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The death of the key change
- PaulHoule 4y agoI used to make fun of Medium by calling it Tedium, then this site came out which is one of the wonders of the web and makes me think, ‘why the hell does anybody care what happens to Twitter?’ I mean, this guy listened to more than 1000 songs and explains music theory and how you edit music on a computer today, while Medium bloggers tell me how impressed they were to get 70 views on an article and people on Twitter think it is their constitutional right to say “A TRANS WOMAN IS A WOMAN. PERIOD.” or a “A TRANS WOMAN WILL NEVER BE A WOMAN. PERIOD.” What’s priceless is having the opportunity to think something through and explain it and Tedium rises above the shitposting world. Bravo!
- dang 4y ago"Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html That's particularly extremely important when the thread is fresh, because threads are so sensitive to initial conditions. Tossing flamebait in like this risks ruining the entire thing.
- chx 4y ago
- kweingar 4y agoAre drummers not musicians because they don’t play melodies and harmonies?
- earleybird 4y agoOf course they are, just ask Charlie[0] [0] https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/music/2021/08/24/charlie-watts-rolling-stones-drummer-mick-jagger/5577698001/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/music/2021/08/2...
- ghusto 4y agoThat, is an excellent simile-example (?), and made it clearer for me. Clear enough to say "I don't know!". It feels almost as if the answer is "they are a component of the whole, but not musicians by themselves". i.e. the beat can't be music by itself, but the vocals for example, can. I don't fully believe that though, and am leaning more towards a beat being able to be music by itself too. You can see my dilemma though :P
- 8note 4y agoJust practicing the drums can be highly musical: https://youtu.be/SSlEQNoCAXM https://youtu.be/SSlEQNoCAXM Or, I just spent a while whistling a long to take the a train at the end of https://youtu.be/crZ8ALG3tm4 https://youtu.be/crZ8ALG3tm4
- kweingar 4y agoI don’t really understand your dilemma. Why are drummers not musicians?
- bmacho 4y agoI guess GP sat down, and thought about it. I do that myself time to time, then I realize that despite to my best efforts I can't defend some common sense ideas, and must accept it as false. Usually hard to even explain. .. just think about it with an open mind, or try to even defend that drummers are musicians. I think most definitions of musicians don't include drummers much more than the costume designers or the publishers. (They work in the music industry, make music better, but can't and don't create music themselves alone.) I lean towards that they are not musicians. Also if GGGP doesn't classify hiphop or rap as music, then the "but the drummers are usually classified as musicians too" argument doesn't work on many levels.
- midoridensha 4y agoI'd call drummers "musicians" because the drums (which have rhythm) are a necessary part of the musical composition, and the drummer is performing that integral part of the music. What's harder to decide, IMO, is whether a drum solo really constitutes "music". If rap isn't music, then is a drum solo also not music? Personally, I can't stand most rap, but I also get bored with drum solos and usually skip them, even if I otherwise really love the drum parts of the band's other songs.
- 8note 4y agoWhen I played drums, I played them melodically. It's not particularly out there, you're just limited on which notes you have available
- denton-scratch 4y agoOld joke: Q: What do you call someone who hangs around with musicians? A: A drummer.
- GoblinSlayer 4y agoI think drums are more expressive than rap, in comparison rap sounds monotone, but monotone drumming isn't used in music.
- parenthesis 4y agoRoy Haynes is one of the greatest musicians I have ever heard.
- acjohnson55 4y agoPeople have felt that way about folk music, blues music, atonal music, pop music, bebop music, avant garde electronic music, rock 'n roll music, hip hop music, EDM, etc etc etc etc
- wahnfrieden 4y ago
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- wahnfrieden 4y ago
- goto11 4y agoOK that is hilarious!
- wahnfrieden 4y agoword for word. it's anti-black culture war nonsense, whether they know it or are just parroting it. and it's not even accurate, showing a basic ignorance of the genre
- goto11 4y agoYou can dance to pure rhythm, without melody. You can't dance to a melody without any rhythm. If follows that rhythm is more fundamental to music than melody, even though you usually need both.
- bazoom42 4y ago> I really wish I had a better word for these two categories Maybe “music you like” and “music you dont like”? It is totally fine to not like certain genres of music. But it is pretty dumb to say “I don’t like this book, therefore it is not a book”.
- boomboomsubban 4y agoShouldn't the move to digital recording also made the ability to make key changes much easier? Frequent key changes in music are supposed to be difficult for musicians to handle, but in the bass example shown adding a key change would have meant you need to record four notes rather than two.
- acjohnson55 4y agoTechnically, it is easier. But I think the article makes a good point that the specific tools and techniques chosen influence the artistic expression.
- InCityDreams 4y ago...also that the tech that made it 'technically easier' was easily aquired by less-trained musicians who really didn't care about key changes. Happy to say i grew up stoned and listened to some of the dirgiest drivel you could ever find - and loved every moment of it. Learning to compose introduced 'choices': should it change....why...what am i trying to achieve...is it required? Sorry - Cant get to link but there's a canadian musician on yt that plays guitar solos for quite some time over the same looped backing tracks. Lovely stuff.
- narag 4y agoNot so much a problem of recording. The difficult part is finding a nice change and the right chords and notes to work as a bridge. Also if sung, not getting out of range.
- progre 4y agoIn Swedens top 20 (Svensktoppen) the key change became a ridiculed trope. See, Sweden top 20 is for Swedish musichians only. The imported (American and British mostly) music had a separate list, "Tracks". Neither of the lists was based on sales by the way, since the state media monopoly was supposedly non-commercial. Anyway the Sweden top 20 stuff stayed dance-based (think jitterbug, not rave). Somewhere someone started talking about the key change. Even non-musichians learned to hear and point out the key change (easy, almost always the last refrain). Sweden top 20 leaned in to it. More humor oriented songs now include the key change in the lyrics ("here comes the pull-up).
- egiboy 4y agoThe author, by making this claim, lays bare the fact that they do not know about Eurovision. Key changes are so common in Eurovision songs that it is mentioned in the ultimate Eurovision spoof song "Love Love Peace Peace", which also features at least one key change: https://youtu.be/Cv6tgnx6jTQ https://youtu.be/Cv6tgnx6jTQ The reports of the death of the key change, dare I say, are greatly exaggerated.
- TylerE 4y agoEurovision is irrelevant to the US market. Those songs do not chart here.
- mkl95 4y agoThey don't chart that much in Europe either. Eurovision is tone deaf.
- dividedbyzero 4y agoI'd rather say that what works in that huge party simply doesn't necessarily work outside of it, at least not everywhere. The ESC is still crazy successful, at 161 Million viewers this year worldwide.
- andybak 4y agoAt least in the UK - people are watching with a mixture of morbid fascination and ironic glee. I've never met anyone who thinks it's a valid forum for good pop music.
- AlecSchueler 4y agoIs chart performance really the only marker we have left for cultural relevance? Eurovision is hugely popular and continuously and commercially successful outside of the charts world.
- ilyt 4y ago
- jws 4y agoOne reason to use a key change is to move the lead vocalist to a different part of their range. You can get a different sound to a too often repeated chorus or let them do a variation on the melody which would have been undelightful in the original key. Also, as a bass player. I don’t care. I mean, I’ll whine if you go to Gb, but it’s mostly just for form. Any awkwardness in fitting low lines on the instrument is more than made up by telling a guitar player to play the Cb chord.
- jader201 4y agoI don’t care if it is a trope, I miss key changes. Maybe because I grew up in the 80s and early 90s where it was common. But I have a fondness for songs that had them. Some songs did them in a way that was predictable, just following the formula of others, but some did them really well. One stand-out example, to me, is how Seal closes the song “People Asking Why” (around the 3:16 mark): https://youtu.be/qq_bfcvdN-0 https://youtu.be/qq_bfcvdN-0 With his vocal range, he was one of the few that could pull something like that off.
- 8note 4y ago2005-2012 or so Canadian jazz is full of the one-semi-tone-higher key change
- ghostpepper 4y agoThis is an oddly specific set of qualifiers. Would love to hear how you arrived at this conclusion and maybe some examples
- kleiba 4y agoMy hypothesis is that you can choose any aspect of composition that musicians find exciting and note the same decline over time. You don't have to be a music theorist to observe that by and large, today's music has been dumbed down in comparison. On a scale from "most producer friendly" to "art" it's definitely leaning heavily to the left. You can especially note that when it comes to harmonies, and harmonic shifts (aka key changes) are not the only aspect that has been greatly simplified. Elaborate harmonies are just not a thing anymore. And that's not just the typical effect that old generations cannot relate as much to the music of new generations. No, it's that today's taste - which, of course, has been mostly shaped by the exposure to today's music - appreciates songs that are, from a musician's perspective, much simpler in almost every aspect. The only exception that I can think of is that the performance capabilities of the singer have been put much more in the focus, so you can find songs today that are really difficult to sing well. This is mostly true for female performers, though, and the beginnings of that trend can probably be traced back to Whitney Houston and especially Mariah Carey, who made a certain Coloratura-style of singing fashionable. I think hardly anyone will dispute the observation that today's music business is much more professionalized than it had already been since the beginning of recording technology. And that goes to tell. It really _is_ a business, and the process of producing a hit song has been streamlined tremendously. Of course, we need to keep in mind that the focus of the article (as well as my comment) is on chart pop music. And of course, this is a big-picture kind of observation, not claiming that you couldn't cite some (however, rare) exceptions here and there. A thriving alternative scene with much more elaborate song writing has never ceased to exist, but that's not what gets played on your average top-40 radio station (for the youngens: "streams").
- kazinator 4y agoKey changes that just abruptly shift a repeating pop chorus near the end of a song by a step or half step are pretty dumb though; it's not clear that losing them specifically is a dumbing down.
- ComplexSystems 4y agoI agree. I think it's simply that this thing which used to sometimes happen now never happens, thus making the music more predictable and further lowering the entropy rate of music as a stochastic process.
- ruined 4y agoit's worth noting that there are many more timbral manipulations now available. effects such as a filter can serve a similar purpose to a key change and can even be modulated as instruments in their own right. modern producers have many more options.
- fedeb95 4y agoThis isn't an accurate title since it only talks about a tiny subset of genres available and specifically concentrates on popular (hence historically simple) songs
- codeulike 4y agoWith that in mind, it’s probably not a coincidence that the only number one hit to use a key change during the 2010s is also one of the most iconic: Travis Scott’s “SICKO MODE.” That can't be true, surely? Only one number one song with a key change in a whole decade? (I assume we're talking US charts?) Crazy by Gnarls Barkely has some nice key changes but it only got to number 2 apparently.
- re 4y ago> Crazy by Gnarls Barkely Starts and ends in the same key. There's some minor<->major mode shifting over the course of the song, but the tonic remains the same.
- codeulike 4y agoAh I see, it does some unusual stuff with chords, I was hearing it as a key change https://flypaper.soundfly.com/produce/the-flurry-of-harmonic-surprises-in-gnarls-barkleys-crazy/ https://flypaper.soundfly.com/produce/the-flurry-of-harmonic...
- kevinwang 4y agoDo people not consider parallel key shifts to be key changes? (btw whoever invented the name "parallel key" for majors and minors with the same tonic did a terrible job)
- b450 4y agoI thought Beyonce's "Love on Top" might qualify. Pretty iconic use of key changes, but it apparently peaked at #20 on the hot 100.
- rhn_mk1 4y agoKey is described as choosing a certain set of notes from all the available ones. The picture shows that the F key is missing in G major. Is there any popular music that belongs to multiple keys because they only use the notes that are shared between them? Or, is there anything that doesn't belong to any key because it uses more notes than are allowed by any key?
- TheOtherHobbes 4y agoNo, and no. It's not that you can't write multi-key music (polytonal is one word for that) but it sounds esoteric, "modern", "difficult", and not something you're going to use in a chart hit. There are probably one or two examples somewhere, but it's certainly not common. Keys are like the rails that keep a train on the tracks. If you don't have them, or if they're too non-linear, you lose a sense of momentum that keeps untrained people listening. Classical music meanders for a while and then stops at cadences, which reinforce the key. It's like a train ride with stations. A key change switches the ride to a different track, but you always get a series of pauses and restarts. Modern music uses ambiguous chord sequences - usually four chords - that repeat over and over but never come to a climax or a pause. The chords are ambiguous because they fit with a couple of keys - usually related major and minor, or perhaps a mode - but without the stops there's no clear sense which applies. So you get continuous but repetitive motion on a single track without the stops. It's like being stuck on a loop and going through the same station over and over without stopping. Sometimes the scenery changes between the verse and the chorus/drop/whatever. But without the clear key stops you can't get off.
- codeulike 4y agoModern music uses ambiguous chord sequences - usually four chords - that repeat over and over but never come to a climax or a pause. The chords are ambiguous because they fit with a couple of keys - usually related major and minor, or perhaps a mode - but without the stops there's no clear sense which applies. I don't agree with that. A key is not just a collection of allowed notes, there is a kindof frequency distribution to them too, so that the tonic is either the most used or the most implied. The fifth is often the second-most-used. Its sortof like a key has a 'center of gravity' in the tonic note. Either it will be used a lot or alluded to a lot. So a chord sequence might technically fit into different keys but usually there is an implied tonic and that 'tells' you what key you are in. So within a (well constructed) chord sequence in modern pop you can still have suspense and resolutions and so on. Kindof the same as cadence but done in a different way. And the trick to a good key change is to subtely shift the 'weight' in the direction of the new key just before you make the change.
- mahoho 4y agoIncidentally, one of my favorite modulations in pop music is the transition to the chorus in Scritti Politti's "Perfect Way". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cLxIB_lrwk0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cLxIB_lrwk0
- yesenadam 4y agoThanks, never heard that, I didn't realize Miles Davis' version was so close to the original! e.g. Finland 1987 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-eaTwj6NTzU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-eaTwj6NTzU
- jader201 4y ago100%. I’ve always liked the modulation between the verses and chorus of this song.
- mariusmg 4y agoPop music and (semi) complex music composition. Name a more unlikely duo.
- bena 4y agoI mean, key changes may not be popular right now, but things have a way of coming back around. Sooner or later, someone is going to make a really good song with a key change and then it's going to be back in rotation.
- giraffe_lady 4y agoThat's not necessarily true.... Swelling vibrato-heavy string backing on choruses were a staple for decades, have been gone for just as long, and are probably never coming back thank god.
- JasonFruit 4y agoI'd take that bet. I'd bet you that backing by full-blooded, real bowed strings, with plummy vibrato and all, will come back in style at some point in the next thirty years.
- giraffe_lady 4y agoaight
- bena 4y agoTo be fair, later can be very later. On the order of decades even. And maybe it just winds up with a dedicated niche audience. Never fully mainstream, but never out of the current culture either. It's hard to predict what people will like in the future. The best we can do is just do things we like.
- circlefavshape 4y agoI normally think the up-a-semitone key change is kinda trite, with the exception of The Rainbow Connection from The Muppets. Changes key in a non-obvious way after the middle-8 and really gives the song a lift (FWIW I write songs with key changes all the time (usually tonic->dominant). If only someone would listen to them ...)
- ano-ther 4y agoInteresting observation about “horizontal” vs “vertical” songwriting, driven by technology. Can relate to that. On guitar, what I come up with will more likely be a progression — which then gets layered (horizontal first). On Ableton, it usually starts with layering a loop before I build it over time (vertical first).
- TonyTrapp 4y agoThe simple answer is that Sérgio Mendes already used up all the key changes in 1983, nothing's left for modern-day musicians: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fOPh3bTglak https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fOPh3bTglak
- jader201 4y agoYeah, whenever I hear song, I’m not thinking about the lyrics or anything else except “yeah, this song has a lot of key changes”.
- jdontillman 4y agoSolid point.
- kevinwang 4y agoThe first point about the rise of hip hop seems good. The second point about the rise of digital production seems like incorrect conjecture. If chord changes had become more, not less popular, I'm sure that the rise of digital production would be cited as the reason, since it makes it much easier to modulate all the instruments. I think a better hypothesis is what was alluded to in the editorial at the end: > Say what you will about key changes. Maybe you find them at best heavy-handed and at worst trite. I know that I often do. They have just fallen out of fashion as being gimmicky. I don't really buy that vertical production would kill the key change. After all, beat switches are alive and well. We still have verses and choruses and interludes and beat drops.
- rjmill 4y agoAnd all the concertina, melodeon, and harmonica players of the worlds couldn't be happier. I feel personally attacked whenever I want to learn a song, and it has a key change in the middle of it.
- stickfigure 4y agoReminds me of this breakdown of "Never Gonna Let You Go" by Sergio Mendez: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZnRxTW8GxT8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZnRxTW8GxT8 That song makes everything else look like amateur hour. Somehow it hit #4 on the Billboard Top 100 in 1983. I think I'll stick to bluegrass. In G.
- bitwize 4y agoThe last-chorus step up in key has been called the "Truck Driver's Gear Shift" and widely mocked as a cheap way to add energy to a song that is flagging, reaching its end, and needs to go out with a bang. Musicians started attempting to end their music on its own terms rather than resort to a gimmick in response.
- crazygringo 4y agoI'm sorry, but this is a silly article. Yes, key changes went away in US pop music at some point a few decades ago. But the idea that this has to do either with hip-hop or with digital music production is frankly ludicrous, and the author presents zero causal evidence here except that all three things happened very roughly around the same time. And the proposed explanations make zero sense. The real answer is simply that the shifting the key up in a dramatic energy-raising fashion just went out of style, like a thousand other things in music. As the author themself notes, they're "heavy-handed" and "trite". I could add corny, old-fashioned, and overly earnest to that list. Everything in music gets overdone and then fades away to make room for the next new thing. There's no more reason needed for this than people just got tired of the old thing -- which they always will. Claiming it's because of hip-hop or digital music is just strange.
- adamc 4y agoI don't think it's just a fashion thing. There is a real outcome of this: the music is simpler and less interesting. Modulation isn't the only missing ingredient, though. Quantization and click tracks and pitch-correction and sampling have all combined to reduce the variation in songs. Part of it is driven by the need to make production cheaper (since music is less profitable now), so it's hard to say if it will come back.
- hammock 4y agoPitch correction is harder to do live, if there are key changes, since you can set your auto tuner to a specific key Also, key changes present some increased difficulty (not insurmountable of course) in live performance on certain instruments like guitars. And the fact is (at least frontman) music artists are getting less talented at their instruments on average
- ghostpepper 4y agoHaving never performed live I'm just guessing, but theoretically changing keys on autotune should be as simple as pressing a single button at the correct point in the song, no? Conceivably it could even be programmed in with everything else
- adamc 4y agoThe formatting of that article is a bit hard to read. People have been pointing out how little modulation there is in modern pop music for a while. Combined with click-tracks, pitch-correction and sampling, there is just less variation in most modern pop songs.
- 4oo4 4y agoSpeaking as someone that prefers weird and experimental music but also has some theory training, IMO, most key changes, especially a big one at the end of a pop song are overrated and don't add much. Also, if this is only looking at popular music as defined by the Billboard charts, that's more likely caused by the homogenization of music production and a very small group of producers that are responsible for the majority of hit songs. This is a much better analysis: https://pudding.cool/2018/05/similarity/ https://pudding.cool/2018/05/similarity/ I really don't like the assumption behind these types of articles that increased complexity of music theory-wise automatically means better music. Just like adding unnecessary complexity when writing code is always better. Both complex and simply structured music both have merit, and I'd argue that more simple music is harder to do well beacuse you need a really strong central idea/concept to make it work. For example, musically Perfume Genius is extremely simple, but it's still some of the best songwriting I've ever heard. It works so well because of the simpliclity makes the subjects he's singing about even more stark and makes it feel more vulnerable. If complexity were all it took to write good music, then everyone would be listening to things like Ornette Coleman (who is great at doing the exact opposite). You can still be an excellent musician without knowing a lot of theory, and it also should be pointed out that our system of music theory is based around classical composers who made up the rules as they went. All you really need is muscle memory and recognizing harmony and dissonance. As much as I respect people like Rick Beato that are into this old school view of music needing to be heavily backed by theory and saying "they don't write songs like they used to", I think it's very elitist and extremely artistically myopic to claim authority on something that's completely subjective. Yes it can help to know theory depending on what type of music you want to make, but you might also make even better music not having that sense of what's correct or not. This is the approach that Giorgio Moroder took and he's one of the most successful and inventive producers of all time. And just remember that pop music is a market demographic and a product more than it is a distinct genre/style, and that we should all be free to listen to whatever music we want, however correct or wrong someone else tells you it is.
- cf100clunk 4y agoThe pop song ''Sunny'' by Bobby Hebb (1963) is famous for featuring several key changes in escalating form: https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=sunny+hebb+guitar+tab&ia=web https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=sunny+hebb+guitar+tab&ia=we...
- huqedato 4y agoThis technically named modulation. Without it any piece of music sounds boring, sterile.