Do keys matter?

Y

YoungCapone

New member
(Beginner here)I made a simple melody in the piano roll of FL studio and started shifting it up one semitone at a time (keeping the intervals the same). I notice that there was no real difference in how the melody felt as I shifted it up or down. It made me think about why keys or octaves were important. I’ve heard some things about how historically, there were implications involving the way different instruments were made and what not, but in today's day and age does it really matter if we’re making music digitally?? I feel like what’s most important are relationships between notes (intervals). Thoughts???
 
YoungCapone said:
(Beginner here)I made a simple melody in the piano roll of FL studio and started shifting it up one semitone at a time (keeping the intervals the same). I notice that there was no real difference in how the melody felt as I shifted it up or down.
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Huh? Low notes should start to rumble.
 
When you transpose a tune (i.e. shifting the whole thing up or down), the relationship between the notes in a melody is preserved. If you are creating , say, EDM, then it doesn't really matter what key the medoy is written in.

You mentioned one consideration, which is the mechanical capability of musical instruments. If you are wirtingsay, orchestral scores, then you need to know what notes the various instruments are capable of reproducing.

Similarly, if you are expecting people to sing a melody, it has to be pitched within their voice range.
 
Songs are transposed to different keys all the time, and are still recognizable. In fact, it is quite common for a singer to lower the key of older songs as they age and their vocal range drops.

For vocalists, its very hard to impossible to correctly sing above or below your natural range. For an instrumentalist, it may require a complete reworking of chords into difficult positions. This can be fixed for guitar by adding a capo. A really good pianist can often transpose on the fly.

The melody is key to the song. If you just start singing a song, there's a good likelihood that anyone who hears you will recognize the melody of the song, regardless of the key. That assumes you stay in the major or minor, per the original song.

Transpose a song from a Cmajor to a Gminor and you'll get a completely different feel because, as you said, the intervals between the notes will change. Try changing "Hey Hey We're the Monkees" to a minor key and see if its the same song! Even better, listen to the Supreme's version of You Keep Me Hangin On (G#) and the Vanilla Fudge version (Em). There's quite a difference in the mood of the song based on the key.

In this respect, drummers have it easy!
 
As a whole, a song can be played in any key, and will sound basically the same. some people transpose songs when they cover them to have it match better their vocal range. But for me when writing music I never stick to one key I make music in all of them,
 
Shanecombs1993 said:
As a whole, a song can be played in any key, and will sound basically the same. some people transpose songs when they cover them to have it match better their vocal range. But for me when writing music I never stick to one key I make music in all of them,
Click to expand...
Over the years I played with various keyboardists, I noted that they tended to be the ones that treated keys with a certain mystical mojo quality. They would, almost without exception, get irritable at having to transpose to another key whereas guitarists and bassists just do so as a matter of course. Singer can't reach the notes in B flat ? Go down to A ! Ebm feels too awkward to play ? Try Em or Dm !
But I realize that keyboardists, especially the classically trained ones aren't being awkward. It really is just the way they are taught to approach a piece. The great composers of old made a point of naming their pieces with the key in the title and that meant that it was almost heresy to play "Zimbaga's fourteenth concerto in Dm" in Bm. With that in mind, some songs perhaps do take on a slightly different quality if the key is changed. Maybe it depends on how far up or down the key change is.
But I don't think it matters with original music because only the writer will ever know.
 
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