Deep House Remix - major to a relative minor key?

[banksay]

Hi, I'm working on remixing an acapella from a house track that's originally in the key of Bb major. I want to create a darker deep house remix and have created some chords in the key of Gm which I believe to be the relative minor of Bb major - please correct me if I've got this all horribly wrong

Anyway, to my ears the original Bb major acapella sits nicely in my Gm track but my question is...is this a common thing to do? Without hearing it, does this sound right on paper? Self doubt always creeps in when I try and use my self taught music theory!

[gustavokch]

Hi, I'm working on remixing an acapella from a house track that's originally in the key of Bb major. I want to create a darker deep house remix and have created some chords in the key of Gm which I believe to be the relative minor of Bb major - please correct me if I've got this all horribly wrong

Anyway, to my ears the original Bb major acapella sits nicely in my Gm track but my question is...is this a common thing to do? Without hearing it, does this sound right on paper? Self doubt always creeps in when I try and use my self taught music theory!

I think you are right and it should work. But I might be wrong.

[bpgeez]

Interesting... I'm definitely trying to hear it. Is there any way that you can post the original song and what you have done with your remix?

[RyanG]

Hi, I'm working on remixing an acapella from a house track that's originally in the key of Bb major. I want to create a darker deep house remix and have created some chords in the key of Gm which I believe to be the relative minor of Bb major - please correct me if I've got this all horribly wrong

Anyway, to my ears the original Bb major acapella sits nicely in my Gm track but my question is...is this a common thing to do? Without hearing it, does this sound right on paper? Self doubt always creeps in when I try and use my self taught music theory!

Yes, on paper this technically does work... you might have to monkey around with the chords and such but for the most part it works.
One thing to keep in mind is that the key of a song is generally determined by the bass, so if you have a Bb major acapella on top of a Gm bass then it's technically in Gm.
You might have trouble with the ending of the song, because you'll either end on an inversion of a chord (which is sonically weak), or have the vocals (which I'm assuming are the melody) probably end on scale degree 3, which can also be considered weak. You generally want the very last chord of the song to have scale degree 1 in both bass and soprano, this is known as a perfect authentic cadence and is about the strongest end you could have.

(somebody please correct me if I'm wrong on this stuff).

etc...

take a look at this:

M = Major
m = minor
o = diminished

Code: Select all

M m m M M m o 
          m o M m m M M

These are how the chords match up between major and minor of the same key (top is major, bottom is minor in this diagram). Tip: relative minor can be found by traveling down a minor third from the tonic of the major key.
Generally in (harmonic) minor the V and vii° (major and diminished, respectively), but in natural minor they become v and VII (minor, major) due to lowered seventh scale degree.

tl;dr - yes, it technically works.

[chrispurchase]

Yeah you may want to play around with using an F# & E natural in your chords though instead of F & Eb so you get better resolutions.

[Km7]

^ Both tones originally and classically belong to minor. Without using F and Eb (usually descending) together with F# and E (usually ascending), he would actually use only the ascending form of the melodic minor scale, also known as jazz minor or simply melodic minor in jazz theory. But I have no idea as to what exactly the piece is - which tones are in the acapella. Here is one thing to have in mind, though: If (in Bb major) your acapella signs scale degrees 6-5-4 or 4-5-6, they would be 1-7-6 or 6-7-1 in the relative minor (Gm), which means you won't be able to use harmonic or ascending melodic minor here, since you'd have a bad and inappropriate clash of tones. But since house music is often quite limited in note range and harmonic progressions, it could be that you won't even need to use these chords anyway.

[banksay]

Thanks guys, lots of good info here. As it's a Deep House track and the chords are more rhythmic than a complex progression I don't think I need to change the chords I have at the moment as I don't hear any clashes with the melody of the vocal. However, I'm going to experiment anyway based on your advice...only way to learn and it might lift it from just sounding ok to sublime...I'll probably get it all horribly wrong though but if you never try...

Thanks again.

[RyanG]

Can you post an audio example for us to hear?