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Lesson 7 Practice: Diatonic Triads

The main topic of Lesson 7 was the "Circle of Fifths," but we also covered Diatonic Triads, the chords that you get when you play the chords in a key as you move up the musical scale.

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If your piano is not close enough to your computer that you can play while listening to this lesson, then click on the "Worksheets" button to view and print a file that includes the exercises in this Practice Lesson.

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A couple things you will notice: in this Lesson, instead of moving up the scale by half-steps, we move around the Circle of Fifths that we studied in this lesson. That way, we start out with the simplest key - "C" - and then move through the keys in order of increasing number of sharps - C, G, D and so on. Then we start over back at C and move the other direction in increasing number of flats.

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If you want to view the Circle of Fifths tool we saw in Lesson 7, you can bring it up (in a new tab or window) by clicking on the button to the left.

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The other thing you will notice is that in this exercise, I have not marked all the flats or sharps for each key. At the start of each staff there is a key signature, and that key signature lets you know which notes are flatted or sharped for that entire staff. You may find it helpful to print off a copy of the Major Scale Chart that will help you know what notes are flat or sharp in each key.

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We start in our teaching key of C - the easiest key to play because all of the notes below will be played on the white keys. The first chord is on C, E, and G; the next one on D, F, and G, and so on.

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Our next exercise is in the key of G, which has one sharp - the F# note. If you look at the chords in this exercise, you will see that on the third, fifth, and seventh chords, there is an "F" note (the top line of the staff). So on each of those chords, you need to play an the F# key rather than the F key.

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With each exercise, we add one more sharp. For this exercise, the F and C notes are sharped, according to the key signature. The first, third and sixth chords in this exercise contain F notes - in the first and third chords, the F note is down in the first space in the staff, but it's still an F note, so you need to play an F#. The third, sixth and seventh chords contain C notes, so you also have to play those notes as C#.

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If you printed out a copy of the worksheet for this exercise, you can pencil in sharps or flats to help you know when to play on the black keys, but part of the goal here is to get you to learn to play from key signatures, so try to do it that way if you can!

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This exercise uses the A major scale - three sharps. One of the things you may notice as we go through is that each key just adds another sharp to the sharps that appeared in the previous key. In the key of G, just the F note was sharped; in the key of D, the F and C notes were sharped. In the key of A, we add yet another sharp, so now the F, C and G notes are sharped.

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You may have also noticed that as new sharps are added to the key signature, they are added at the left, so that the key signature maintains its look. The same thing happens with the flat key signatures. One of the things about keeping it consistent like this is that there is a "pattern" that musicians will recognize right away. We don't have to count that there are four sharps, we see this pattern and immediately know... four sharps, key of E. So if you are writing out music yourself, be sure to keep the key signature in the right pattern.

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The key of B, five sharps. Again, if you are having trouble keeping track of where your fingers go in the key of B, go back to the top of the page and print out a copy of the Major Scale Chart. One thing that may help - in the key of B, with five sharps, you know that all five of the black keys are going to be in the major scale. You just have to learn which WHITE keys are also in the key!

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They say that songwriter Irving Berlin actually wrote all of his songs in the key of C#, which would be SEVEN sharps! And then he had a special piano built so that he could shift the keyboard and when he played in C#, it could sound like whatever key was good to SING the song in. Nowadays, most synthesizers have some sort of transpose function that lets you do the same thing.

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The key of F#, which has six sharps. One of those sharps will be E# - which you play on the F key, since there is no black key above the E key.

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So now we start over with the "flat" keys. We've already practiced in the key of C, so we start off here in the key of F, one flat.

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The key of Bb adds a second flatted note. The flatted note in the key of F was Bb, and then the next key is Bb. This pattern continues through all the "flat" keys - the flat note we add with each new key is the name of the next new key we play. Unfortunately, there's nothing like that that works for the sharp keys...

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The key of Eb adds a third flat.

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The key of Ab, four flats.

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The key of Db, five flats. This means that all the black keys will be part of the scale, you just need to figure out which WHITE keys to play.

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The key of Gb uses six flats. Remember the key of Gb uses the same keys as the key of F#, which has six sharps - just the names (and the notation) are different.

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Hooray, You Made It Through Lesson 7 Practice !!!

These practice exercises are tricky, because you have to remember as you are playing which of the black keys to use in the key you are playing. As I explained, in regular notated music, this is how they handle the sharps and flats - in the key signature, not by marking each note. So I hope you were able to get used to playing from a key signature rather than having every single note marked. If you have any questions or noticed any problems in the exercises, please send me an email to let me know. If you have questions, I will try to answer you as soon as I can.

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