How to Understand Key Signatures in Sheet Music

Video Transcript

" Hi! I’m Will the next thing I’m going to teach ya’ll on is key signatures. For any given piece of music you may see somewhere at the start of the piece or on every line or just change any one out a group of sharps or a group of flats, for instance one thing you might see will look like this… This is just a group of flats to start in any group of flats like this represent the key that your piece is playing, for instance this one is playing the key of E-flat and what this means is that every time you have a B or you have an A or you have an E, every B and every A and every E are played flat. So for instance on the piano this would sound like…whereas it didn’t have these three flats here it would sound like…cause the D, the A, the E would be raised up a half step instead of lowered as they are. And so for key signatures you have to write the flats in a certain order and the way to remember it is called or actually it’s just B raise a common factor or B E A DG C F and this is just when you’re writing flats. So for instance we have here already written B-flat, E-flat, A-flat we’ll then have to write D-flat, G-flat, C-flat and then F-flat and essentially you have to do this every time you’re writing all the flats, you can’t write for instance A-flat, D-flat, A-flat it just doesn’t work that way. If you’re writing sharps you can do the same thing but you start from F, so you’ll write F-sharp first and then C-sharp and so forth."