From the course: Learning Music Notation
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Key signatures and key changes
- [Instructor] In order to reduce the amount of clutter in a piece of music and to simplify how musicians read scores and parts, the accidentals that are in the key of the song or composition are placed at the beginning of the music in a group referred to as the key signature. In essence, the key signature warns the musicians that the accidentals are in effect for the entire piece. Let's take a look at how to correctly notate a key signature. So first of all, the key signature follows right after the clef sign and before the time signature. And in most music, we post the time signature at the beginning of the staff on every staff of the piece. So for example, when we look at this Mozart example, we can see that at the very beginning we have the clef sign followed by the key signature, which is one flat in this case, key of F, and we see the time signature. We see that repeated on the base clef staff as well, so we see the base clef sign, we see the key signature, which is just one…
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