Bad and Wrong Music Lessons: Key Changes

By Shamus Posted Wednesday Jan 4, 2017

Filed under: Music 48 comments

I am really enjoying Studio One. It’s become my go-to DAW. That’s pretty impressive. I have hundreds of hours of experience and muscle memory dedicated to MAGIX Music Maker. The fact that Studio One was able to win me over in about a week says a lot about how easy it was to learn.

I’m still using the free version, but I’m definitely getting the mid-tier version once we recover from the holidays. A couple of years ago I was wary of spending money on fancy tools before I had the skill to make proper use of them, but the time is right. I’ve long since ditched the automated tools and prefab loops that MAGIX has to offer. These days I insist on doing everything myself.

At the same time, I’ve felt like I’ve been stuck in a rut. All of my stuff is sounding the same. And even within a single song, it starts to get a bit monotonous by the end. My tracks usually end after four minutes not because I’m out of ideas, but because it doesn’t matter if I throw in a new melody, new drum riff, or a different instrument. The added variation doesn’t help fix the underlying problem that the song kind of feels like it’s spinning its wheels.

A few days ago I got an encouraging email from a fan who offered me some advice…

The Studio One interface. It's not easy, but it's easier than it looks.
The Studio One interface. It's not easy, but it's easier than it looks.

They suggested I needed to experiment with key changes.

See, all of my music is in the key of A minorI often throw in a couple of chords from C major, which uses the same notes.. I used A minor because it’s easy. When I’m mapping out notes, I just have to stick to the white keys on the piano and ignore the black ones. It’s not like one key is objectively better than another. F minor isn’t fundamentally more interesting than A minor. It’s true that sometimes a particular key will lend itself to a certain mood or style better than another. A minor is overwhelmingly the most popular key for the genre of music I’m working in. It’s got the right mood, it’s popular, and it’s easy. So why change?

What I was overlooking is that it’s not so much about choosing a different key to write the song in, it’s about changing key within a given song. The key change is what shifts the mood and adds texture. It’s what keeps a song from getting old. You can start a song in one key, then shift to another. Once that settles in you can shift to yet another, or go back to the original key.

So I need to let go of A minor. I don’t just need to get comfortable working in another key, I also have to learn how to transition from one key to another without making it sound like a cat walking on a piano.

If you were a musical expert / genius like me, you would recognize the following object as a trombone:

CDEFGABCDEFGABCDEFGAB
CDEFGABCDEFGABCDEFGAB

(Just kidding. Obviously it’s a contrabassoon.)

Anyway, if you want to play one of these gizmos in the key of A minor, you’d need to stick to these buttons:

The green keys are safe. Red keys are lava.
The green keys are safe. Red keys are lava.

If you’re playing something in A minor, then hitting one of those red notes is going to sound really out of placeThere are exceptions. Because with music, there are ALWAYS exceptions..

But if you wanted to play something in B minor, you’d have to use these buttons instead:

Now these red keys are lava. Try to keep up.
Now these red keys are lava. Try to keep up.

The astute among you might notice there’s a bit of overlap between these two. They have a few keys in common. Specifically…

I have de gift of gab.
I have de gift of gab.

We can use these notes in either A minor OR b minor, which means we could use these notes to transition between the two. If we’re lucky, we can construct a chord out of these notes.

And we can! If you mash E+G+B, you get an E minor chord, which works in both the A minor scale and B minor scale. If we’re in more of an upbeat mood, we could use G+B+D to play a G major chord.

It’s not as easy as just slamming out an E minor chord and you can magically shift to the new scale. The listener is probably “used to” the old key. You’ve probably been repeating a pattern of chords, and they’re expecting that pattern to continue. You might expect you can play these three chords in order:

  1. One chord that works in the old scale.
  2. Another chord that works in either scale.
  3. A third chord that works only in the new scale.

But it turns out it’s not quite that simple. In isolation, #1 and #2 sound okay together. And #2 and #3 sound okay together. But if you play all three in a row the listener might still wince when you hit that #3. You need to wean them off the old scale by breaking up the pattern they’re used to. You can do this brute-force style and just stop the song for a second. Or you can fill the transition with a bunch of effects and sound samples and bending pitches to destroy any expectations. These are both valid techniques. (Particularly in electronic dance music.)

But this is also sort of cheating if your goal is to really understand how music works.

I haven’t found any solid advice on how to do this. We’re in one of those wishy-washy areas of music theory where the answer to every question is “It depends”.

The piano roll (where you map out notes) in Studio One. I've set it to highlight the notes in the B minor scale.
The piano roll (where you map out notes) in Studio One. I've set it to highlight the notes in the B minor scale.

Anyway, my goal now is to build some key changes into a song and see if I can figure it out. Which means I need to familiarize myself with a few different scales. I suppose a real musician might have every possible musical scale memorized, but posers like me need a little help. If I was still using MAGIX, this would be a monumental pain in the ass. I’d have to keep Alt-Tabbing to another window to refresh my memoryOr sit there mentally counting keys.. But Studio One has this feature where it will helpfully highlight the notes that belong in your scale. If you’re feeling lazy, you can even have it snap things into your scale so you don’t have to do any laborious mouse-aiming.

Above, I showed that A minor and B minor have a lot of notes in common. This is obviously not always the case. B minor and F minor have only ONE note in common – G. Not an entire chord mind you, just a single note. My suggestion for transitioning from B minor and F minor is to just start hammering on the G note, all by itself, over and over, until the listener has lost all concept of music and is willing to accept basically anything that’s not G.

At this point the music nerds (watch out for those guys, they will confuse you) will jump in and insist that everyone should look at THE CIRCLE OF FIFTHS, a wheel-within-a-wheel diagram that – despite having “fifths” in the name, actually has 12 points which are numbered with letters, which are all out of order. They will insist they’re showing you this thing to help you, but in truth they’ve discovered the raw, nigh-universal sex appeal that comes with being a musician and they’re just trying to throw you off because they don’t want the competition.

Well, here it is anyway:

Remember: Go down by fourths to go counter-clockwise and up by fifths to go clockwise. Yes, there's a good reason for this. No, it's probably not worth an hour of jargon and math to find out.
Remember: Go down by fourths to go counter-clockwise and up by fifths to go clockwise. Yes, there's a good reason for this. No, it's probably not worth an hour of jargon and math to find out.

Just focusing on the inner ring (minor keys) for now: You can see A minor and B minor are fairly close, which is why they have so many notes in common. B minor is directly opposite F minor, which makes them basically toothpaste-and-orange juice in terms of how well they compliment each other.

So that’s all the theory. Now to apply it:

I decided to break from my usual electronic dance music. EDM is a little repetitive by design, which probably makes transitions easier. (Earlier I jokingly suggested hammering on a lone G for several seconds, but in EDM you can sort of get away with those kind of shenanigans.) Also you’ve got drums, drops, wooshing sounds, fade-outs, audio samples, and other tomfoolery that can be used to distract the listener while you shift into another key. My goal here is to make one song that does several key changes. I want something that’s slow and focused on the music, not something fast that’s just sugar coating on a throbbing drum beat.

The result…

The track map. I like the colors.
The track map. I like the colors.

There are 3 key changes in this. It starts out in D minor. At 57 seconds we change to A minor. E minor happens at 1:16, and B minor at 2:04. If you look at the circle of fifths above (again, looking at the inner ring) you’ll see I’m moving clockwise through the possible keys, one step at a time. These are the easiest kind of transitions. Larger jumps – where you move several steps around the wheel – are harder.

It’s a bit of an odd track. Since I’m focusing on transitions, I don’t really stop and explore any of the parts like you would in a real song. I settle into a key, do one thing, then move to a new key and never revisit that idea.

Well, that’s my music homework for this week. I don’t know that I’m a better musician, but I am a more knowledgeable sort of hack.

 

Footnotes:

[1] I often throw in a couple of chords from C major, which uses the same notes.

[2] There are exceptions. Because with music, there are ALWAYS exceptions.

[3] Or sit there mentally counting keys.



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48 thoughts on “Bad and Wrong Music Lessons: Key Changes

  1. Allen says:

    Shamus, if you’re looking for more info on chords and changes (without getting too far into music theory), can I suggest two sources?

    1. Old classic blues songs – “twelve-bar blues progression” is a classic of the genre, and the older the song, the easier it is to pick out the changes. (Some big-band jazz songs have the same progression as well).

    2. Guitar tabulature focuses on the chords in the song, which is handy for learning how chords apply to modern songs.

  2. David says:

    Music nerd time: As you say, the circle of fifths isn’t the be-all and end-all, and there are always exceptions and special cases. But the reason it’s so helpful for beginners trying to learn to do key changes is that keys that are adjacent in the circle only have one note changed between them. Since there are more notes in common, there are more chords in common, and it’s easier to transition between them nicely.

    Also, in case anyone is wondering why it’s called the circle of fifths, it’s because if you go clockwise around the circle posted above, each note is the fifth note of the scale based on the previous note. So for example, E is the fifth note in an A scale, so E follows A in the circle.

  3. Here’s a “cheat code” you can play with: Despite the fact that classical music theory and pop music theory are based on fundamentally different structures, you can still sometimes use classical music theory’s main key transition method in pop music for a key transition that sounds like it belongs.

    The simple version of transitioning into a new key in classical music is: 1. Start with the target key you want. 2. Go up one fifth (i.e., C -> G, A -> E, Bb -> F). 3. Lay down a “seven” chord on that key, which is the major chord of that key, and the note one full step below the base of the chord (i.e., C7 -> C E G Bb, G7 -> G B D F). Now “resolve” into the target key by taking the second note of the chord and moving one half step up, the fourth note moving one half step down, and the rest doing as you like.

    Sometimes you may need to prep the transitioning key itself with a couple of transitions to get there first, too, but this is a fairly nice way of getting transitions out.

    (For music theorists, I am aware of just how much I’ve left off here. My goal here is to be helpful for someone being very practical with their music and extract a potentially helpful tip from what is indeed a morass of theory, not show off.)

    1. Henson says:

      Dominant 7ths really are a great fundamental for key changes, but I kinda like how Shamus, the neophyte, is poking around without much formal knowledge; after all, formal training is both useful and confining. Maybe he’ll come across something I never considered!

      1. I clocked a number of years doing the same thing a while back. In hindsight, the stray hint here or there would have been quite useful. It wouldn’t have crushed my creativity; it would have accelerated it.

        (There’s also some more subtle reasons to try this technique out too.)

        1. Jay Allman says:

          I agree wholeheartedly with you on the usefulness of stray hints, but a hint that involves introducing two accidentals — the minor seventh added to the triad, and the raised tone [Shamus mostly works in minor keys] to make it a dominant seventh and not a minor seventh — might be too theory heavy for a guy who likes to punch music theory in the face.

          Question for Shamus: When you’re writing in the key of A minor, do ever use E major chords [E-G#-B] in place of E minor [E-G-B] chords? If not, I’d suggest playing around with the chord sequence E major – A minor instead of E minor – A minor, and see what you think. I’ll leave that as a “stray hint.”

    2. Jay Allman says:

      Your progression from D minor to A minor to E minor to B minor is an excellent strategy for exactly the right reasons — it’s smoother to move between keys when they differ by only one tone. Kudos on figuring it out yourself!

      Meanwhile, this strategy, which you think doesn’t quite work,

      1. One chord that works in the old scale.
      2. Another chord that works in either scale.
      3. A third chord that works only in the new scale.

      is actually a standard technique. It relies, as you intuit, on the ambiguity of the second chord, and on the third chord forcing us to reinterpret the music in a new key, since that chord can’t occur in the old one. There are standard formulas for executing this kind of move — Jeremy Bowers above gives one — but I’m dying to know what chord sequences you’re using when you make a move. Could you report on that? Like Henson, I’d love to know what you’re discovering.

    3. Tizzy says:

      I am surprised to read that ” classical music theory and pop music theory are based on fundamentally different structures”. I don’t know either, but I guess I always assumed that the fundamental basis was the same, i.e., we’re dealing with a physiological / taste process that can be only partially formalized, because ultimately it’s what sounds good that matters. But the basic of what sounds good (fifths, pentatonic scale) are the same so I’d expect all (at least western) music to have a sizable shared starting point.

      So: anyone wants to jump in and add some useful links to those fundamentally different structures? I’m really curious now.

      1. LCF says:

        I’m no expert in Music Theory, but I heard in passing that Pop – especially mass-industry, Majors-produced Pop – focused on “catchy” songs : those simple enough, repetitive enough and predictive enough that listeners’ brains would follow along, keep auto-filling the next notes to be played and get hooked on that sort of mental game. Thus, you would be more likely to remember it, like it and then buy it. Most Classical music tend to get somehow complex.
        For exemple, compare Haendel “Alla hornpipe” and Dead or Alive “Spin Me Round”.
        That’s not to say Classical can’t be catchy. We have “Fà¼r Elise”, “Moonlight Sonata”, Pachelbel’s “Canon in D”, Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons” and more.

        1. Tizzy says:

          But those catchy classical pieces where then mercilessly mined for pop music fodder. See for instance the very funny Pachelbel rant by Rob Paravonian: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i0c_fh_ETM0

  4. Don’t forget scales either. If you pay attention to your scales, you can technically change to any key you want.

    For example, if you’re in the key of E minor and you want to change to an even more dissonant tone, you can move up to F# and start changing between F# and G.

    The longer a note sustains inside of your current key but away from the root note, the more room you have to change to that next note as a key. At that point, you transition from E minor to F# phygrian. Then the whole musical venture becomes even more interesting. If you really want to have some fun, try messing with chromatics too. Lotsa cool melodies you can get out of that.

    On another note, you made an ambient song that sounds pretty cool!

  5. Leslee says:

    I really need to put down my cup of coffee while reading this blog – it’s becoming a choking hazard!

    I learned how to read music and play the piano at the age of 5 (not by choice). I honestly can’t remember what it feels like to not be able to read music anymore than most people can remember what it’s like to not be able read English (or equivalent native language).

    So Shamus’ experiences of learning this new “language” are absolutely fascinating (and hilarious!) for me to read.

    Please don’t stop! I’m really enjoying this!

    1. Ander says:

      I relate to always being able to read music, except I wasn’t taught an instrument for a while. So, then I hit college and there are a bunch of people who “play guitar/piano” but can’t read notes. I was quite confused by them.
      “I just play chords”
      Me: “Well, if there’s a C, E, and G, then…”

  6. David says:

    Can someone with more musical knowledge comment on the value of the whole “musical alphabet” thing, as opposed to something more numerical?

    I’m someone with an engineering background, and I’ve built several musical instruments with microcontrollers. (Mainly waveform synthesis, if anyone’s interested). In that scenario, it makes a lot of sense to pick a fundamental frequency (the “key”), and run it through a function that takes semitones relative to that fundamental frequency, and outputs a new frequency:

    fundamentalFreq * (semitones^1/12)

    Once you’ve used this method to “tune” your instrument, I find it much easier to reason about music in terms of relative semitones. Like, a certain chord would be -2, +1, +5.

    1. David says:

      A lot of music theory actually does work based on relative numbers, but not quite the way your method works. Instead of every semitone, relative pitches can be stated based on scale degree, with potential modification up or down. For example, two pitches separated by 1 semitone are a minor 2nd, 2 semitones are a major 2nd, and 5 semitones are a perfect 4th. The naming conventions and reasons for this are a mixture of tradition and practical application of more advanced music theory. It may not be the best system possible, but any potential upgrade would have to be better enough to overcome centuries of traditional teaching and however many trained musicians would have to learn the new system. Of course, for your own purposes, you can think about it however works for you, but if you want to learn what other people have learned, you’ll have to learn the system they’ve used to codify their knowledge.

      1. MadTinkerer says:

        When trying to make generative music (“Hey computer! Here are some rules these long dead dudes decided made good music. It’s basically mostly arithmetic with some randomization and occasionally linear algebra.”) I find David’s method to be super helpful.

        Since actual instruments aren’t involved, it really helps to just turn everything into math, and math is what computers are for. So then it’s just a matter of realizing that “Fifths” means seven steps on the chromatic scale and so on.

    2. Jay Allman says:

      Any conversation between a musician and an engineer is going to be hilarious, whichever direction you read it from. And I’m not even a real musician, and am about as adept at engineering as a duck is at needlepoint. That said …

      The “letters” associated with particular notes function like proper names. It’s exactly like calling them “Abraham, Betty, Carl, Desdemona, Ethelred, the Federated Republic of Kreplachistan, and George.” It is convenient for each pitch to have a unique identifier, rather than a relative one, so that everyone knows which frequencies are being referred to. You could identify each note by its frequency, using “440”, e.g., as the proper name for a particular pitch, but then it would be much harder to keep track of octaves. At a glance, you can tell that “C0” and “C3” are three octaves apart. It’s harder to tell that “16.35” and “130.81” are three octaves apart without doing math in your head.

      This kind of naming convention, I’d hazard, is just about the easiest way of handling things, which is no small virtue when a small company of composers and theorists have to talk to the MUCH larger community of performers, who need a system that is clean and can be instantly grasped.

      There are ways of referring to tones in a relative way, however. The Roman numerals I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII are basically used as variables when discussing pitch relationships regardless of key; similarly, the terms “tonic, supertonic, mediant, subdominant, dominant, submediant, and subtonic.” In the key of A minor, I = tonic = A; in C major, I = tonic = C; in B-flat major, I = tonic, = B-flat; etc.

      Now a real musician can come in to trash and correct everything I’ve said.

      1. silver Harloe says:

        When did the letters replace Do Re Me Fa So La Ti as the names? Some music nerd or another told me Beethoven would’ve used names like “Re minor” (except with the German translation of “minor”), but I read that Bach worked his name into music (H was apparently a name for G#. Why the other sharps don’t get letters, I dunno) (also I’m unclear why working his name into music was a thing. You write those 4 notes. done. no? (I understand even less than Shamus, sorry))

        1. David says:

          In the Bach motif, H represents what is normally B natural, and B represents what is normally B flat. I’m not really sure about the origin of this convention, but I don’t think it’s generally used anymore.

          1. Alex says:

            Germans to this day or at least to my days in school say “H” for what you’d call “B” and “B” for what you’d call “B-flat”.

            If you go to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_in_B_minor and click “Deutsch” in the sidebar you will get “h-Moll-Messe” -> “h”-minor-Mass.

            Which makes me question: are there any key changes in e. g. the “Mass in B minor”, if yes, why is it called what it’s called, if no, why is it not boring (following Shamus’ reasoning)?

            1. John the Savage says:

              I’m not intimately familiar with that mass in particular, but the convention of “X in Y major/minor” relates to what key the work is based around, not in. For example, a piano sonata with three movements would typically have the first and third movements in the title key, with the second movement in a closely related key – usually one step up or down on the scale of fifths (so it would go A – E – A), or into the relative minor/major (like A minor – C major – A minor). Most masses in B minor would have movements in B minor, D major, E minor, and F# minor/major (don’t worry about why both would be acceptable).

        2. Jon says:

          Many of the continental-European (French, German, Italian) classical musicians I’ve worked with learned musical notes as Do-Re-Mi-etc rather than C-D-E-etc. (And yes, Do = C.) It’s a one-to-one mapping, so we can translate in both directions, but it often requires some thought!

          Also, as David correctly notes, the note “H” is B-flat – so B-A-C-H is actually B-A-C-Bb. And I also have no idea of the origin of this convention!

    3. Stratoshred says:

      Sweeping oversimplification:

      There are 12 notes, but only 7 in a major scale. Therefore you name the 7 A through G, and the other 5 (incidentals) as sharps or flats (e.g. A#/Bb). This makes it easy to keep track of which notes are in key, particularly when reading. This also means you can fit a scale onto a stave easily; a numerical scale would probably require 12 lines, but the alphabet method only requires 7 lines per octave.

      The alphabet system also means each note always* has the same name. The lowest string on my guitar is an E, and if someone tells me to play in Bb I know which fret to play. Writing everything relative to the key you’re currently using would make this harder.

      A numerical system (Roman Numerals) is usually used to denote chord changes: C G Am F would be written I V vi IV.

      *This is a lie

  7. Lazlo says:

    So do you think that the auto-aiming key feature in Studio One was a remnant from an abandoned console port?

    (Poe’s law disclaimer: I’m joking)

  8. Jin says:

    You give a clear demonstration in layman’s terms of the issues involved in changing keys: find shared chords between the keys you want to switch between and use them during the transition. A lot of music theory and the art of composition deals with which shared chords sound the best in order to accomplish the key change. Since constant relative shifts between any two keys can be treated as the same other than the starting chord, as Jay notes above, you will see a lot of discussion notated using relative chord values to make it independent of the starting key. Any time you see someone talking of a “I IV V iii vi” modulation, that just means “using these chords in the starting key to get to the next key in the circle of fifths will make things sound ‘good'”.

    Some keywords that may help for further research:
    modulation = key change
    chord progression = sequence of chords in a key that sound good

    Taken together, you will find a number of links that show you how to produce a key change that sounds good.

    As an aside, common chord progressions (outside of changing keys) are often given that sound good within a key. “I IV V I”, for example, is the basis of almost all pop music.

    1. Tizzy says:

      The modulation article on wikipedia looks really interesting. So many things to learn! My favorite so far was that there is a name for phrase modulation that occurs near the end of a song: the truck driver’s gear change. . What a wonderfully appropriate term!

      Cheap effect, too, but efficient nonetheless, and perfectly fine when used in moderation.

      By the way, I can think only of examples where the phrase goes up. Anyone has a handy example where it goes down?

      1. Jin says:

        I didn’t know it was called that. Super common, in pop songs, as the last section slams up a note to give it a lift, without any tedious transition work: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TruckDriversGearChange

        In classical music, most pieces modulate up the circle of fifths, sometimes more than once, then make it back to the starting key to end. In more modern and popular music, that is not always, or even usually, the case.

        1. Tizzy says:

          Of course there would be a TV Tropes entry for it… Why didn’t I think to check?

          I swear, that site threatens to swallow more and more of my free time every day!

      2. Jay Allman says:

        On one of the “Batman: TAS” DVD commentary tracks (IIRC), Bruce Timm tells a funny story about composer Shirley Walker. When it came time for the episode to be scored, he would talk it through with her, describing the quality of the music he wanted at various points. “And here, it’d be nice if the music went like [vaguely musical sounds].” “Oh, you mean Mr. Wobbly,” Walker would say. Timm: “Is that what it’s called?” “Yes.”

        Years later, he’s giving guidance to a new set of composers. “And right here,” he says, “I want you to use Mr. Wobbly.” The other composers look at each other, then look at him. “Who’s Mr. Wobbly?” they ask.

        Because, of course, that was only Shirley Walker’s pet name for the musical effect.

        Hey, Batman’s more popular than music theory, right?

  9. krellen says:

    None of the transitions seemed jarring to me, so I guess that means you succeeded.

    1. Domochevsky says:

      True. There’s nothing jarring about the song anywhere. Which… also makes it excessively boring to me, alas. Very slow-paced and soft. >_>

  10. KingJosh says:

    At a large, muti-church gathering I attended in my teens, the song leader instructed everyone to “Stand up when we change keys!” I had to lean over and ask my Mother how I’d know when he’d changed keys!

    Incidentally, as a tone-deaf guy with no rythym, I’ve really been enjoying this series! It’s great to finally “grok” some of the things that my family (most of whom are musicians) have tried to teach me over the years! (My mother once asked me, in all seriousness, if I even knew that I was supposed to change my tone when I sang. My “singing” came out monotone, and she honestly started to worry I’d somehow “missed the memo” about singing traditionally involving different notes. Not my proudest day.)

  11. Cuthalion says:

    Yay new song! Yay music theory!

    I think your song did its job of changing keys to keep things interesting. I liked it.

  12. Cass says:

    I really liked that song!

  13. Burnsidhe says:

    “My suggestion for transitioning from B minor and F minor is to just start hammering on the G note, all by itself, over and over, until the listener has lost all concept of music and is willing to accept basically anything that's not G.”

    This was actually painful to read, because it’s so deadpan funny and I was drinking water at the time. Water shooting through nasal cavities burns.

  14. Chris says:

    This is something I need to try to put to use. I have half a dozen unfinished tracks kicking around because I just can’t get them to go anywhere. Maybe a key change is just what they need.

    My bigger problem is that I am complete rubbish with chords. I don’t know where I’m going wrong; I’ve tried using voice leading, inversions, and suspended chords, and while it’s much better than chunky triads I never like how it sounds in my work. Any time I try to add a chord progression to a song, the whole piece starts to sound really dumb and inane.

  15. Jay Allman says:

    “All of my music is in the key of A minor [I often throw in a couple of chords from C major, which uses the same notes].”

    Just so you know, you can relax about this, because this distinction does not exist in music theory. As you noted, the keys of A minor and B minor share the E minor chord. In exactly the same way, the keys of A minor and C major share the D minor chord. They also share the E minor, F major, G major, A minor, B [punches self in the face], and C major chords. This makes modulating between C major and A minor so easy that sometimes it happens accidentally.

    You’ve already discovered this in practice. Theory says exactly the same thing.

  16. Daemian Lucifer says:

    which makes them basically toothpaste-and-orange juice in terms of how well they compliment each other

    Are you saying that you never had a toothpaste-and-orange juice cocktail?Oh man,its the best!Especially if you pick a menthol toothpaste.

  17. Tonich says:

    Haha, usually I would read these blogs thinking something like “hey, maybe I could give Shamus some useful advice”, but this time I was actually holding my breath hoping that finally someone would explain me how to do key changes properly. :) You see, I’ve been doing music for almost 20 years now, trying my best at composing for the larger part of it, but since I’ve only got basic musical education, I still don’t know how to do that.
    What I can say, is that, apart from moving to the closest key in the circle, another popular change is moving a step or half a step up while repeating the same melody (usually it’s done in pop songs when repeating the chorus ad nauseam). So, basically, it’s what you were talking about at the beginning with moving from A minor to B minor. Usually it doesn’t require a chord transition, executed either at the next chorus repeat or restarting it halfway through in a different key. The latter case usually requires transitioning through the new key’s dominant chord (e.g. if we move from A minor to B minor, you’ll have to slip in an F# chord before starting the melody in B minor)… the tough part is that it IS pretty nuanced, so I can’t say whether it’ll work until I hear it. Anyway, hopefully my explanation wasn’t too jumbled, as English isn’t my first language.
    Also, this song moves every verse half a step up, and I hadn’t even noticed it until I started learning how to play the song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-u6qdeaPoE :)

  18. Thomas says:

    The very very beginning of the opening sounded a bit like the Final Fantasy X temple puzzle music, as I remember you love :P

  19. Stratoshred says:

    If you want a more noticeable key change, you could try moving just one note in the scale, the 7th. A B C D E F G# is called A Harmonic Minor, and it’s probably the scale being used whenever you hear something that sounds spanish/middle eastern/egyptian etc. You could try repeating this chord progression:

    A minor ( just play A minor over this)
    E major (switch to A harmonic minor here)

    This is more of an exotic key change, whilst still allowing you to basically stay in A minor.

  20. blue painted says:

    I’m putting this here because I happened to watch it just after reading this article.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQS91wVdvYc

    and if you want to know “Who is this Howard Goodall anyway?” …

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Goodall

    1. Jay Allman says:

      Thanks for the link. All the Roger Goodall videos look very interesting. I notice he’s got several “How Music Works” videos.

  21. Archer says:

    Solid piece of work, this new track. An odd one, as you said, but odd in a good way, I think. I like it!

  22. Zak McKracken says:

    I stumbled across this nice video on youtube the other day, explaining how suspended chords used to be _the_ thing to move between keys, since they’re not just ambiguous but also have some kind of open character to prepare the listener for the change. What Shamus is doing here is a little like that but not quite.

  23. Rayen020 says:

    I’ve recently become a carpenter at a company that builds Pipe Organs for churches (and other places apparently but i haven’t been to one). I have also been introduced to the circle of fifths and the owner of the company who is my boss (there are only 5 or 6 of us depending on how you count) insists that i learn and understand it. I have so far ignored him as he is old and sometimes a little crazy. Honestly i don’t see how it helps me cut wood better.

    1. Burnsidhe says:

      It doesn’t help you cut wood better, but it does help you understand why you’re cutting the wood in the shape you are using and why the organ is built the way it is. It also helps when you’re actually assembling the pipe organ and testing it out.

      Knowing the theory behind how an instrument is used does help, especially when you get into a situation where your company is building a custom organ.

  24. Urthman says:

    There’s another “trick” you can use to change keys that doesn’t involve music theory but is a little more musically interesting than just stopping and star again in a different key and that is to use rhythmic and melodic repetition to bridge the gap between keys.

    If you play a brief bit of melody in your starting key of A minor and then play it again in another key, any key at all, by moving each of the notes an equal amount so they have the same relationship to each other but just start on a different note (this is called “transposing”), so it sounds like the same melody but higher or lower, that repetition creates a connection that can sometimes make the transition satisfying even if the new key isn’t closely related to the old one. It might sound weird, but it can sometimes be a bold, ear-catching kind of weird.

    Take a short, five-note melody, something with a distinctive rhythm, and play it in three random keys. They won’t all sound good, but you won’t have to try too many combinations before you find a sequence that sounds interesting but isn’t a traditional chord progression. Like the “Truck Driver Gear Shift,” this has to be used in moderation, but it can be an effective way to change keys that sounds fresh. Even if you don’t think you like modern art music, movie soundtracks and lots of pop music have trained your ears to enjoy weirder chord progressions than anything Bach or Beethoven would have approved of.

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