Introduction
A good portion of my childhood was spent learning how to play guitar in a manner that some people would characterize as “self-taught.” But you can’t really learn how to play music without drawing from sources of outside knowledge any more than you could acquire a language without hearing it.
Although my studies didn’t begin formally, I had informal teachers. My older brother took bass guitar lessons and had the patience to teach me a few songs that he had learned. And after my fingers began to work more favorably, I could begin reading the tablature notation in drug-store guitar magazines that I purchased with my weekly allowance.
YouTube wasn’t around yet, but VHS tapes allowed me to see what my heroes were doing. And as I gained more experience, the audio recordings themselves started to provide enough information to play around with. As my musical vocabulary grew, my choices of notes became more accurate, little by little. I was able to contextualize what I was hearing and reading. The problem remained, however, that every note choice was still very vague and arbitrary. I could see that there were recurring patterns, but they had no rhyme or reason.
Every now and then I would get advice from older musicians. One common phrase was: “make sure you know your keys!” The word “your” was always interesting to me. I didn’t know how or when I came into possession of these so-called keys, but the word “your” made it seem as if it was possible to possess them without knowing anything about them.
With minimal investigation, I came to the conclusion that a key was a note that the song circled around. What you start and end on. It was inaccurate, but it did the job for a couple years. For some practicing and hobbyist musicians, this story may seem familiar and may even end there. Once I started studying formally, there were times I questioned if I should have ended there as well. Something that once seemed so simple was now dense and never-ending. And although Complexity Bias may skew our perceptions (the assumption that complex answers are more accurate than simple answers), it can sometimes have an adverse affect on our artistry in the long term.
College unloaded a mountain of information on something that I once saw as simple and settled. And as a result, I temporarily gave up on music theory. While I enjoyed putting the puzzle pieces together, I couldn’t help but think about all the musicians that didn’t take college courses on music theory. However, around that time, YouTube was born.
“...but the ability to make their inspiration into reality was possible with a great understanding of the craft. They were able to create at the speed of inspiration.”
For years, lore presented many artists as supernatural beings whose inspiration seemed to arrive as a gift from the heavens. However, a barrage of unseen footage showed me another side to their artistic process. Rather than waiting for a song to simply arrive in their hands, they were using theoretical terms and making calculations off the cuff just as my professors did. They were supposed to be vagabonds, free from the shackles of society and the complexity of phrases like "second-inversion drop-2 seventh chord voicings.” Their inspiration still came from a deep and personal place, but the ability to make their inspiration into reality was possible with a great understanding of the craft. They were able to create at the speed of inspiration.
In interviews and behind-the-scenes footage, I would hear math from Bob Dylan or Paul McCartney, who quickly transposed chord progressions for other instruments. Or B.B. King, a son of share-croppers that ran away from home and never went to school a day in his life, discussing how Charlie Christian used diminished runs to connect the turnaround back to the start of the chord progression during the V chord. It made me question whether or not ignorance truly was bliss.
It was then that I realized something. Growing up in a family of carpenters, I found that there was something similar about the way musicians talked about songs and the way carpenters talked about their work. It was slightly foreign and coded, but more importantly, it was the same audible shorthand. My dad could rattle off something that contained five pieces of important information in one phrase. Just like carpentry, music is not only a craft, but a trade.
So my cry to those who have not learned their keys is to try once again. But this time, you won’t be taught to learn “your” keys, but to understand “the” keys. I believe that a big source of the aversion to studying music theory has to do with an excess of pedantry. There seem to be hundreds of ways to explain what keys are without actually disproving simpler explanations. And while I enjoy diving deep into music theory, what I don’t enjoy seeing is a beginning student frustrated because the information they are being given is unorganized. In other words, I like to teach the rules before the exceptions, which is the same way I like to learn.
In that spirit, I’d like to offer an explanation that is based in simplicity without simplifying to the point of being riddled with inaccuracies. The definitions I have below are not detailed. But detail isn’t the same thing as accuracy.
The first definition is very simple. The second definition is a little bit more detailed.
Definition One: Keys are groups of seven notes.
Definition Two: Keys are twelve different but specific combinations of seven-note groups chosen from a pool of twelves notes.
So there you have it. If the second description confuses you, just remember the first. The second description will make more sense as you learn more. And really, there could be a third, and a fourth, and so on. And then there are exceptions and differences of opinion. And this is where the pedantry snowballs into a giant boulder chasing down anyone who dares cross its path. So we’ll just keep our descriptions where they are. As you learn more about music, you can add to the description of what musical keys are. For now, don’t worry about it.
Visualizing and Understanding What Keys Are
A quick disclaimer: The word “keys” has two different meanings. First, there are musical keys, which are the groups of notes that I explained above. Second, there are piano keys, which are the physical objects you strike on the piano to make a note sound. For this reason, I will not be using the word in reference to the piano. Instead, I will only use the word “notes” for the piano, and the word “keys” only in reference to the subject of musical keys.
I find the piano to be a good visual representation of keys. If you don’t play piano, don’t worry. It simply provides a nice picture to work with.
Example 1
In example 1, there are 13 notes. Some are big white notes and some are small black notes. The first note (far left) and the last note (far right) are the same note. Repeat the pattern and you end up with with something that you may recognize (example 2). Each repetition is a new octave, which is another subject to discuss at another time.
Example 2
Many people see the piano keyboard and assume that the white notes are equidistant, and therefore the difference in pitch from one white note to the next is equal. Unfortunately, that’s not true. When you look at at a piano, it’s best to imagine it more like example 3, with the black notes occupying the same amount of space as the white notes.
Example 3
The white notes represent one of the twelve keys of music. Those white notes, when used together to create a musical piece, are a harmonic system comprised of seven notes (remember, the first and last note are the same note).
The very first note is referred to as “C” in a system of seven white notes, CDEFGABC (example 4). Why it is “C” is rather arbitrary, as it was just something that was chosen and agreed upon by human beings.
Example 4
The reason for the black notes is to allow compositions to be played with different tonal centers. For example, let’s explore the idea of starting everything on the next white note higher than C, the note D. If we try to recreate the same sound using only white notes, then everything falls apart. That is because the whole steps and half steps are no longer correct. The distances from one note to another are no longer consistent and the music sounds different.
In example 5, you can see that starting the pattern on D does not give us the same pattern of whole steps and half steps that we had with the C scale (indicated by the red Xs).
Example 5
Take for instance the following video.
Example One - First, I play a C Major scale, then a rendition of “Mary Had A Little Lamb” using only white notes.
Example Two - Then I play a scale starting on D, but you might notice it doesn’t sound quite the same as the previous Major scale. And “Mary Had A Little Lamb” sounds much different. I often joke in my lessons that the first version sounds more like “Mary HAS a Little Lamb,” while the second sounds like “Mary Truly HAD a Little Lamb.”
Example Three - I then make two adjustments and the song sounds normal again, although, slightly higher than the first version because I am using the note D as the center of focus, rather than C.
To make the song sound correct again, I made two adjustments: I changed two white notes to black notes. Those two small changes made it possible to replicate the same WWHWWWH pattern that was used for the C Major Scale. In example 6 you can see that with the change of F to F-sharp and C to C-sharp, the pattern of whole steps and half steps is restored, once again represented by the orange and green lines on the bottom.
Example 6
So that’s it. Those are keys in a nutshell. In all, there are twelve because there are twelve possible starting notes. You can start any Major scale on any of the seven white notes or the five black notes and as long as you follow the same pattern of WWHWWWH, you’ll end up with a Major scale, which represents a group of notes that make up a key.
Conclusion
With that said, I would like encourage practicing students to consider something. Instead of memorizing scales and key signatures so they become “your” keys, try to practice the skill of constructing “the” keys of music. I mean this with the idea that even if you have never played a G-sharp major scale in your life, you would be able to do it on your first try. All you have to do is follow the pattern of whole steps and half steps and become better at recalling it. Once you memorize something, you no longer have to think about it. And thinking about music is what we want to be practicing (see The Musical Genie).
If you are playing a guitar, try it on one string. A whole-step is two frets and a half-step is one fret (one of the first exercises in The Guitarist’s Palette).
WWHWWWH = 2212221
If you are playing a horn or a piano, practice your chromatic scale, then skip notes on the whole steps.
There is a lot of information that I have left out: the circle of fifths, scale degrees, modes, key signatures, minor keys, and octaves, to name a few. My goal was to keep this explanation as simple as possible. Not to teach you “your” keys, but for you to have an understanding of them.
I hope this clears up what keys are to those that found the information arbitrary. Thanks for reading and happy playing.