Does the song key matter?

[dan_s]

Oh come on; if it sounds right, then it is right. Rules are made to be broken and where music / self composition is concerned, there are no rulez.

Even though I generally agree, I think it is much easier to create music if you know some rules.

Given that I have pretty much no musical theory knowledge, I am using the same school of thought, -hitting keys till it sounds good.

But, as I've started learning a little about key/chords, blahbleh, I've been able to more quickly create lines that I find interesting and compose better quality tunes.

ya know, keep your feet on the ground and your head in the clouds.

[sjm]

Generally, if it sounds good, you've discovered one of the "rules".

Isn't that what HTBoogie is getting at?

[Aroused by JarJar]

Oh come on; if it sounds right, then it is right. Rules are made to be broken and where music / self composition is concerned, there are no rulez.

So you use alternative tunings? For 12-tone equal temperament is one of the strictest and most limiting rules created in the history of music. If you are using only 12-tET and talking about "breaking rules", then you are like a teenager who thinks that wearing a leather jacket and talking shit in the backseat of his mother's SUV makes him a "rebel".

[Ogg Vorbis]

If you are using only 12-tET and talking about "breaking rules", then you are like a teenager who thinks that wearing a leather jacket and talking shit in the backseat of his mother's SUV makes him a "rebel".

Funny as hell!

[yellowfever]

Oh come on; if it sounds right, then it is right. Rules are made to be broken and where music / self composition is concerned, there are no rulez.

So you use alternative tunings? For 12-tone equal temperament is one of the strictest and most limiting rules created in the history of music. If you are using only 12-tET and talking about "breaking rules", then you are like a teenager who thinks that wearing a leather jacket and talking shit in the backseat of his mother's SUV makes him a "rebel".

Stop being a smartass. You know exactly what I mean and yet you to try to belittle a comment I make? Very clever. Everyone knows about 12 tone equal temperament. Did I say I use alternative tunings?. No; I used the word rules.

[Aroused by JarJar]

Oh come on; if it sounds right, then it is right. Rules are made to be broken and where music / self composition is concerned, there are no rulez.

So you use alternative tunings? For 12-tone equal temperament is one of the strictest and most limiting rules created in the history of music. If you are using only 12-tET and talking about "breaking rules", then you are like a teenager who thinks that wearing a leather jacket and talking shit in the backseat of his mother's SUV makes him a "rebel".

Stop being a smartass. You know exactly what I mean and yet you to try to belittle a comment I make? Very clever. Everyone knows about 12 tone equal temperament. Did I say I use alternative tunings?. No; I used the word rules.

I didn't belittle your comment- quite the opposite. I'm pointing out some heavy implications of what you say. Actually understanding, believing, and practicing such statements is a heavy thing and a lifelong commitment.

[PurpleCatfishBettie]

Keys make colors in my mind. G minor is golden green, G major is more like a pine forest green. e minor is dark blue (bono of u2 said it was red to him). b minor is red. a minor is whitish/orange, and C major is really orange. Oddly enough, so is c minor. d minor is purplish. I could see E major being white.

I'm wondering if it's not so much key, but something having to do with fret position on the guitar.

The thing about doing a lot of different keys, is that it gives more variety. Doing every song in the same key can get boring.

Randy Rhoads was one of the first heavy rock players to explore a lot of different keys.

Until then, it had mostly all been 'a' or 'e.'

JS Bach's music is unsurpassed in modulating all over the place, and doing it in such a way that the key changes are often unnoticeable, yet so beautiful all the same.

[cobzilla]

Oh come on; if it sounds right, then it is right. Rules are made to be broken and where music / self composition is concerned, there are no rulez.

If it sounds good to you, great, no problem. The best way to learn is to experiment.

Nonetheless, this statement is cr*p. Most of the time this attitude ends up resulting in a big forgettable mess of noise that is often just plain painful. When it does comes out sounding truly good, if you look closely, the rules were actually followed - but, since knowledge of the rules was missing we have quite the happy accident.

A bit of a harsh response, but true. There are a great number of fantastic musicians that don't know music theory as it is written in books, e.g. Jimi Hendrix. They play and compose by ear. But if you were to analyze their composition, you would be able to reverse engineer the parts back into the existing constraints of standard music theory, even though when the piece was written, the composer wasn't actively constraining themselves to a particular set of rules.

So even if you don't think you are following 'The Rules' of music when you play. You are still following 'The Rules' of music, at least those rules that define the tones that, when played closely in time, sound appealing, e.g scales. Those rules are hard to break, because the results just aren't very appealing.

Ultimately though, a piece of music is really defined by the phrasing and by the large scale movements throughout the song. There are certainly rules that constrain those aspects of music, e.g. 12-Bar Blues, but it's in phrasing that there is infinite room to break 'The Rules'.

Bernie

[Ldizzy]

since this is an electronic music board... ill say some sounds seem to sound better on precise notes... this is especially true for bass sounds and for people who know nothing about eqing..

[konartis]

They key in which a song is composed does matter. You can transpose; the relationships remain but it is never the same. Keys all have different... colours. This is the nature of frequencies perceived.

Having said this, nobody should stress about what key they're in to start composing. Once you're playing around and having fun trying to find a nice riff or something, you will make decisions based on the chosen key, whether you are aware of it or not.

[tapper mike]

Why people choose Jimi Hendrix as a point of contention for learning theory is beyond me. Jimi Hendrix while he may not have studied notation he did study music. He did learn from others.

Hendrix learned to play by practicing almost constantly, watching others play, through tips from more experienced players, and by listening to records.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimi_Hendrix

It wasn't accidental that he learned songs practiced them and then began to impovise over them, applying the same concepts of progressions that he learned to craft his musical legacy.

[cobzilla]

Why people choose Jimi Hendrix as a point of contention for learning theory is beyond me. Jimi Hendrix while he may not have studied notation he did study music. He did learn from others.

But I used him as an example because he didn't have thorough knowledge of music theory in a 'standard' sense. He didn't squirrel away for years studying music and, I'm speculating but I would be willing to bet that, he wrote, played and composed more from instinct than from intellect or analysis.

Yet, if you sit down and analyze his improvisation and his compositions, you would be able to map them into existing musical theory concepts. It's as if he *had* squirreled away and spent years studying scales and then applied those scales rigorously to his work.

So I was responding to the comment...

Oh come on; if it sounds right, then it is right. Rules are made to be broken and where music / self composition is concerned, there are no rulez.

...by pointing out that, even through Hendrix was not a classically trained and learned composer, but someone that played mostly from instinct, he ultimately still 'followed the rules', even though he probably wasn't conscious of it.

I guess my point is that the 'rules', represented by scales in this case, really aren't that strict, they're just guidelines that have evolved over many years based on groupings of tones that have some inherent psychological connection to each other and tend to sound appealing to us humans. So even if you try to ignore the 'rules', you ultimately will find that, unless you try really hard to purposely avoid any existing scale, your compositions will end up falling into some predefined tonal space. Because the vast majority (if not all given the relatively small set of possible tones in our current system) of appealing tonal spaces have already been identified and named.

[Jafo]

d minor is purplish.

It's the saddest of all keys, after all...

[Jafo]

If people didn't break the rules, we'd all be singing plainchant, possibly with a drone or some organum. You could sing parallel fifths, octaves, or fourths. All other intervals were against the rules. Adding independent voices, broke the rules. Chords were against the rules. For a while tonality was deprecated. The return to tonality was against the rules. Dominant chords were against the rules. ii-V7-I was against the rules. Equal temperament was against the rules. Chromaticism was against the rules. 12-bar blues was against the rules.

Maybe the people who make the rules don't know what they're talking about...

(Or more charitably, rules are a great servant, but a lousy master.)

[cobzilla]

Or more charitably, rules are a great servant, but a lousy master.

Exactly. That's perfect.

I think the word 'rules' being used as an synonym for music theory is unfair. Instead, I think 'guidelines' is probably more appropriate.

In music, the key sets the mood, the melodic space, of the song and the phrasing defines the structure.

Just as in painting, the color pallet sets the mood and the brush strokes define the structure of the image.

A song or image is a unique combination of pallet and form.

In nature, there are certain visual and aural pallets that generally reflect certain psychological states (i.e. mood). Using the color red for stop signs was not an arbitrary choice.

Over time, humans have identified those pallets, those naturally coherent groupings of tones or colors and have given them names (e.g. Major, Minor, Earth Tones, Pastels, etc) so that we don't have to reinvent them each time we want to create a form to express a particular mood.

So the theories that define musical and visual arts are not rules that were invented by humans. Instead, they are simply naturally coherent groupings of tones or colors humans have given names to, which map to particular moods due to the psychopathology of the human brain.

Yep, art is science. How's that for controversial?