Key Signatures

When you first look at sheet music (the page with all the confusing lines and dots), what do you automatically look at? For every musician, when they first see sheet music and they want to play it they should automatically look at the key signature. This is how music gets organized, according to a specific scale (Carter 83). The key signature “takes the form most often of a note followed by the word ‘major’ or ‘minor’” (Carter 83). This means that when there is a chord, let’s use C for example, it would be followed by either “major” or “minor” to tell you what notes are included. C major is arguably the most used and simplest scale there is since there are no sharps or flats (which is why I am using it for all of my examples). When the key signature is known, playing along with the music or improvising is made a lot easier. I use this a lot when I play keyboard for my church band (side note: our favorite chord is Gsus, can you guess why?) Since I am the leader, I find the chords played with the song, determine the key signature, and then tell that to the rest of my team. My team and I find it very useful since we improvise what we play and we do not have sheet music to tell us what to play and when. A lot of the time during piano, I use the key signature to tell me what notes I can play with each chord so that the sound is still pleasant while not being the same exact chords throughout the song. When I know the key signature, I can make up the notes as I play. In the case of a C major key signature, I know that I can play a G chord and it still fits into the signature, but playing an A# minor would sound terrible. This is very useful for keyboard as well as other musical abilities such as writing music. The whole reason that it is not wise to mix key signatures is because certain chords have different sharps and flats in them. With a C chord, there are no sharps or flats but with a chord like E, there is a G# in it. Playing these two chords together would make the sound very messy and harsh to listen to.

https://youtu.be/4uWFxGQ3fvY

This is Sad Song by We The Kings (sorry about the metronome, my timing was really off during the song). The chords used in this video are F#, C#, G#, and A#. These are all in the same key signature, but for learning purposes, I won’t tell you what the actual key signature is. All I know is the chords of the song and then I listened to the song and improvised to find the notes that sound somewhat like the actual song.

Do you think it would be easier playing without music when you have the key signature, or just the chords of the song? Would it be possible to figure out the key signature using the chords? If so, what do you think is the key signature of the song?

Also, I am going to be uploading a duet that my best friend and I did together. You can see all the different components that I explained in my previous posts applied into real music.

Carter, Nicolas. Keys and Key Signatures Explained. Music Theory From Absolute Beginner to Expert. N.p.: Nicolas Carter, 2016. 83-84. Print.

Building Chords

Building chords is rather simple once you understand what a chord is and how it fits in with the corresponding scale (refer to other posts). To build a chord you take the root note of the scale, then for each new note you use take the next third (Carter 91). For example, the C scale: the root is C, the third is E, then G, then B. Make sure that when building a chord, not all the notes of the scale is used. This is necessary because some notes in the scale do not fit with the rest when played together. For example, A, B, and C do not sound pleasant together even though they are all part of the C scale. “note that in practice, not all chords are played, or voices, with all of these notes being included – so that it is possible to play a seventh chord by playing only a root, a third and a seventh” (Carter 91). When playing a C scale, you can skip the third note (which is the fifth step) and it would still sound like the scale.

https://youtu.be/2cSu0TTtTUI

In this video, I played a typical C scale. As mentioned above, you can play a chord without the fifth step in it (so the notes for a C scale would be C, E, and B and the chord still sounds clean). You could also do this with other steps of the chord such as playing C, E, G, and D. When you delete the seventh step in a scale, it is labelled as an add9 (so the C chord would be called Cadd9).

If A, B, and C are all notes in the C scale, why are they not able to be played together?

Carter, Nicolas. How Chords are Built. Music Theory From Absolute Beginner to Expert. N.p.: Nicolas Carter, 2016. 91-92. Print.

Melody vs. Harmony


Hi everyone! I'm Kara and I've been playing piano for 11 years. I play piano and keys, electric and acoustic guitar, ukulele, and violin. I have not taken any music theory classes besides scale books in first grade but I was just made the new leader of my church worship team. I figured it would be beneficial to understand scales, chords, and inversions. In the beginning, I initially thought this book was pretty simple and that it wouldn't help me very much but as I kept going, I realized that my teacher failed to teach me a lot of the basics. One of the things I have never learned is melody versus harmony. Melody is the relationship between pitches that forms a song (Carter 29) whereas harmony is defined as "the vertical relationship between pitches" (Carter 29). For any kind of music, having a strong melody is impertinent. When playing music, the melody should be like the chips to your guacamole, you need to be able to notice the chips at all times or else you just have a mouthful of avocado. In the same sense, you need to be able to hear the melody which is the most important part of the song. Also, in writing songs, you must understand that melody consists of tension and release meaning the pitch moves away from the harmonic center, and then finds an interesting way to get back to it again.

The pink dots are a C major third and the blue dots are a E minor third. The C third would typically be the melody and the E third would be the harmony. When you play or sing, you use the corresponding note (play C and E, E and G, or G and B). These would be the harmony and melody sets for these two chords.

(I tried showing this in a video but it wouldn't upload. Next post with probably be a video.)

Do you think a typical two step harmony sounds better than the rest? Why do you think the pitches blend together so well?


Carter, Nicolas. The Building Blocks of Music - Harmony, Melody, and Rhythm. Music Theory From Absolute Beginner to Expert. N.p.: Nicolas Carter, 2016. 29-30. Print.