ChordWizard® Music Theory 3.0 is the downloadable version of the How Music Works tutorials. It is installed on your computer for easy reference, and includes all the sounds, text searching, bookmarking, and many printing options.

(2.10) Key Signatures for All Keys

We saw earlier the key signature for the G Major scale. This indicates that all F notes are to played as F#, so we don't have to mark each F# note with an accidental sharp symbol.

In the same way, there are key signatures for all of the Major keys, placed at the beginning of each staff, and containing a specific pattern of sharps or flats.

These key signatures adjust the notes on the staff lines to suit the Major scale of each key, as listed in the table of the previous topics.

The key signatures containing sharp notes are:

Notice how the patterns of sharp symbols are very similar between the treble and bass clefs - just shifted vertically by one line.

The key signatures containing flat notes are:

Try to remember these key signatures, or at least the more common ones in the first rows.

Knowing the key of a piece of music not only helps you play the right notes, but also gives you a good idea of what chords are likely to be used with it. We'll see more on this later.

ChordWizard products such as Songtrix offer unlimited flexibility with key signature changes. Any or every bar can have a new key signature. The notation in Staff View is updated automatically.