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

It's here!! Find more about our quarterly publication, GODfire Magazine, at www.geocities.com/godfiremagazine.

Father Charles

In order to make use of different keys, it is necessary to memorize which notes are sharp or flat in that key. You could write them out, like I did in my last post, and memorize them, but their's an easier way. Just memorize the following phrase:

Father Charles Goes Down And Ends Battle

In this phrase (which means nothing at all), the beginning letter of each word is each note name:

F, C, G, D, A, E, B

The phrase just helps you remember the order of notes, which, as you can tell are not in their normal order. Instead of being arranged how they would appear on a keyboard, they are arranged by the number of sharps and flats that they have. So, on top of each letter, we put a number that indicates the number of sharps in that key, starting with "C." Remember that if we follow the pattern of TTSTTTS, the key of C has no sharps or flats.

#'s 6-0-1-2-3-4-5
----F C G D A E B

C has no sharps, G has 1, D has 2 and so on. The key of F is a special case--it actually has 1 flat. However, the key of F# has 6 sharps. F# is the black note just above F. (See the diagram in my last post.)

Now, for the flat keys, we put a number below each letter.

#'s 6-0-1-2-3-4-5
----F C G D A E B
b's 1-7-6-5-4-3-2

The key of C is another special case. You can find out very quickly on a keyboard that there is no such thing as Cb. Therefore, the 7 "flats" are actually 7 sharps in the key of C#. Similarly, there is no such thing as "Fb," so the 1 refers to F and the 6 sharps refer to F#. Just remember that the smaller numbers on "F" and "C" refer to the natural keys, and the larger numbers refer to the sharps of those keys.

#'s 6-0-1-2-3-4-5
----F C G D A E B
b's 1-7-6-5-4-3-2

From this we find that Gb has 6 flats, D has 5, A has 4, and so on.

Not only does Father Charles tell you how many sharps or flats there are, it also tells you what notes are sharp or flat. Take the key of E for example. It has 4 sharps. Starting at the left of the chart (on "F") we can count up 4 note names:

#'s 6-0-1-2-3-4-5
----F C G D A E B
b's 1-7-6-5-4-3-2

That gives us the 4 notes that are sharp in the key of E: F#, C#, G#, and D#. We do the same thing for finding flats in a flat key, only we start on the right (on B). Let's findwhat notes are flat in the key of Db. Db has 5 flats, so starting on "B" we count to the left 5 note names.

#'s 6-0-1-2-3-4-5
----F C G D A E B
b's 1-7-6-5-4-3-2

The flat notes in Db are Bb, Eb, Ab, Db, and Gb. Now you try it. Find and name the sharps or flats in the following keys:

F
G
Eb
C#

Leave a comment to tell me what you found. I'll have the answers in my next post. Watch out for C and F!

Tim Heider


It's here!! Find more about our quarterly publication, GODfire Magazine, at www.geocities.com/godfiremagazine.

Sharp Flats

Did you try it--making major scales starting on different notes? Here's a little chart that will tell what notes are in several different keys. Remember that the distance between the notes in a major scale are Tone, Tone, Semitone, Tone, Tone, Tone, Semitone.

A: A, B, C#, D, E, F#, G#, A
B: B, C#, D#, E, F#, G#, A#, B
C: C, D, E, F, G, A, B, C
D: D, E, F#, G, A, B, C#, D
E: E, F#, G#, A, B, C#, D#, E
F: F, G, A, Bb, C, D, E, F
G: G, A, B, C, D, E, F#, G

These are just 7 of the 14 keys. Since the pattern for finding these notes are the same, each scale sounds the same when they are played, except starting on and containing different notes. The intervals, or distances between notes is the same. So, it is possible to sing a melody in the key of B, containing certain notes, and sing the same melody--but with different notes--in the key of D. If a song is too high for a person to sing in G, he can lower it to another singable key without changing the melody at all. (Don't worry if you don't understand--it will all come together later.)

A melody is an arrangement of notes within the key signature. A key signature is the number of sharps or flats in the key. Like a signature, each key has a designated number of sharps of flats that distuguishes one key from another:

A: 3 sharps----Ab: 4 flats
B: 5 sharps----Bb: 2 flats
C: 0 sharps----C#: 7 sharps
D: 2 sharps----Db: 5 flats
E: 4 sharps----Eb: 3 flats
F: 1 flat-------F#: 6 sharps
G: 1 sharp----Gb: 6 flats

The "b" means "flat," so you have the key of A, and also the key of Ab. If you look at the diagram in the previous post, you'll notice that there is no F flat, E sharp, C flat or B sharp on the keyboard. Because of this the key signatures of F and C and their related keys look different than most. Instead of having 1 sharp, the key of F has 1 flat. True, Bb is the same as C#, but in the key of F, it is called Bb. In a flat key, and in F, all the black keys are called flat. In most other keys the black keys are called sharp. There's a little phrase that will help you remember how many sharps or flats there are and I'll tell you what that is in my next post.

Tim Heider

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Majoring on Scales

In my last post I talked about how a melody is made up of different pitches that go up and down in a certain order. I also discussed the how Western music is made up of 12 notes called the chromatic scale:

A, A#, B, C, C#, D, D#, E, F, F#, G, G#

The picture at the top show the notes on the piano. Notice that the black keys have two note names. I'll explain why later.

So, that's all the colors in the musical rainbow. But, if you try to use all of those notes in a melody, it won't sound very good. Music that uses all 12 notes is called atonal, or 12-tone music, which is sort of an advanced form of jazz. It's not very nice to listen to. If you want beauty and flow in a melody, you have to select certain notes in a pattern that creates a diatonic scale. There are 14 diatonic scales, called major scales, but really, they're all the same.

Just as an example, let's start on the note "C." Since C will be the first note, the song that we are working on will be in the key of C. If it started on "A" it would be in the key of A. Since there are 14 scales, there are 14 keys. A diatonic scale is made up of seven notes, with a certain distance between each note. Those distances are:

tone
tone
semitone
tone
tone
tone
semitone

Remember that a tone is two keys on the piano and a semitone is one key. An easy way to remember this pattern is TTSTTTS. No matter what note you start on, the pattern is the same. So, starting on C, we go up a full tone to D, up another tone to E, up half a step to F, and so on until we come back to C. The C major scale is the simplest scale to play because it only uses white keys. Try it on your piano, or check out the picture on this post.

Any questions? Leave a comment! I'll explain more about scales in my next post.

Tim Heider

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Theory 101

There are two major components in a song--the lyrics and the melody. We've talked about lyrics at length, and now we'll talk about melody. Like the lyrics, the melody is what makes a song memorable. If you hear someone play "Mary Had a Little Lamb" on the piano, you will no doubt recognize the song right away. But what makes a melody? Well, to answer that, we're gonna have to get technical.

The most notable aspect of a melody is how the sound goes up and down. You may start singing low and then switch to a higher note, then go back lower than you were before. This is called pitch. Pitch is simply how high or low a sound is, relative to other sounds. If you have a piano, try this: play a note on the far left of the keyboard, and then play a note on the far right of the keyboard. You'll notice the difference easily. The note at the left of the keyboard has a lower pitch than the one on the far right. Now, if you play a note in the middle of the keyboard, you can say that it has a lower pitch than the right key, but a higher pitch than the left most key. So, then, a melody is made up of sounds that go up and down in a certain way. But they don't just move around in any old way--there's a pattern .

In Western music (i.e. European and North American music) melodies are based on a series of 12 pitches, or notes. If you start on any key of the piano, say, the white key just before two black keys, and play the 11 keys (white and black) above it, you will be playing those 12 notes. These notes are named after the first 7 letters of the alphabet, starting with A:

A, A#, B, C, C#, D, D#, E, F, F#, G, G#

This is called a Chromatic Scale. Generally speaking, the distance between one letter name to the next (i.e. A to B) is called a tone. Half that distance is called a semi-tone. The "#" means that the note is sharp, that is, a semi-tone higher than the note before it. Sometimes we use a symbol that looks kind of like a small "b" to indicate that a note is lower by one semi-tone. This is called a flat note. The #'s and b's in the chromatic scale coorespond to the black keys on the keyboard. There is a semi-tone's different between each key. So, we must skip a key in order to play a full tone. For example A to B is a full tone, but B to C is only a semi-tone. Confusing? Yes, but that's the way it is.

The easiest way to find the notes on the piano is to start with the white key in the center of the keyboard that comes before a pair of black keys. This note is called middle C. You can figure out the rest of the white keys by counting up with each letter name: the white key above C is D, and above that is E, and so on. Eventually you'll get back to C and start the scale all over again.

You can think of the chromatic scale as a rainbow. It has all the colors of music in it. You, the songwriter just has to decide which colors to use. Next time, I'll break down the musical rainbow into different pallates of colors that are easy to use when coming up with a melody.

Tim Heider


Have you heard? We're starting a magazine! Click the link at the bottom of the bar at right.