First of songwriting techniques you should learn: song key

Advertisements

People always get confused when they begin writing songs especially writing music or melody, they usually ask questions like what chords am i supposed to use, what scales, what, what, what...?

Don't bother yourself with this, because i'm going to show you how exactly professional songwriters write their great songs everyday. So the key factor to write a harmonized and good song is to know what keys are.

The key of the song is where all the notes belong, it's like a form of music, or some rules that will make you stay on the line and never commit wrong things. The song key is named by 2 factors which are: the type of the key (whether it's major or minor), and the name of the key (the name or the root note).

You remember the lesson of "The major scale: the absolute of songwriting techniques", that's all what you are going to need to understand keys, how awesome is that!!!. You only need to construct your chords and you're done.

Chords are constructed from the 1st, the 3rd and the 5th note of the scale, we call the chord construction from the major scale "harmonizing the major scale". So let's see the example of the C major scale and try to harmonize it by picking the 1st, the 3rd and the 5th note and move to the next note as a root note...etc

The C major scale:
C - D - E - F - G - A -B - C - D - E - F - G - A -B
C   -     E   -     G                                     (C major)
      D    -    F    -    A                               (D minor)
            E   -     G   -    B                           (E minor)   
                  F    -    A   -    C                     (F major)
                        G    -   B   -     D                (G major)
                              A   -    C    -    E          (A minor)
                                   B    -    D     -   F    (B diminished)

These are our 7 chords from our C major scale, so you can use them without getting into trouble (but be careful).

Note: The funny part of all of this is that the chord succession in any major key is (major, minor, minor, major, major, minor, diminished), how cool is that!