This is a continuation of my ‘Circle of Fifths‘ post.
The Order of Sharps and Flats
This will be another utility to use with the circle of 5ths to determine what key gets Flats or Sharps and how we determine them.
Order of #‘s: F C G D A E B (a saying I like to remember these notes is):
Order of b‘s: B E A D G C F (a saying to remember the flats is):
If you notice, the order of Flats is just the order of Sharps in reverse.
Now lets get workin’! Lets pick one of our keys from the cycle of fifths in diagram 2. Lets start with the key of A Major.
Notice this: the key of A Major is on the side where we have Sharps (#) in thiskey. to determine the sharps of the A key we will refer to the “order of Sharps (#)”.
Order of #‘s are as follows :
F C G D A E B
1 2 3 4 5 6 7
Since we see that the key of A Major has 3 sharps, we will just count up in our order of Sharps, 3 alphabet characters. F C G – These are our sharps in our key of A Major.
Let’s write out our key of A without identifying the sharps like this firsthand:
A B C D E F G A
We have determined that our sharps in the key of A Major are F C G, we were able to do this by using our circle of fifths corresponding with the order of Sharps. NOW, if we happen to pick a Eb key (has 3 b’s) we would be using the order of flats, but the same principles apply. we can now add our sharps symbols to our notes within our key to identify it as the “key of A major”. (F# C# G#)
A B C# D E F# G#
We have successfully made our first key, we can use this key to form many things, such as scales & chords believe it or not! Lets see how we can do that!