But that’s not the conventional way to do things. In jazz, you sometimes do write the key verbally at the top of the page, especially if the tune is in an unusual mode or scale. At this point, you might reasonably ask why you can’t just write “E major” at the top of the page. If there’s no key signature, I don’t know what to expect, and that’s just more cognitive load for me. If I see a key signature with four sharps, then I’m going to mentally prepare myself to play E major. You can see how the one-at-a-time method would get old fast.Īside from convenience, the main reason to use key signatures is that they communicate to the performer what key the music is in. Here’s a little tune I wrote in E major, shown in two ways: with accidentals on individual notes, and then with a key signature. That’s fine for D minor, but in other keys, writing all the accidentals individually would be too much work. He wrote in the individual B-flats as they arose. JS Bach wrote his famous Chaconne in D minor without a key signature. You might reasonably ask, if this is what key signatures are for, why do you even need them? Couldn’t you just write accidentals next to all of your notes one at a time? The answer is, sure you could, and historically, some people have. The key signature in the image at the top of this post is telling you that every time you see a B, you should play B-flat, and every time you see an E, you should play E-flat. This collection of “global” accidentals is called the key signature.

If a note is going to stay sharp or flat all the way through the piece, you can write its accidental at the very beginning of the score, and then that note will be sharp or flat every time it occurs. (But what about F-flat and C-flat? Consult a music theory textbook for this kind of exotica.) You write a sharp next to the note if you want to raise it up to the closest black-key note, and you write a flat next to the note if you want to lower it to the closest black-key note. In notation, you change a white-key note to its neighboring black-key note using a symbol called an accidental. This is a holdover from historical tuning systems in which A-sharp and B-flat were slightly different notes. Each black key confusingly has two names: A-sharp/B-flat, C-sharp/D-flat, D-sharp/E-flat, F-sharp/G-flat, and G-sharp/A-flat.

C major is Western European music’s “default setting.” To play the other major scales, you will need to replace one or more white-key notes with one or more black-key notes. The white keys play the seven notes in the C major scale, repeated across octaves. You can think of music notation as a graphical representation of the white keys on the piano. The only thing that worked for me was to learn, write and improvise a lot of music in every major and minor key until they were as familiar as the layout of my apartment. The answer is, yes, there are many, but I’ve never found them to be helpful.

Several students have asked me if there is some shortcut or mnemonic for memorizing the key signatures. This assumption makes an awkward fit with the music that the kids are making and listening to. This is understandable! Like the rest of the Western notation system, key signatures are based on a big assumption: that all of the notes will be within one of the twelve major keys, or within some scale that can be derived from a major scale (most often, the natural minor scale). Most of my students struggle with key signatures.

The twelve music keys