Puzzle Answers

I'm sure you've been waiting in the deepest suspense to know the answers to the puzzle from last post, so I'll break the tension and tell you.The puzzle, or excersise, was to find and name the sharps or flats in the following keys, using Father Charles:

F
G
Eb
C#

F is easy--it's one of the special cases we talked about. From the diagram, it looks like it should have 6 sharps, but it really has 1 flat, which is Bb

The key of G has sharps for real--well, one anyway. Starting on the left, you count up 1 and find that the 1 sharp in the key of G is F#.

Eb, naturally, has several flats. Find the number below E on the chart and you'll find that Eb has 3 flats. Then count from the right and you'll know that those flats are Bb, Eb and Ab. If you have a hard time remembering the order of notes in reverse for flats, remember this: Battle Ends And Down Goes Charles' Father. That's Father Charles in reverse and it gives you the notes that are flat.

The key of C# is another special case--kind of a weird one at that. C# has 7 sharps, which kind of poses a problem when you try to play it. When you look at a piano keyboard, the white keys are normal, or natural, and the black keys are sharp or flat. But here's the trick--there's only 5 black keys on the keyboard. Worse, when you use Father Charles, it tells you that ALL the note names should be sharp. So what do you do?

Remember TTSTTTS? It's the formula that tells you the distance between the notes of a scale, whether it is half a step or a full step. Just follow this pattern to find the notes of the C# major scale. You will still sharp the E and the B, but you won't call them E# and B#. On the keyboard they are F and C--half a step higher than E and B. So the C# major scale (with all 7 sharps) is C#, D#, F (E#), G#, A#, and C (B#)

Here's a list of all the keys and how many sharps or flats they have. I'll leave it up to you to figure out what the notes are. Be sure and notice how there is just one key for some notes where it seems like there could be two. For instance, Ab could also be called G#. But there is no key of G#--it's always called Ab. Just watch out for those. The only exception is F#, which is the same as Gb.

Natural Keys
A
B
C
D
E
F

Flat Keys
Ab
Bb
Db
Eb
Gb

Sharp Keys
C#
F#

There you go. Sorry about the last post--there was a little problem with blogger so only part of the answers. Next post I'll tell you about the math in music.

Tim Heider

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