The key in F minor is complex. The person who began to study it has not yet mastered the higher school of piano playing, but has already come close to it. There are four key characters in F minor. The quarto-fifth circle will help to determine what these signs are. A simple mnemonic technique will help to remember them.
Where do flats come from?
Key characters appear in a specific order. Each scale is built according to a strict scheme common to all major or minor scales. With a piano keyboard at your fingertips, you can easily build any scale, no matter what sound it starts with. The formula for the major scale is as follows: 2 tones - semitone - 3 tones - semitone. For any natural minor, the scheme will be as follows: tone - semitone - 2 tones - semitone - 2 tones. Using the second formula, build a scale from the sound "fa". It will look like F, G, A Flat, B Flat, C, D Flat, E Flat, F. That is, there are four flat in the key of F minor.
Parallel Major
Each key has a pair. For C major it is A minor, for F major it is D minor, etc. To find a parallel major key, it is enough to build up a minor third from the tonic of the minor, that is, count one and a half tones up from the desired key. Plotting the desired spacing from the "F" key, you get "A flat". That is, the parallel key will be in A flat major. This is important to remember because minor keys are not always indicated on the diagrams of the quarto-fifth circle.
Quarto-fifth circle for minor
Draw a circle and divide it into 12 equal parts. One mark should be straight up. This mark corresponds to the key of A minor. To the right of it there will be sharp keys in the order of addition of signs, to the left - flat. In this case, you need this part. To determine in which key one flat is, build a clean fifth down from the sound "A". This will be the sound "D", that is, the key with one flat - D minor. Accordingly, two flat will be in G minor, three - in C minor, four - in F minor. Continuing the circle, you get the next flat minor key - B flat minor.
How to remember key signs
B flat appears first. This must be remembered. As for the rest of the flats, in order to determine which will be the second, you need to build a clean fifth from the B-flat key. You will get an E flat sound. Having built another fifth down from it, you will find the third lowering sign, that is, "a flat". The fourth, D-flat, is defined in the same way. It turns out that in F minor there are 4 flats: “B-flat”, “E-flat”, “A-flat”, “D-flat”.
The key signs can be calculated in the same way in other flat keys. However, it makes no sense to build further, since six and seven flats are very difficult to read, but at the same time you can choose a simpler key that will sound exactly the same. As for the varieties of F-minor, these scales are built in the same way as all the others, that is, in the harmonic, the seventh step rises when moving both up and down. In an ascending melodic minor, the sixth and seventh steps rise, and the descending scale is played in the same way as a natural one.
