How do you know what key you’re in?

It’s hard to figure out what key a piece of music is in. There are a lot of conflicting answers from different music theory texts. To make matters worse, it’s not at all unusual for a song to change keys, even within a section or phrase. Even rock songs written by totally naive songwriters can be full of key changes. So a lot of the time, you aren’t trying to figure out the key for the entire song; you’re figuring out keys for particular passages.

The good news is that while figuring out keys is complex, it’s not impossible. Before you can do it, you need to know what all the possibilities are, and you need some tools to help you in your analysis. I’m assuming here that you don’t have sheet music of the tune you’re trying to figure out, but you do have an audio recording. You’ll want a program that can loop and slow down different sections. I recommend Transcribe for this purpose. Audio editing tools like Ableton Live and Pro Tools work too.

Continue reading

In praise of copying

We conventionally place a high value on originality in music. But it’s been my experience that the desire for originality gets in the way of making music that’s actually good. The closer you are to your influences, the more definite and truthful your work is. The key to quality music is to blend together an interesting set of influences that you understand inside and out.

Music evolves in much the same way life does. DNA gets copied when cells divide and replicate. Music gets copied from mind to mind when people hear it and want to reproduce it. All musical learning begins with imitation of other musicians. I’d go so far as to say that all learning boils down to imitation. Primates and other smarter animals learn by imitation too.

Continue reading