Major Minor

While I'm willing to concede that many of my readers are trained musicians and are therefore completely conversant with the difference between major and minor keys, indulge me a little. Isn't it fascinating how we innately understand the difference? How even when we were very small children we could 'feel' how a particular piece of music sounded happy or sad, and how the dichotomy is between happy and sad instead of, say, loving and hating or some other emotional split.

For non-musicians who are unfamiliar with the meaning, the technical difference between a major and a minor chord is a semitone, which is the smallest difference between two notes in western music. It's a small change, a half-step of the scale, but it makes as much difference to the sound of the music as playing it on an organ instead of a harp would.

A composer who wants a piece to be serious and maybe tragic would never consider writing it in a major key, and if he wanted a light piece, say, to celebrate a wedding, he would avoid a minor key in the same way. However, for an ambiguous, wry sound, it's possible to bend the third note of the scale from minor to major as part of the setting, and we hear that used in some blues music; the result is music that sounds like it's making fun of a miserable situation.

A couple of years ago I read about a new technology invented by an engineer at Celemony called Direct Note Access which would allow an audio engineer to go into an existing arrangement of multiple instruments and adjust a single note in a chord. It occurred to me that every album ever recorded might be fodder for manipulation, that well-known recordings could be modified so the singer changed the melody or the guitar solo played different notes. It did NOT occur to me that a whole song could be changed from minor to major or vice versa, but apparently it did occur to someone else. As an illustration of the importance of choosing whether to write in a major or minor key, I can not think of a better example. Here's The Doors' "Riders On The Storm" converted to a major key - remember, this is not a cover version, this is the original recording with the scale altered!



Major Scaled #3 : The Doors - " Riders On The Rainbow" from major scaled on Vimeo.