How to do you know what notes are in a key? (Songwriting Tip of the Week Wednesday #8)

When you write a song, how do you know what chords go together? A good place to start, is to figure out what key you are in.  Finding out which notes are in which keys is actually really easy!

This is all you have to remember:

Fred Can Get Doughnuts At Every Bakery

F C G D A E B, are the orders of the sharps! Now you might be thinking, order of the sharps? What does that mean? In order to find the sharps in a key, this is what you need to do:

The note found a half step below the root note, is the last in the series of sharps, and the key includes all sharps that come before it.  

If you want to know how many sharps are in the key of D, ask yourself what note comes before D? C! Now look at your above list, start at C and work backwards and you find C and F.  So when someone asks you what sharps are in the key of D, you can answer F# and C#!  For example, here is what a D scale looks like:

D E F# G A B C# D

Now you can take that formula to find out what notes are in each key and how many sharps are in each key!

PS.

To leave you with a little extra, I'm going to write out how many sharps are in each key.

Key of G: 1 Sharp

Key of D: 2 Sharps

Key of A: 3 Sharps

Key of E: 4 Sharps

Key of B: 5 Sharps

Key of F#: 6 Sharps

Key of C#: 7 Sharps

Happy Songwriting :)