A DRAGON LEARNS THE CIRCLE OF FIFTHS

Dragons enjoy music. If I had a sense of humor, I’d say “They really go crazy for all the scales!”

Anyway.

Let’s say you were a dragon going through your angsty teen dragon years and your dragon parents finally relented and took you to Dragon Walmart to get the new Linkin Park or Evanescence CD. You and your dragon friends (or fairy friends) popped the disc in and went bananas over it. Someone suggests starting a rock band, except everyone needs to learn how to play an instrument/actually learn music.

Fortunately, your dragon father really enjoys music so there’s a section of the lair stocked with instruments. Maybe you have a liking for the piano and decide to start learning some songs. Eventually you stumble across the circle of fifths, the beauty that it is, and your mind goes blank. You get the point, but memorizing and understanding it is pretty intense.

Worry not. You’re a being of vast intellect, drive and a thirst for destroying even slight inconveniences. You are going to attack the problem head-on and dominate the Circle of Fifths.

And here’s how.

Step 1: Charles

There’s a common mnemonic to remember the order of key signatures known as:

Father Charles Goes Down And Ends Battle 

This tells you the order in which sharps are added to the key signatures starting from G Major scale and going clockwise around the circle of fifths. 

G Major: F#

D Major: F#, C#,

A Major: F#, C#, G#

E Major: F#, C#, G#, D#

B Major: F#, C#, G#, D#, A#

F# Major: F#, C#, G#, D#, A#, E#

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

Step 2: Beads

The second order you should remember is for flats and is:

GCF BEAD GC

This one’s more complex but it’s still pretty simple. 

GCF represents G Major, C Major, and F Major. 

G Major, as we just saw, has one sharp: F#.

C Major has all naturals.

F Major has one flat: Bb.

The reason why G and C Major are included here is to connect the flats and sharps into a continuum that tells the full story. But more on that in a second.

Next, we continue stacking flats as we move counterclockwise of the circle.

G Major: F#

C Major:

F Major: Bb

Bb Major: Bb, Eb

Eb Major: Bb, Eb, Ab

Ab Major: Bb, Eb, Ab, Db

Db Major: Bb, Eb, Ab, Db, Gb

Gb Major: Bb, Eb, Ab, Db, Gb, Cb

Cb Major: Bb, Eb, Ab, Db, Gb, Cb, Fb

If you notice, you’ll see that as you move counterclockwise, flats are added in the order (starting with F Major): 

BEADGCF

The real beauty of the flats system is that as you move clockwise starting from Bb Major, all you need to do to remember the order of flats is each scale inherits the signature from the scale previous to it, AND it adds the name of the scale after to it. 

For example, a quick way to remember Db major is first remember:

BEAD GCF

We’ll take D as Db, add the scales previous to it, then add the scale right after. So,

Db takes Bb, Eb, Ab, itself as Db, and the one after — which is Gb.

Db Major: Bb, Eb, Ab, Db, Gb

Step 3: The Math

Believe it or not, the part where math comes in is actually the most simple. Remember that music is based on math so you pretty much always can make it a numbers game.

The easiest way to do that is to translate sharps to “+” and flats to “-”.

Therefore, you can rewrite the scales as 

G Major: +1

D Major: +2

A Major: +3

E Major: +4

B Major: +5

F# Major: +6

C# Major: +7

Where the numbers represent the number of sharps per scale.

C Major has no accidentals so it will be 0, and the flats will represent negatives. 

G Major: +1

C Major: 0

F Major: -1

Bb Major: -2

Eb Major: -3

Ab Major: -4

Db Major: -5

Gb Major: -6

Cb Major: -7

You can lay it out fully horizontally in a number line if you like or as displayed here in circle format. The circle format is helpful with the numbers because you can immediately see how many accidentals a scale is supposed to have and just go through FCGDAEB or BEADGCF and add the correct number. 

Example: 

E Major = +4. All you have to do is count four in FCGDAEB and you see that you get FCGD and those will be the sharps.

Now that you memorize the circle of fifths, just remember that the relative minors for each key is just three semitones below. 

Example:

To find the key signature for b minor, move up 3 semitones and you get to D Major. D Major = +2 so the sharps will be FC, or F# and C#.

And that’s all. Good job adolescent dragon, you’ve reverse engineered the circle of fifths.

Feel free to discuss how clever this was below in the comments.