Working out the chord: Ab Major 7th.

Working out the chord: Ab Major 7th.

Let’s say you’re trying to figure out an Ab major seven chord. Now most likely you don’t know this chord straight off, but what you need to know to begin with is it’s now a four note chord. You already know there’s going to be the tonic, 3rd, and 5th, so you need to find the. 7th note; there were three ‘mystery notes’, now there’s only one note left to work out.

The simplest way is going back one from the root note, this is the same as jumping 8 whole notes (octave) and going back one note (G Natural), remembering we’re now in the key of Ab major. If you wanted it to be a minor 7th, you’d go back another half step, so the 7th note would be Gb.

Harmonising, using the 5th degree of the scale.

You can also use the Circle of Fifths for harmonising. Let’s say you’re writing a melody and you have a melodic line that you want to harmonise using the 5th degree of the scale. Knowing your Circle of Fifths makes this process much easier.

Let’s suppose that C now represents a C major chord the G represents a G major chord and so on.

We’re in the key of B flat and our a root chord in this key is B flat major. There are two chords that are probably the most important chords in any key that is your root chord, which in this case this us B flat major and then there’s your dominant chord.

You can count up or down the stave from your melody line by line, but it’s going to be much quicker if you know what note it is you need to use to harmonise by a fifth – useful if your mind goes blank during an exam.

Key Signatures.

The Circle of Fifths is most commonly known for working out how many sharps or flats there are for each of the 15 key signatures that you can have.

We’ve already learnt how to create the Circle of Fifths, so now we’re going to learn how to apply key signatures for both sharps & flats, to our Circle of Fifths.

It’s worth knowing that when there aren’t any sharps or flats at the beginning of a piece of music, that you’re going to be in the key of either C Major, or A minor. It’s usually the first note of the pice which gives the key signature away if you’re note sure, it’ll either a note or chord starting on either C or A.

In this diagram, the major keys are on the outside of the third inner circle, and the minor keys are on the second inner circle – which are labelled.

Working clockwise or anti-clockwise, you’ll add a sharp to each 5th degree of the scale. So for G major, you’ll have one sharp, F sharp, D major – 2 sharps, A major – 3 sharps, E major 4 sharps and so on.

The order of sharps are easy to remember if you remember the following sentence: Father, Charles, Goes, Down, And, Ends, Battle. Each time you add a sharp to the Circle of Fifths, you’re of course including the previous sharp. If you can’t remember how to write the Circle of Fifths, you can still work out the key signature.

You start by taking the last sharp and you literally go up a letter. If you’re last sharp is G, you’ll, of course, go back to A because there isn’t a note H in the western musical scale. A B C D E F G.

When we’re talking about key signatures, there’s also relative minors and relative majors. These share the same number of sharps or flats. To work out the relative minor when we’re working in a key signature using sharps, we take the last sharp, go up one letter and back three steps.

For two sharps, the major key signature is D major, because we have F# and c# as our key signature, C is the last sharp, the next letter is D, back three steps or tones from D, is B, so the key signature is B Minor.

Notice, that when drawing the number of sharps for our Circle of Fifths, the sharps overlap with the flats and vice versa, this is because there are 7 sharps and 7 flats so they’re going to overlap by 3.

We have 30 different key signatures in total (including C major and A minor), but when it comes to sharps or flats we only have 7 sharps or 7 flats, but we have 29 keys.