New Year, New Key

Breaking Old Music Habits by Incorporating Them

Ring (or Strum) in the New Year

It’s the beginning of a new year, so people everywhere are making their New Year’s Resolutions. This means making positive changes and breaking bad habits. I thought that my fellow musicians could do the same by looking at a common habit: going to the same key over and over.

Every musician has a favorite key. Guitarists tend to use C and G because C is what we all start learning, while G fits perfect on the guitar by placing the major and minor tonics (G and E) to the bass end of the instrument. D is also a great contender for a guitarist’s favorite key because, like C and G, you can play all six guitar strings and the notes will fit those keys.

Pianists have a different setup for the way notes are located and used. The key of C may be a good starting point to learn from, but I’ve found that pianists like using keys with at least a few sharps or flats. This allows their hands to naturally find grips, or hand positions, that use a combination of white and black keys. This makes playing more comfortable and lets the black keys stand out for a variety of functions.

Style can also affect this. Jazz is usually in F, Bb, and Eb because the saxophone is tuned to Bb so the other instruments play in a key to match the melody-driving instrument. Metal is typically in a combination of E Minor and E Phrygian to set the guitar’s low E string as the drone note, so the keys of G and C are the used. Country and pop music tend to go with the singer, so the singer’s vocal range determines what keys are available to the rest of the band.

Breaking the Habit

Regardless of the key that you use for your “go-to” chords and melodies, we can find a new key to use by going up a minor third interval. If your favorite key is C, then we will go to Eb. Below is a chart of the keys in the Circle of Fifths. Start at the key you always use and go counterclockwise three keys. C leads to Eb, G leads to Bb, and D leads to F.

The new key that we move to will have three notes that are different. The notes that change are always the third, sixth, and seventh degrees in the key. This means that we take a major key and make it a minor key. Check out the next chart.

Moving counterclockwise around the circle by three keys takes you to a new major key, but that key uses the previous key’s tonic note as the new Natural Minor’s tonic note. As shown below, C Major becomes C Natural Minor with E, A, and B becoming Eb, Ab, and Bb. C Natural Minor is also the same collection of notes as in Eb Major.

Dominating Multiple Tonics

The reason why we use the key of Eb Major with C Major is because we can use C as the tonic note of the C Major scale and the C Natural Minor scale. The goal here is to use more than one note as the tonic note and switch to tonic notes as we like.

We can play the C Major scale and switch to A Natural Minor at any time because those two scales are the same collection of notes. We can do the same thing with Eb Major and C Natural Minor. Just as we can switch between two relative major and minor scales like (C Major and A Minor), we can also switch between parallel major and minor scales (C Major and C Minor).

Instead of thinking about playing C Minor we can focus on Eb Major. Now we have the same format of intervals, chords, and modes. The difference is that the tonic note goes from C to Eb, which is a minor third interval above C.

On the guitar this makes perfect sense because we can take all our chord and scale positions and move them up the neck a minor third interval. If you’re a guitarist, then play a few open chords in the key of C. Now bar the third fret and play those same shapes. You are now playing in the key of Eb. But how do we make the switch between C Major and Eb Major feel natural?

The way we traverse these tonics is through the chords and melodic functions related to them. By playing a dominant chord like G7 we can treat it as the V7 of C in C Major. G7 can also be the bVII of Am within A Natural Minor as shown below. Playing G7 to C or Am “tonicizes” C or A as the tonic note. This is like setting our ears to C or A as focal point that our brains understand as “home base”.

Whenever we play any scale, we have a dominant fifth degree chord. The general rule is: If your tonic chord is a major or minor, we can play a dominant chord a fifth above it and lead to that tonic chord. So, Am has G7 that leads to it as a bVII7 along with E7 as a V7. But what about C Major? Does that have two dominant chords?

The Back Door

Yes, we can continue to use dominant chords to move to multiple tonics. If we have a major or minor tonic, then we can also use a bVII7 and lead to the tonic as well. When we access a Major tonic chord from a dominant chord a whole step below it, we call that “the back door”. A common use of this is to play it like a ii-V7-I progression, but this time it is a ii/bVII7-bVii7-I. Check this out below where we take a ii-V-I in Eb Major and then shift to C Major using a back door ii-V to a new I chord.

The first movement of a ii-V7-I in Eb Major takes us through the diatonic chords Fm and Bb7 to arrive at Eb. The second movement uses two chords from Eb Major. First, we have Fm as the ii of Bb7 where Bb7 becomes the bVII7 of C. This is why we notate Fm as ii/bVII7 or the ii of bVII7 and Bb7 as the bVII7.

Doing so shows that Fm belongs to Bb7. It is Bb7’s ii chord. In the key of C Major we do not have a Bb, but Bb7 is a dominant chord at the flattened-seventh (or minor seventh) position relative to C. With Bb7 a whole step below our tonic of C, we have used a “back door” to access the C Major Scale.

What to Practice

I’ll continue this topic some more and extend it into minor keys next week. While you wait, try your hand at using dominant chords a fifth above the tonic or a whole step (major second) below the tonic. The tonic can be major or minor. Try finding ways to access keys that are a minor third interval apart on the Circle of Fifths through these dominant chords.

You could play a progression in C Major like vi-ii-V7-I (Am, Dm, G7, C) and then use a vi-ii-V7-i (Am, Dm, G7, Cm) to access C Natural Minor. Then play another vi-ii-V7-I, but in Eb Major (Cm, Fm, Bb7, Eb). The fourth movement will use the back door and be vi-ii/bVII7-bVII7-I (Cm, Fm, Bb7, C) to get back to C Major. Remember this works with any two keys that are a minor third interval apart.