Key Signatures and the Circle of Fifths

In this lesson we'll be talking about key signatures. I'll give you an easy way to remember them all too. Knowing what key you are in is very important for soloing.

Accidentals

In case you were asleep in grade school general music class, "accidentals" are sharps and flats. A sharp (#) raises the pitch of a note one fret, and a flat (b) lowers it. The following example goes A Ab A#:

"But isn't Ab the same thing as G#?" Yes, it is. Call it whatever you want... for now :)

"How do I tell what note I'm playing?" See my lesson on the easy way to find any note on the guitar.

What is a Key Signature?

In the lesson on the major scale, we said that being "in a key" means that a song sticks to the seven notes in a major scale. We discovered that figuring out the notes in a major scale is as easy as picking a note and following the pattern.

We used the key of C major in our other example, which happens to be C - D - E - F - G - A - B - C. But every other key will have either sharps or flats (the key signature is the place at the start of a piece of music that tells you this). For instance, here's the major scale pattern starting on G:

That scale follows the same pattern as our C major scale did, it just starts from a different note. But this scale has one sharp - the 14th fret is an F#. That's just the way the pattern makes it.

The key of F has a B flat on the 6th fret:

So depending on where you start your scale, you will have up to SEVEN sharps or flats! The key of C#, for example, goes C# - D# - E# - F# - G# - A# - B# - C#. As you can imagine, reading music in a key like that isn't fun.

Major scales never have sharps AND flats - that would get too confusing. So they are divided into scales with sharps and others with flats.

The Easy Way to Remember Key Signatures

I learned this in high school theory class. It's four pneumonics to help you remember ALL the major scales and what sharps and flats they have. As fun as it is to make that major scale pattern, you don't want to have to figure a key out from scratch every time.

Sharp Keys

NUMBER: Good Deeds Are Ever Bearing F(#)ruit C(#)hildren

SHARPS: Fat Cats Get Drunk At Eddie's Bar

Flat Keys

NUMBER: Farmer B(b)rown E(b)ats A(b)pple D(b)umplings G(b)randma C(b)ooks

FLATS: BEAD Greatest Common Factor

What the heck does all that mean? Well let me give a couple examples and it will be easy to figure out after that.

-The key of G has one sharp. What is it? F#.

-The key of D has two sharps. They are F# and C#.

-The key of A has thre sharps. They are F#, C#, and G#.

Get it? The NUMBER part is how many sharps or flats the key has, and the SHARPS/FLATS part tells you what they actually are. A couple flat key examples:

-The key of Bb has two flats. They are Bb and Eb.

-The key of Ab has four flats - Bb, Eb, Ab, and Db.

The Magic Circle

Believe it or not, you just learned the mystical Circle of Fifths! Some diagrams put this in a visual format, like this:

Look really carefully, and see if you can see our pneumonics anywhere in that diagram! They're all there! The sharp keys go around clockwise and the flat keys counter-clockwise, but it's the same order as the cheat sheet above. So don't worry about memorizing this complex diagram, just remember the helpful pneumonics!

For practice, see if you can "spell" a random major scale. Like E or something. How does the scale go? You should be able to figure it out! It goes E - F# - G# - A - B - C# - D#. Try some other ones yourself.