vocal major key, remix to minor key

[the_dj]

say you have a Bb Vocal and you are making a house remix and you want to it to be minor, as most house music is, i know the relative minor is Gm. Now do you have to transpose the vocal to G? Or should it sit nicely on top of stuff in Gm since its the relative minor

[waltercruz]

you have to check against to the melody, but there are some chances to this vocal fit in Gm without hassle.

[the_dj]

so what if the melody i end up creating does create a sort of clash, should i then transpose vocal from Bb to G?

just trying figure out general rule of thumb when dealing with vocal in a major key and u know u are going to producing in a minor key.

thanks man

[JumpingJackFlash]

say you have a Bb Vocal and you are making a house remix and you want to it to be minor, as most house music is, i know the relative minor is Gm. Now do you have to transpose the vocal to G? Or should it sit nicely on top of stuff in Gm since its the relative minor

It doesn't really matter what the vocal is, the deciding factor in tonality is the harmony you use.
In simple terms; even the happiest tune in the world will sound sad if its harmonised that way (although there are of course many other factors you need to consider such as tempo and so on).
So no, you don't need to transpose. All the notes in Bb major are also contained within G minor (plus you have a couple extra to play with too).

Depending on the melody though, harmonising in G minor may not work terribly well. At times, it might be appropriate to harmonise in Bb minor (the parallel minor). This way, you retain the same "tonic" and only the mode changes, but this probably won't work well all the time either because of the obvious clashes.

It might be necessary to pass through several different keys in order to achieve the best results. (Even effective harmonising in the major key can still produce a "sad" effect).

[BertKoor]

Listen closely to Bobby Brown - Two can play that game.

Excellent example of a vocal track where the original chords were thrown away and replaced by new ones, with overlap in the scales of only 90%. There's one repeated dissonant note which constantly pokes me in the eye, but never stood in the way of selling millions of copies.

[diijay]

say you have a Bb Vocal and you are making a house remix and you want to it to be minor, as most house music is, i know the relative minor is Gm. Now do you have to transpose the vocal to G? Or should it sit nicely on top of stuff in Gm since its the relative minor

You don't have to transpose, Bb major and G minor scale have the same notes, just harmonize the way you want to.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
Bbmaj scale: B♭, C, D, E♭, F, G, A, B♭
G min scale: G, A, B♭, C, D, E♭, F, G

(C,D,G)minor chords.
(Bb,Eb,F)Major chords
A dimished chord

[BradColeman]

You could also go for the dorian mode, sounds similar to minor aeolian but with a natural 6 (which sounds 'jazzier')

If your vocal is in Bb major, then insert a C minor groove underneath.

You could do this with every other mode. But as said before, it all depends on the harmony and melody.

[(a)]

The previous posts are correct - it all depends on the melody and the harmonies. Even if they melody and song had the same key there would be no guarantee for compatibility.

Chances are that if you don't transpose the melody and they are compatible, it still might sound unconventional as the tonic/root-note of the melody remains Bb.

Others have said that the pitch content is the same between g and Bb; this is only entirely true for aeolic minor - it is quite common to find leading tones (f# in g minor) that do not occur in Bb.

Overall, it's all about trial and error. You could use our plugin vielklang to easily switch your melody to different root notes and scales to listen to the result.

Cheers,
Alexander

[diijay]

You could also go for the dorian mode, sounds similar to minor aeolian but with a natural 6 (which sounds 'jazzier')

If your vocal is in Bb major, then insert a C minor groove underneath.

You could do this with every other mode. But as said before, it all depends on the harmony and melody.

Nice Stuff there Brad.
In my opinion those ideas is like thinking outside the "electronic producer box", as far composition goes.

What else would you do?

Thanks.

[BradColeman]

There are numerous options, depending on how 'hip' you want to sound.
Maybe the vocal line you are using will fit in another way on the harmony you're using, I don't know because I don't know how the line goes.

I guess parallel minor would sound the most standard, dorian might be OK.
Maybe phrygian (Bb major -> D minor)

Just use your ears and dont hestitate to try something different, maybe even random and see what it does.

And yeah, I'm always looking for unconvential stuff, I also love jazz so I guess that's where it comes from Good luck with it.

[Xenobt]

Another option is to use a transparent, realtime pitch shifter like Melodyne or Pitch n' Time to move the offending pitches (I'd imagine mostly major thirds), then you can keep the song in the original key and tweak to taste. You can even do it with straight file-based pitch shifting if the formant change isn't too great.

There's even a way to do it in Stretch "mono legato" mode in Sampletank (which is FREE!), but it's more fiddly than the other options mentioned, as you have to import the sample, then play the keyboard to change the original samples pitch as it plays. Here's a quick tutorial:



So that's how they did the Diva in 5th Element!

As everyone else has mentioned, it all depends on the melody, but when there's a will...

KVR/eSoundz: Xenobt

[paterpeter]

You could also go for the dorian mode

Done!

SCNR