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Re: Song root + scale (4 Vocoder and stuff)?
| quote: | Originally posted by ReasonLover
How do you figure out your songs scale?
Let's say the bass line goes G# B E F# |
You really need to know your chords and scale positions to understand how to do this. You could go by the order of sharps, which is F# - C# - G# - D# - A# - E# - B#. Basically, if a major key has one of these sharps, it will also have every sharp to the left of it, but not necessarily to the right. The reason for that involves the circle of fifths but I'm not getting into that now, just trust me on this one.
Your example has G#, so the key must also have C# and F#. That's all we can learn from the sharps alone, and unfortunately there are three different keys that have those notes -- A major, E major and B major.
If you analyze your bassline according to each note's position in those three scales, it might help. Let's look at those three scales:
A major:
A - B - C# - D - E - F# - G#
1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 - 6 - 7
E major:
E - F# - G# - A - B - C# - D#
1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 - 6 - 7
B major:
B - C# - D# - E - F# - G# - A#
1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 - 6 - 7
If you take the bass notes and represent them as numbers according to their position in each of these scales, you get:
A major: 7 - 2 - 5 - 6
E major: 3 - 5 - 1 - 2
B major: 6 - 1 - 4 - 5
How this is useful in any way brings me to your next question:
| quote: | | And Root key is the note that is used most in the song? |
Not quite. First off you're thinking of the tonic, which is the note a scale is built off of. C major's tonic is C, F minor's tonic is F.. you get the idea.
Roots relate to chords -- chords are built off triads, which are three notes with an interval of a third between them. C's triad would be C-E-G, and C is the root.
Depending on what key you're in, a triad built off of C can be either major, minor, diminished or augmented. If you're in F major, the triad is major (C-E-G), but if you're in Bb major, it becomes minor (C-Eb-G), since E is flat in that key. In Db major it's diminished (C-Eb-Gb), both E and G are flat in that key.
A triad built off a certain position in a scale will always be major/minor/dim/aug. Triads built on 1, 4 and 5 in a major scale will always be major, while 2, 3 and 6 are minor. 7 is diminished. To picture it visually:
1 - Major
2 - Minor
3 - Minor
4 - Major
5 - Major
6 - Minor
7 - Diminished
That stays the same across all major scales. Minor scales and others are different, but let's stick with major for now.
Remember that numerical analysis thing above? If we assume each of the bass notes are playing the roots (which they typically do in EDM, but not always), then knowing what position they're in relative to the scales will also tell us what the chord progression is, which would help figure out the key. Neat, huh? So let's do that:
A major: 7 - 2 - 5 - 6
Following that chart above, we know 7 is diminished, 2 is minor, 5 is major and 6 is minor, so the chord progression would be G#dim, Bmin, Emaj, F#min. Not exactly a common progression. Let's try the other two:
E major: 3 - 5 - 1 - 2
G#min, Bmaj, Emaj, F#min
B major: 6 - 1 - 4 - 5
G#min, Bmaj, Emaj, F#maj
If you took the time to make each of those progressions in your DAW, you'll notice B major sounds the best. 6-1-4-5 is an extremely common progression.
Based off of that, the scale is most likely B major, but if the bass notes aren't playing the roots then it could be something else.
I guess you could also just use the order of sharps to figure out what keys it might be in, and then narrow it down by playing those scales over the song to see which fits the best. To each their own
..jesus fuck that's a long post, hopefully someone learns something from it haha.
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