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Music facts: Sharps and Flats

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This week we're talking about how to get faster at spelling your major scales.

Counting whole and half steps is useful when you're starting out, but is the REALLY long way to figure out what the notes are in a scale.

Ultimately, you want to know the notes in each scale so well you don't even have to think about it. But on the way to that goal, you need some guides to keep you on track.

By looking at the spelling of all the major scales, grouped into sharp keys and flat keys, you start to notice patterns.  The slides for this week point out some of those patterns, like the circle of 5ths, the order of sharp and flat keys, and the order of the sharps and flats in those various keys.

It turns out that the order of the sharps and flats is consistent through every key - and we can use that to cheat and help us know which notes are natural and which ones are accidentals in any given key.


Homework this week: 

  • Learn the order of the sharp keys and flat keys, around the circle of 5ths.
  • Learn how many sharps or flats are in each key.
  • Learn the order of the sharps (FCGDAEB) and flats (BEADGCF)
  • Try assembling a major scale using your knowledge of a) how many sharps/flats are in a key and b) the order of the sharps/flats
The slides for this week have more details on all this - check them out for reference.

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