KEY SIGNATURES CONTINUED: 

THE CIRCLE OF FIFTHS and relative minors

Another useful tool to help you really learn and understand key signatures is the circle of fifths (also called the circle of fourths). Watch the video below, and study the diagram, to help you understand how the circle of fifths works.

To memorise the circle of fifths, I like to use a repeating pattern in the circle. If you go round the circle anti-clockwise (to the flat side first) You will notice that after 'F', the next four note names spell the word 'BEAD', followed by the letter 'G' at the bottom of the circle (here we are just talking about the flat keys, and we're ignoring their harmonic equivalents. Remember, you'll need to add flats after each letter). After Gb, this pattern repeats through the sharp keys (BEAD-G) until we get back round to C.

This means if we remember 'BEAD - G' we've got most of the circle memorised.

C - F - Bb- Eb - Ab - Db - Gb - B - E - A - D - G. (then back to C)

We can work out the number of flats in any key by adding a flat each step as we go around the circle.

C - F - Bb- Eb - Ab - Db - Gb  KEY

0 - 1 - 2  -  3  -  4   -  5    -  6   NUMBER OF FLATS

For the sharp keys, (if we're still going anti-clockwise, we can just start with the key of B Major (5 sharps) and then subtract one sharp with each step.

B - E - A - D - G - C

5 -  4 - 3 - 2 -  1 - 0

MINOR KEYS

In classical music, we can think of music as being in either a Major key (which we've just learnt) or a minor key. Luckily, if we know our major keys, working out minor keys is really easy. This is because if we play a major scale, but start on the sixth note of the scale, we are playing a NATURAL MINOR SCALE.

You can see from the above diagram the C Major and A minor have exactly the same notes in them. Because they share all the same notes, they also share the SAME KEY SIGNATURE.  Therefore every key signature can be thought of as being TWO relative keys, a major key and a minor key

Major and minor scales that share the same time signature are called RELATIVE scales. A minor is the relative minor of C major, and C Major is the relative major of A minor. 

The only difference between the two relative scales is that in C Major we are thinking of the note 'C' as being the tonic (or root) of the scale, and in A minor we think of the note 'A' as being the tonic of the scale. 

It's probably more accurate to think of A minor as a scale in it's own right, with the 'A' as the tonic (note 1)  like this:

Even though the two scales (C Major and A minor) have exactly the same notes in them, the two scales sound quite different. C Major has a bright, happy quality to it, whereas A minor sounds dark and melancholy.

This is because our ears tend to remember the first note that we hear (the tonic), and relate all the other notes in the scale to it. The other notes in the scale relate differently to the tonic A than to the tonic C. We can see this clearly if we compare A Major (the key of 3 sharps) to A natural minor.

You can see that compared to A Major, the A natural minor scale has a flattened 3rd, and flattened 6th and a flattened 7th note. To understand this fully (and memorise it!), watch the video below, and complete the following worksheets.

HOW DO YOU FIND THE RELATIVE MINOR?

There are a number of ways you can do this:

1)  take the sixth note of the major scale

2) Count UP 9 semitones from the tonic of the Major scale

             or even easier:

3) Count DOWN 3 semitones from the root of the major scale