Name: Lecture 2 Extra 1 - Key Signature Demonstration (Coursera - Fundamentals of Music Theory 13)
Uploaded: 2016-07-28T13:53:32.000Z
Duration: 11 min 3 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Gerund

And again, I've just been looking through the forums and looking for things people

might need some extra assistance with, and

might need some more kind of hands on examples.

So what one of these areas I think is key signatures.

And just looking at key signatures determine what keys they

represent, and how to go about actually working that out.

So I'm just going to give kind of chatty informal.

Example, flashing some on the screen and talking

Now you can find this exercise at musictheory.net.

I truly recommend it as a, a wonderful resource for you to

go to and to use some of the practice exercises that they have.

Certainly they'll be useful for getting to practice some

of the things that we're talking about in this course.

So let's have a, we look at some key signatures.

There's a few ways of going about this and I'm sure there's people on

the forums and people taking the course certainly have different ways of doing it.

I'm just going to show you a few different ways that you could do it.

But certainly if anyone else has got any useful tips out there,

please feel free to share them with the rest of the group.

Now, I'm looking at this, and I'm seeing that there's

an F sharp, C sharp, G sharp, and D sharp.

What I would say is eventually you'll get used to that.

You'll be able to look at this immediately and

Just by seeing the, the, the, the fact that there's four sharps there.

So, this is a little trick that you can use for sharp keys.

If you look at the very last sharp in any key signature, and raise it by a semitone.

So, in this case we've got D sharp as our last sharp.

Raise D-sharp by a semitone, so it gives us E [SOUND].

Okay, now we've got another sharp key here, so C-sharp is our last sharp.

So if we raise up by a semitone it gives us D.

Now, I'm not going to click it right away

because I just want to explain that to you.

Another way of thinking about this is that the last sharp

in the key signature is the leading note of the key.

So C sharp is the seventh degree of the scale, of D major.

So of course we're just dealing with major keys here.

Each one of these also relates to its relative minor.

So we just said that the last one was D major.

B minor, and that would also be a perfectly acceptable answer

for the question, which key does any given key signature represent.

It would be either the major or the relative minor.

But just for the ease of explanation in this little video, I'm just going to

stick to majors because I think people would probably prefer that at this stage.

We can go into it in more depth later on or in the forums.

So again, I've got sharp keys, and I'm going to look at the last sharp here.

We know that this is the key signature for A major.

it's relative minor, which is F sharp minor.

But at this stage I'll just say we're just dealing with major keys.

sorry, looking at the last sharp, counting up one semitone, and getting our answer.

Obviously, another way we can do this is to be a bit more kind of thorough.

Go back to the, the first transpose, and we could use the circle of fifths.

So what we can see is this one sharp, two sharps, three sharps.

So that is three steps clockwise round the circle of fifths

from the key of C, which has no sharps or flats.

So if we imagine C being at 12 o'clock on the circle of fifths,

and we go one step clockwise, well, we get C, D, E, F, G.

D, E, F, G, A will be our third stop and there is no stop at number three

is because we've got three sharps in the key

signature, and again that gives us the answer A.

You can either count how many sharps there are and

go around that number of sharps in the circle of fifths.

Or you can look at the last sharp and raise it by a semitone.

Or indeed, as we've just done here, you can

do both, and use them as checks against one another.

So in this case, we're going to select A.

Okay, and this next one, we can do both options.

Let's run through this a bit quicker, now.

If we look at the last sharp, we've got A sharp.

If we wanted to do it using the circle of fifths,

what we could do is it's one, two, three, four, fifth.

Round the circle of fifths from C at the top, at the 12 o'clock position.