There are a total of 12 minor keys, and each minor key contains seven notes that can be used to write music in that key. The World of Minor What is a Minor Key?įirst off, let’s understand minor keys by applying some basic music theory.Ī musical key is, by definition, a certain collection of notes that a piece of music is composed in. #Music keys meaning how to#Read on to learn the theory behind minor keys, how to build minor scales, chords, and intervals, and how to listen for them in the songs you know and love. In this comprehensive guide to minor keys, we’ll cover all of this and more. minor keys? How do you play in a selected minor key? That applies simple rules to keys so you can easily review all your tunes and see which ones will mix well into the current one.Several questions arise: why do minor keys usually sound sad? What is the difference between major vs. Once you get your head around keys, the easiest way to mix with them is to use Camelot notation, which is what Mixed in Key uses. #Music keys meaning software#That’s why DJ software has “key lock” functionality – it holds the key the same while the BPM can be altered (and on some you can also alter the key without changing the speed). Key mixing is made easier for DJs with the Camelot wheel. If a piece of music is in the key of C, and you alter your pitch (by 6%, as it happens) by speeding it up, it moves a whole key up the piano keyboard and is now in the next key up the scale (C#). The reason BPM is related to it is that if you speed up a track you make the starting note higher – or to put it another way, you change its key. So from any starting note, there are two keys – if our starting note was C, the two possible keys are “C major” (or just “C”) and “C minor”. Strangely maybe for a happy medium, most dance music uses minor scales. That’s why we say a key is “minor”. The first sounds jolly and twee, the second more menacing and even a bit “sad”. There are actually 7 instances of the note “C” on a piano keyboard, ranging from a really deep one to a very high one. By the way, there are also two “scales” from any given starting note – called major and minor. When someone says a tune is “in the key of C”, what they mean is that its main or starting note is C, and the scale it uses is the notes that you’d play a tune on if that’s where you started. This “scale” represents the notes your version of the airport tune or indeed a whole song in that particular key would use. After that, it just repeats – but much higher. By playing the melody from a different starting note, what you’re actually doing is playing it in a different “key”. These are the 12 possible starting notes for a “scale” or set of notes related to the starting note. One instance of that pattern is called an octave, and actually consists of 12 possible notes. You’ll notice that a piano has a pattern that repeats all the way up its keyboard (3 black keys, 2 black keys, 3 black keys etc). But a piano has 88 possible notes, and there are not 88 different keys. What you’re actually doing is playing it in a different “key”. You could play the same tune a bit higher or lower by playing the melody from a different starting note. You pick your starting note and then play the next two or three notes depending on where you started. Now, you can play that melody from memory starting from anywhere on the piano keyboard. Thinking of the way a piano keyboard is laid out can help you to understand musical keys. Think of the simplest melody, like the four notes they play in an airport over the PA before they say something, or in an elevator when it arrives at a floor. The best way to understand what “key” means is to imagine a piano. Towards the end, she goes “up” a key for the chorus. If you want to hear an obvious example of a key change, listen (if you can stand it) to Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You”. The key of a piece of music usually doesn’t change: apart from cheesy pop records, generally a piece of music remains in the same key throughout. Most pieces of music are in just one musical key Also, luckily there are tools around today in modern DJing that can help you to use keys and key changes to play great-sounding DJ sets. Keys can be really confusing at first, but once you understand the concept, it isn’t that difficult. Reader Robert Moff writes: “How many beats until the key changes? And please can you do a bpm / key chart to help me understand key change, because I’m not sure.” Digital DJ Tips says: Once you understand musical keys, you can use keylocks to make great harmonic mixes.
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