No, he says explicitly that most dance music is in a minor key. He uses his data to present which keys HIS tracks are in. There are many threats to validity here, but the part that you are sweeping under the rug is his experience.

He doesn't bother to separate out the tracks in major keys because they are few and far between, in his data. He then asserts that, in his experience, this is generally true.

In my experience, it is also generally true, but more true for some styles than others. There are also some styles that it's probably not true, happy hardcore, and some house styles come to mind.



It's not intended to be "science." You're projecting more there than is presented. It's a guide for producers and DJs who are into what is referred to as "harmonic mixing", which is an aggrandizement of simply mixing in key.

He has 1500 records, that's actually a pretty good sample. There is absolutely bias in that sample and consequently limits to how well his observations generalize. There's probably little bias, however, in the key distribution itself. By that, I mean, I think that it's reasonable to assert that Am/C are the most popular keys. He may play a style that favors minor keys, e.g. trance which would skew the distribution of minor to major.

That said, I'm telling you what every musician who's been to more than a couple of underground events knows, most dance music IS in a minor key. For some styles, notably trance, most of it is in a minor key.

But, since you seem unconvinced by the assertions of people who do have the experience to make such assertions, I'll give you data to back it up.

I went to Beatport and simply counted the keys of the top 10 tracks on the front page and in the trance category. They list them on the tracks. This is certainly a reasonably random sample with respect to this question. There is no systematic reason to believe that the charts somehow favor a key today that they don't normally favor. If you want to argue that it's biased towards popular tracks, then I say so what, most bedroom producers want to create popular tracks.

From the main page, 6 out of 10 are in a minor key. This supports the assertion that most dance music is in a minor key. From the trance page, 8 out of 10 are in a minor key, this supports the assertion that minor keys are more dominant in trance than they are in dance music in general.

Obviously, this isn't "science" either. For a proper study we would sample randomly and use appropriate statistical tests to show a difference in the populations. But, it is ADDITIONAL evidence nonetheless, and for the purposes of this discussion, should be more than sufficient to convince you that the statement "most dance music is in a minor key", is largely true.

There's certainly some truth to that, and even more so with muscle learning. However, we have to consider everything in moderation here. We're simply not talking about much learning in the first place. So unlearning isn't that significant of a challenge.

Moreover, who's talking about learning something that is specifically wrong? We're talking about limited learning. Learning that the Am natural scale is all white keys beginning with A, is not wrong, it's just an incomplete story of Am.

Sure, learning Am and then Cmaj, is unconventional, but it's not "wrong." It's not that big of a deal to later shift gears and say, we learned it that way to help you get started, but we'll get more out of it if we learn it this way.

This happens ALL the time in school. If you learned FOIL in high school algebra then you learned a simplification of a general idea that gave you an easy mnemonic to help you build a habit. There's no need to multiply terms of polynomials in any particular order and FOIL will not fully describe the method for polynomials with more than two terms. You later learn that this is simply a specific case of the more general distributive law.

Was it worth it to learn FOIL to make progress? I think so, and the same applies here. There's simply not that much to unlearn.

The fact is, we learn incorrect things all the time and are able to later correct them. My point was simply that it's not THAT big of a deal. JJF was dramaticizing my claim that genre skills trump music/production skills.

I think that's his record collection. I doubt he releases 300 tunes a year.

Tech house is often based on samples so is quite diverse, here are 100 results

Am 19
A#m 4
Bm 13
Cm 3
C#m 2
Dm 18
D#m 12
Em 7
Fm 1
F#m 3
Gm 3
G#m 1
Total minor 76

A 6
A# 2
B
C 5
C# 1
D 3
D#
E
F 6
F#
G 1
G#
Total major 24

Well I guess if it's aimed at that audience it's not an issue but your topic title is "Ultra basic intro to music theory" so that doesn't really show people that's the case. That was my point really, and since reading a few more of your posts I've realized that it's targeted rather than general.

erm... general really, but it's done in ableton Live so obviously it's not for an aspiring young violinist, it's EDM really. The OP is just half of the first one, there are 4, so they do get as far as the circle of fifths and stuff, or they will when I get round to finishing them.