How do YOU decide which key(s) your song is in?

Salmon_Refrain · 2021-11-22T21:48:23.622Z

I have always improvised a lot and the key choose itself whenever I feel like I find a nice melody or progression. This mainly refers to guitar that I have been playing for some 17 years. I remember when starting out with songwriting I would use the harmonic circle or “borrow” from Neil Young.

Now with keys and synths I have little idea of what I’m doing so I let my ears guide me and that works fine as long as I play alone. But not much composing, mostly improvisation.
I would say for myself that chance or ears decides the key.

12eightyseven · 2021-11-23T00:01:42.946Z

It depends!

If I’m going to be singing, I try to pick a key that is easy for me to sing in, E, F, F#. If I’m going to add brass instruments, I try to pick a key that is easy for a brass or woodwind instrument to play - Bb, C, Eb, F, G. If I’m playing it on the guitar, I try to pick a key that is easy to play on the guitar - G, A, E. I guess I go for the easiest key. Of course ‘easiest’ is relative, but I like to write a lot of songs quickly and I can concentrate on technique and expressiveness if my hands and note-brain feel good. If I’m at the piano, it’ll be whatever key my hands jump to, usually that’s B, G# or E for some reason. C is definitely the easiest, but I feel most comfortable on the piano.

If the song is sounding boring but I like the key, I’ll switch modes.

Edit: Oh, is the question about how do you find out what the home key of the song you are writing is? It depends- when it’s unclear it might have a few different keys depending on what part of the song it is in, or it could be in an unfamiliar key. If this is the question and you want to share a chord progression with me I’m happy to give it a shot.

chalkwalk · 2021-11-23T00:47:24.457Z

Question one would be, if you have written the music already, then why do you need to know what key is in? What do you plan to do with this information?

Assuming it matters to you, the key centre means which of the 12 chormatic tones sounds the most stable and resolute in the harmonic and melodic context of a piece of music. There is not required to be a clear key centre, nor is this key centre required to remain fixed throughout and may vary between sections, or even more frequently. The modality is defined by the apparent function of the other notes played in that context, with the expected function in a given mode (e.g F# is an “in color tone” for C lydian but is a “blue note” in C minor). You could guess this by counting the occurrences of each note and assuming all the more commonly used ones are in key, and hence infer a mode/scale; Note that the harmonic and melodic minor scales have 7 modes too, so don’t rule those out either.

21echoes · 2021-11-23T00:57:49.830Z

Great time to post this video about how to think about “what key is this in?”

ZacharyTalis · 2021-11-29T23:46:44.170Z

Hopping back into this thread, here’s my method:

Write a lead or pad
Plug all the notes into this nifty key finder
Choose a key (or set of keys) from the results based on the tune’s perceived center. An interactive circle of fifths is quite useful for this step, helping find keys with “color” and identifying problematic (restrictive) notes

ntrier · 2021-11-30T00:18:24.035Z

On a related note, I just watched YouTuber Pat Finnerty’s “What Makes This Song Stink” video about a Kid Rock song. He has a segment on how the guitar solo is in the “wrong” key because the solo is in D minor pentatonic but the song is in G major.

However, the solo sounds fine to me (it’s actually the only interesting part of the song in my opinion ). Finnerty plays the solo in the “right” key, but this version is, to my ears, much more boring. Then he plays some other classic guitar solos in the “wrong” key the same way that the Kid Rock song is “wrong,” and they similarly sound much more interesting to me.

(has some NSFW language)

My point being that “key” is, in practice, a pretty loose concept!

funkoftherob · 2021-11-30T04:08:49.242Z

I’m really into the idea of a key or usable scale being some subset of the chromatic scale that is melodically interesting.

The obvious ones are all of the minor and major modes, but this website lets you punch in some pitches and points out every scale that could work for it as long as the scale is not some chromatic clusters. The idea being that any sort of WH relation is interesting as long as you don’t put HHH in the mix.

(W being whole step and H being half step)

Its pretty great for finding frames of reference that are not what you might be drawn to initially.

https://dmitri.mycpanel.princeton.edu/scale-finder.html

Lizards_Case · 2021-12-02T07:57:53.764Z

Composers of the 19th century (and before) had a firm classification of what key is about what mood. Was pretty interesting to me:

https://wmich.edu/mus-theo/courses/keys.html

LC

Jet · 2021-12-03T00:35:27.411Z

As someone with pretty average sense of pitch that whole idea of a particular key sounding a certain way or conveying a particular mood fascinates me! I suppose with acoustic instruments the way partials will sound is going to vary in a way that with a synth patch is just not the same. But in general, I just don’t get that kind of analysis at all. Even assigning a set mood to a scale (yes, even major vs. minor) seems weird.

robint · 2021-12-04T09:52:48.409Z

Thank you so much for your replies!

I bought an Ableton Push 2 a few weeks ago. Using it to record some additional instruments on top of audio tracks made me realize how often I change keys within a song / borrow chords from another key / change between major & minor etc. Because of this I’m not really able to use a scale mode on Push 2 or similar devices for the whole track.

Another thing that constantly happens to me is running out of “playable” notes in sample libraries where maybe only 2 octaves are available. Not every instrument sounds good if you manipulate the pitch up or down.

Working with other musicians can be a lot easier if you are able to explain a piece of music on a theoretical level. Normally I have MIDI tracks in my DAW files for the chords that are played by the main instrument in the section. Sometimes I pull harmonies / melodies out of the audio tracks to a MIDI track for easy doubling of a phrase.

So it is more about road blocks in my individual workflow and communication if that makes any sense.

Jet · 2021-12-04T22:46:43.869Z

Ah that’s useful context!

If I’m working on something that’s not diatonic and want to add some more tuned stuff I think more about a scale than a key, like someone’s table of available notes idea earlier. The scale may have less than 7 notes. And I do this with a bit of theory and a lot of listening / trialling notes.

When I’m trying to figure out which notes work all the time, it either becomes clear that there’s one scale I can use or I stumble over some kind of changes I can play with. The latter helps other humans I guess, but is not super helpful for setting up machines…

Voltmeister · 2023-04-23T06:58:38.009Z

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A friend sent me this years ago. I sometimes turn to it for inspiration.

orbit_f · 2023-04-23T07:21:54.136Z

Further tables about emotions/keys relationship
I remember I encountered Christian Schubart’s table (1806) in a discussion about Beethoven and the influence of his then contemporary music theory on his composing, and there was some hypothesis about how he might have known and used the correspondences between emotions and tonalities that Schubart lists.

In the same website there are also references about color/notes relationships.

chrome_screenshot_16822351509802048×1092 173 KB

andrewhuang · 2023-04-23T11:41:41.788Z

It’s always a bit funny to me when people get very universal or theoretical about mood and color associations with notes or keys. I think the total inconsistency in the note/color correspondences above shows it to be pretty personal to each of those people.

I developed a set of note/color associations when I was very young, but it’s simply been a helpful way to speed up my thinking around notes and their relationships if I already know what key I’m in.

I’ve spoken with some people who like the idea of extrapolating note frequencies far beyond the range of human hearing until they fall in visible light spectrum. Here’s the first search result I found that shows the correspondences. I appreciate that the author indicates we would be measuring the frequencies of two different things - sound waves, and electromagnetic waves.

If anyone else has their own note/color associations I’d be interested to compare notes!

Mine are
C: Yellow
D: Green
E: Blue
F: Pink
G: Grey
A: Red
B: Brown

And accidentals are just associated with whichever letter is in use, eg. F# would be pink but Gb would be grey.

hermbot · 2023-04-23T12:46:29.200Z

Depends on who’s going to be playing:

Horn players will love you for flat keys.

Guitar and bass players like E or A. (“Church” guitar players can only play in G but secretly can play in any key if you hand them a capo.)

Outside of that, I personally stick with the keys I’m most comfortable in. I think chord voicings matter more than the key when it comes to feel.

orbit_f · 2023-04-23T12:47:15.128Z

andrewhuang:

It’s always a bit funny to me when people get very universal or theoretical about mood and color associations with notes or keys. I think the total inconsistency in the note/color correspondences above shows it to be pretty personal to each of those people

I agree but I also wonder why humans have felt the need to link moods and feelings to scales and notes: if the link would be only subjective then why humans have spent centuries discussing the matter since the Greeks?Mood/note relationships probably had some kind of consensus shared within groups of people or cultures, and so the products of these cultures/groups both influenced and were influenced by these association.
Then there’s also equal temperament that played a part in “levelling” the perception of shifting key centres: a change from C major to Ab major has a different character in just intonation than in 12tet.
The color/notes association seems more inconsistent and highly subjective to me.

alanza · 2023-04-23T13:00:36.063Z

I think you’re right to point out the technological aspect of this. From my limited understanding, truly precise 12TET needs a fairly precise way of calculating the twelfth root of 2 (this, multiplied by the base frequency, gives you the length of a given half-step). For a while in history, this just was not done, meaning (on the piano, at least) different keys likely had markedly different characters. Some whiffs of this probably survive if you’re reading the tea leaves, since composers of the era would write music to fit the “mood” of the key…

Of course this all falls apart for some traditions, like unaccompanied choral music, where the tuning is much more free…

orbit_f · 2023-04-23T13:17:51.041Z

And also 440 Hz as a shared tuning reference is kind of a newborn baby in western music history.

andrewhuang · 2023-04-23T17:58:08.663Z

In non-12-TET tunings I concede there will be slight differences in vibe between different keys, I just think it’s not even a factor compared to what you’re actually composing in those keys.

chalkwalk · 2023-04-23T18:32:55.110Z

Acoustic instruments certainly have a timbral difference between notes. More importantly, I think, is the sonorous range of an instrument. In particular if an instrument runs to C vs F# you may or may not have access to a full octave in a certain register. This tritone difference can have a significant timbral impact on certain instruments, especially when played near the pitch range of an instrument. In those situations the choice of key has a notable impact, meaning scales where your top octave ends at a higher pitch have a brighter sound vs darker otherwise.

As for a more complex emotional relationship between certain root pitches I suspect this isn’t absolute or universal. Having said that, despite most people not perceiving absolute pitch, I think there is something of a recognition perceived in commonly heard keys on common instruments (such as the piano) perceived by virtue of the timbral changes I mentioned. In this regard I think there is a weak, but perhaps measurable, difference in experience of songs performed in different root pitch (vs just digital transposition of the audio where the timbre may remain). Perhaps even a slight familiarity or unfamiliarity: my take though, is that any such effect is weak.

More importantly to me, is that on some instruments (notably the piano) it requires quite different hand positions to play notes of the same function in different keys. As such, when composing by playing on an instrument, the mechanical differences yield different musical choices. The result, I suspect, is differently melodic choices being made. For a guitar I guess chromatic transposition for melodic parts is simple, but often chords get played in different positions so perhaps guitar based music tends toward differing chord choices. In any case I suspect there will be some bias towards certain melodic or harmonic structures on certain instruments in certain keys.

When composing on paper or on a piano roll I don’t think this applies to the same extent. Perhaps compositions on a staff still suffer from some form of “note choice bias” by the placement of the lines (and necessity for ledger lines beyond the core range). Perhaps, therefore, piano roll composition is the most “egalitarian” method. One method I sometimes use is to choose a key for a song (at random, but with the mode based on the feel I want) then play different parts in different keys, and chromatically transpose the midi into the key of the song. My perception is that this results in different musical choices than I might otherwise have made.