![]() Whether you realize it or not, I know you’ve heard it before: the creepy minor key.įrom the traditional sounds of a pipe organ (at a haunted house, perhaps): With a bit of practice you’ll find you can reliably tell whether the key is major or minor and quickly hone in by ear on the tonic, just needing a quick check on your instrument to make sure you’re right.I believe that Ira Gershwin said it best: “How strange the change/from major to minor.” It’s strange, indeed. The more you do this the easier it will become and the more confidence you’ll gain. Once you confirm this you’ll find you can use the corresponding scale and chords to improvise over the song or transcribe it easily. Then try experimenting with your instrument trying to figure out the tonic. The first few times you try this you’ll probably begin with an instinctive sense of whether a song sounds major or minor. Likewise, you can look up the chords for that key, and check by ear whether these are the chords being used in the song. ![]() You should find it’s a good fit for the chords in the song. Once you think you know the key, you can try playing the corresponding scale over the top of the song. D Minor tonic chord? The song is in the key of D Minor. C major tonic chord? The song is in the key of C Major. In 95% of cases in popular music you’ll discover that identifying the major or minor tonic chord directly reveals the key of the song. Try playing each over the song – you’ll find that only one sounds any good! Once you’ve found the tonic note it should be easy to tell by ear whether the chord for that note is a major or minor one. You’ll probably find a few that work well in different places in the song (you’re starting to transcribe the song!) but there will normally be one which always sounds like the safe choice, always sounds like the stable root of the music. Playing or singing the tonic note while the song plays will sound pretty good throughout the song: it’s always a safe choice, musically.Īs you begin trying to identify the tonic in songs, one simple way to train your ear is to play along with your instrument, trying different notes or chords, and see which one one best fits throughout the song.The vast majority of songs will finish on the tonic chord, and often start with it too.You could stop it on this chord and it wouldn’t sound incomplete. When the tonic chord is played, the song will sound most stable and finished.The melody will often “come to rest” on the tonic.The tonic note will feature strongly in the melody.Can you tell a major chord from a minor chord? Even if these musical terms are unfamiliar, the chances are that your ear knows the difference. Well, there is a huge wealth of books and articles on music theory which could explain all the intricacies of keys, scales, and chord progressions, and you could conduct a careful harmonic analysis of the song to determine its exact key and scale… So how do you hear if a song is in a major or minor key? We’ll discuss minor keys in detail another time, but for now you just need to know that choosing a different set of notes can create a “minor” sound and give you a different selection of chords to choose from. If you choose a different subset of notes, you can create a minor scale, and a minor key. In the example above, playing all the white notes in turn produces the scale of C Major. There is a close link between a song’s key and its scale. ![]() If you know a bit about music theory, you’ll have noticed that this is very closely connected to the idea of a scale: a collection of notes in a certain order. You can compose your melody using just these notes and it will sound nicely musical.Ĭonstructing triads with these notes gives you the chords of C Major, D Minor, E Minor, F Major, G Major, A Minor and B Diminished which you can choose from to accompany your melody. This is the white keys of a piano keyboard. Example: the key of C, or “C Major” means choosing all the ‘natural’ notes – no sharps or flats.
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