I wrote a song to help my students with key signatures

Part of my ongoing project to teach music theory using music itself

Yesterday I was sitting in on a colleague's theory class, and when she said that it was time to practice identifying key signatures, everyone groaned. I feel their pain and want to help. I myself learned the key signatures by reading and writing a lot of music in lots of different keys and eventually just absorbing them by osmosis, but that doesn't work in a one semester class. My idea is to use music itself to teach music theory concepts, so that end, I wrote a song that explains the key signatures. Listen and download here.

Here's a chart if you want to sing along. And here's an explainer on how key signatures work.

My original plan was to just sing the number of sharps or flats in each key on the tonic of that key. However, I found that repeating the tonic was boring, so I made a little melody. Then I thought it would be nice to sing the final sharp or flat in each key too, and to do it in a way that also makes melodic sense. This was quick work in MuseScore. I exported the MIDI, brought it into Ableton, and turned it into the track you hear above by adding some beats, a bassline and my voice.

So, there you have it. We will be singing this in class next week, and we'll see if my students find it to be more helpful than flash cards and drills. At the very least, it will be a good sight-singing challenge.