simple to understand if each note represented one whole step up or down the musical scale, but that’s not the case. Two of these notes, B and E, are natural half steps. See how there is no black note between B and C or E and F in the keyboard illustration. All the others have half-stepped notes between them (black notes), which we refer to as sharps and flats. So the true alphabet looks like this:

A -A#- B- C- C#- D- D#- E- F- F#- G. In this illustration, each (-) represents a half step. Notice that I have only used sharps to illustrate this. I could have use flats just as easily because there is no difference in pitch between, for example, A# and Bb, they are just different spellings of the same note.

photo credit: Torley