FiddleHed Network

Hi Lisa, yes, what great depth shared with transposing in various ways. 🙂 Thanks for sharing how this sits with you.
That is a great point leading from this subject. We’ll take note of this for a future post/lesson.

For now, I’ll share my process for identifying the key of a song from listening to it.
-I’ll utilize my instrument, and work on identifying what notes are in the song (even just in the first section or so), and I write down all the different notes I locate (ex: Let’s stay together by Al Green: A, B flat, C, E, F, D, G).
-Once I have a decent range of notes written, I go to my ‘Circle of Fifths’ chart and see what key, in relation to those notes (specifically the sharp/flat notes within those notes I wrote) and narrow down the potential key signatures (ex: F major or D minor).
-From there, I would try to guess the feeling of the song, whether major or minor (also recognizing the key could change throughout song) (Ex: mostly major).
-One thing to note when identifying the notes in a song, there could be some notes added which are not related to the key that the song is in, so I’d also try to keep that in mind and if i think that has happened, I will write that note down outside of the main range of notes I am writing from the song (ex: D flat)
-I’ll also try playing the associated scale with what I have narrowed down and see if the scale ‘matches’ the sound of the tune.

This is a great topic to go further into. Thanks for mentioning it.