ShmoopTube

00:04

And here's your shmoop du' jour brought to you by the circle of

00:06

fifths. It moves us all through despair and hope through faith and love till we [A giraffe and zebra looking up at a monkey on a cliff]

00:10

find our place wait that might be the circle of life our bad moving on okay

00:16

here's a question what's the key signature shown above right there and

00:20

here the potential answers....huh is that it anything on the back no? well

00:27

let's thank the AP powers-that-be finish this up and take an early lunch with [Boy sat in an exam hall]

00:31

this problem we can refer to the ever helpful all-powerful circle of fifths

00:34

we're going to take a short journey through the circle of fifths now all [Man hiking through a field of musical notes]

00:38

right we said short you can probably leave the tent behind why well there's

00:42

only one sharp in this key signature meaning that our journey will end after [Man decides to pitch a tent in a field]

00:45

just one step so probably didn't even need the hiking boots starting with C

00:50

major one step to the right on the circle of fifths leads us one-fifth up to

00:54

the key of G major which has one added sharp well this gives us the key [G major one added sharp]

00:58

signature in the problem but since G major isn't a key listed in our potential

01:02

answers we need to check out relative minor keys. Starting back to the start of

01:06

the circle of fifths we have a key with no sharps and no flats and before you [Finger pointing to the circle of fifths]

01:10

all boo and say we already did this bring back the weird Lion King thing just [Giraffe and Zebra looking up at Rafiki on a cliff]

01:14

stick with us for a second here. A key with no sharps and no flats can be C

01:18

major or A minor yep same key signature just a minor third lower if we take that

01:24

same step we originally took to bring us to a key with one sharp a fifth up from [Finger pointing to a fifth up from A minor on the circle of fifths]

01:28

A minor brings us to E minor and E minor just happens to be the relative minor of

01:33

G major that means our answer is D but because we enjoyed our trip through the

01:37

circle of fifths so much seriously we wrote a glowing yelp review let's take a [shmelp review of the circle of fifths]

01:41

look at the other options A major has three sharps, D major has two sharps and C

01:45

minor has three flats and as we clearly remember from the question we were

01:49

looking for something with one sharp not two not three and definitely not flat [Two, Three and Flat sharps with X marks]

01:54

the circle of fifths illuminated the right choice for us as we blinking

01:58

stepped into the sun there was more to see than could ever be seen more to do

02:02

that could never be..that still has nothing to do with Lion King, all right still [Rafiki holding the circle of fifths and man appears]

02:06

our bad

02:09

Oh

Full Transcript