Accidental Modulation Chart

This chart was a combined effort of modulation I learned in my music theory classes (mainly in high school), and the studies that I have drawn from the Well Tempered Clavier from J. S. Bach. The way this works is that you first pick a key that you want your song to be in and from this stick to that vertical column for the entire song. So for example let's say you want to be in the key of C. You would just use the first group (with the "C a" under it). From this you can construct some type of modulation. In Bach's songs he usually modulates up first and towards the end modulates down even below, and then end back on key. The up arrows represent modulating up, and in his works he never modulated more than 2 keys in either direction (for book 1, book 2 is a different story). So if you are in the key of C and you modulate up one key you would be in the key of G and you would sharp the F. The "H" rows depict the melodic and harmonic minor accidentals so without modulation in the key of C, G sharp would be the harmonic minor where 'a' minor and 'E' major chords are used in this key. So the next column shows the chords where capitol letters are major, and lowercase letters are minor. The way I word this is for just the modulation rows, I use the "1" chord, and for the harmonic minor rows, I show the "6 and 3" chords. Well there you have it! I use this as a tool first to analyse sheet music from the Well-Tempered Clavier to determine at what point he was modulating. One interesting piece is Fuga XIV where the modulation occurs within the theme melody itself! Be sure to check out all of these cool songs. I have also written one here that used this and other conventions studied from these works.

Accidental Modulation Chart (click picture for full (2048x1600) res)