Hi there. I’ve been trying to learn tunes exclusively by ear as of late and have been making good progress. However, I’m starting to wonder if I’m missing something by not having much intuition about musical keys. It seems like a lot of players/teachers on YouTube call out a tune’s key which makes me think it must be important…
So after studying up a bit on music theory the past couple weeks, here’s my current understanding:
The “tonic” is the note that the tune wants to resolve to. I’m not quite sure I hear it as a “tonal center” yet, but I can definitely hear it as a good concluding note.
The “scale” then defines the note set (generally 7 note diatonic) in which a tune is comprised. The scale is what sets the vibe (happy, sad, somewhere in between).
The combination of the tonic and scale yields the key. So the “key of D” means D is the tonic and the scale is major.
There’s also “modes” which are just more scales. Major and minor scales are a subset of these seven modes.
How much of this should I be conscious of when listening to tunes?
It seems overly theory based but I keep seeing references to it from many players. Should I be able to hear the difference between two major keys? (e.g. key of C vs key of D). Or is it more common to just hear the difference between different types (e.g. major vs minor vs other mode)?
I don’t think it matters much, and you’ll hear many players say they don’t know about these things.
However when some of these same players compose a tune, it will follow all the “rules” of tune composition. I don’t think it’s because the person is conscious of the rules, but because they’ve played the same patterns over and over hundreds of times. Humans are really good at pattern recognition.
So whether or not players are consciously aware of keys and scales and chord progressions, they’re aware of them.
Many discussions on these boards over the years have shown that different people have different cognitive approaches to tune acquisition.
For me, when I’m picking up a tune by ear, which I can do quickly, probably the first thing I’m aware of is what scale the tune uses. It’s not the key, which for many tunes is debatable, but the scale, which isn’t.
For just one example, there’s a lot of tunes that use the scale
D E G A B
so as soon as I recognise this my fingers are conforming to the pattern of the tune, making it much faster to learn it.
Note that scale only has five notes, that is, Pentatonic. Tunes include The Kesh Jig and Amazing Grace (in G).
Then within a tune the first thing I’m recognising are arpeggios like D F# A or G B d etc. (You’re just saying every other letter.)
So I’ll have the arpeggio patterns under my fingers right away, say
D F# A, D F# A, E G B, E G B,
(the 3rd part of Atholl Highlanders).
What chords these arpeggios imply isn’t important, just recognise them and do them.
I think that getting my head around the notions of tonal center and modes, in particular, helped me a lot. I’m definitely more of an analytical thinker, so understanding the fundamental structures that underlie the music really helped me start to see patterns that made everything more predictable.
I actually had to learn this stuff intellectually before I really started to hear it, but now that I both understand it and hear it, I feel much better off.
I also found it helpful to recognize and understand the following four modes (Ionian, Mixolydian, Dorian, and Aeolean) and see them as degrees of majorness or minorness. Each has a distinctive flavor that you start to hear after a while, and of course, they tell you the pattern of intervals in the scale which greatly restricts the number of possible notes (ignoring accidentals, of course).
So I think it is helpful to know that Ionian/Major has a major 3rd, 6th and 7th, Mixolydian has a major 3rd and 6th and a minor 7th, Dorian has a minor 3rd and 7th, and a major 6th, and Aeolean/Minor has a minor 3rd, 6th and 7th. So they are getting progressively more minor as you go. The other modes are much less common in ITM, so you don’t really need to know about them.
There are a lot of tunes that are ambiguous about their mode because they only contain 5 or 6 notes of the scale, as pancelticpiper illustrated.
For me, as an analytical thinker, it really helps to have some organizational principles like this to help simplify the potential complexity. In the very beginning it seems like the music is an arbitrary sequence of notes, but once you understand that tunes are in a restricted number of modes and rhythmical patterns, you can see that the complexity is massively simplified. There are accidental notes and unusual tunes, but these represent relatively rare exceptions that are not too difficult to keep track of.
So basically, I guess what I’m trying to say is that structure is extremely valuable in combating complexity, even when there are exceptions to the rules.
I’ll agree with both points of view. It’s possible to play the music without much knowledge of theory, but the theory can be helpful, in different ways to different people. I find it most helpful to know the key and the mode. As pancelticpiper says, the scale also plays a part, but I’ve picked that up mostly through intuition rather than study. The tonic mostly just falls into place, I don’t know that you need to focus on hearing which note it is, it becomes obvious as you play.
As far as I know, most people learn to hear the difference between various modes, but from my experience most people can’t hear what key a tune is in. That depends on your ear though. My dad can’t hear the difference between one key and another, whereas I can pin down Amaj, Dmaj, and Gmaj with relative ease. The more you hear each key played, the easier it becomes to recognise in other tunes.
I imagine most players call out the key so that the guitar/rhythm backers know what key to build their harmony around.
Yes. I started learning tunes from Robin Williamson’s The Penny Whistle Book and right from the start he gives examples of those and names the mode and home note for the scale for each tune. I’m not sure why I found this useful when starting out, probably that how tunes ‘work’ was a mystery and like paddler says learning stuff intellectually suited me.
Now I find it useful when picking up a tune by ear to recognise the home note for the key (maybe when it gets to the end the first time) and then identify which of the likely options for the other notes are in use. I think it also helps understand the occasional tune that doesn’t end on the home note and to recognise any accidentals as not being from the scale.
It’s surprising how many people with formal music training have trouble find a place for mixolydioan and dorian modes in their theoretical compass (and look at me as being nerdy when i just shrug and sat ‘dorain mode’). Conversely harmonic and melodic minor scales are things I don’t come across much.
From david_h, “recognizing the home note”, and from Panceltic Piper “arpegios” (i.e. chords). PPiper also has mentioned in the past, noticing the rolled notes.
Knowing or noticing the key/mode, makes some things easier. For example in minor (aka dorian) tunes, the tonic is the A or E, but the chord structure is very frequently Aminor/Gmajor or Eminor/Dmajor. You can hear it, but knowing how typical it is, allows you to guess ahead of time. In arpeggio terms, that would be A-C-e and G-B-d, or in rolls, maybe: A~ and G~
But, as an ear-learner, you’ll do fine by listening.
It does no harm to learn as much about them as you find interesting, but you may manage fine with very little knowledge of them at all. If someone tells you what key a tune is in, it helps improve the odds of you selecting the right flute or whistle to play it on to make the fingering easiest, though you may still run out of notes and need to switch to something perhaps a fourth or fifth lower or higher, but having a range of instruments in different keys to select from certainly reduces the amount of learning you have to do. If you only have one instrument and it’s chromatic, then you need to develop more skill to handle all the different keys, which is where practising scales becomes important for setting all those standard patterns in your head. When someone then calls out the key for a tune, that then switches your brain straight into the right pattern of fingering for it.
(With some instruments, a lot of the difficulty is caused by design choices. There are twelve sets of keys with different fingerings on a standard piano, but with a little redesign that could be reduced to just two. It isn’t possible to match that simplicity on a flute, but with the right kind of keys (the things you press) you could have only three sets of fingerings to learn, though with varying complications when switching between octaves. Each key (the thing you press) would need three positions: fully down, up but with a hole in the top of the key covered (equivalent to half-holing, but with precise tuning guaranteed), and up with the hole in the top of the key open. That would use six fingers and be fully chromatic. Another option might be to have four notes per finger by having an extra note triggered by raising the finger even higher to push a lever that opens an extra hole. That would be fully chromatic while using only four fingers, and you’d only have to learn four sets of fingering patterns. I wonder if anyone’s ever tried to make one.)
Yeah, I’ve personally found that learning about theory helps immensely with my playing. I like being able to track the chord progression and know the relationship between the note I’m playing and the chord that’s playing behind me. It helps me remember, on the spur of the moment, which note to play.
And on a more basic level, knowing which key I’m in is vital. My brain has to mentally switch to “G mode” or “D mode,” for example – I’m not going to play the right notes otherwise. E.g., I have to think “ok, I’m in G, so I generally move fingers R1 and R2 together, and there’s a Cnat.” Or “okay, I’m in Dmix now, so I pretend I’m in G, except D is my home base, and I’m more likely to play F#.” Etc.
Yes I certainly agree that consciously knowing theory is helpful. When I hear a new tune I’m aware of its scale and key and chord-changes, and when I hear arpeggios I’m aware of what chord they imply. I think it makes picking up new tunes faster and more accurate.
However it’s become clear over the years that consciously knowing theory isn’t necessary.
The reason I think recognising a tune’s scale is more helpful, in practice, than deciding upon what key the tune is in is that tons of people in the ITM world debate keys and/or are unaware of keys. On The Session tons of tunes are listed in the wrong keys, which makes searching tunes by key next to useless.
I think what people do is use the key signature that allows the scale they want to be generated, then look up somewhere what that key signature is said to be called. I just posted a tune in B minor that people were listing as being in A Major due to them using a key signature of three sharps. (Since the note G doesn’t appear in the tune specifying G# doesn’t even make sense.)
Being able to recognise a tune’s key, but not being able to recognise a tune’s scale, can lead to the result of playing wrong notes, notes that are part of the key but not the scale, due to it being a gap-scale (hexatonic or pentatonic) tune.
One example is a guy who picked up Jenny’s Chickens and, recognising that the tune appeared to be in B minor, dutifully played it in a full B minor scale complete with the note D all over the place.
Actually the tune is in the hexatonic B scale
B C# E F# G A
which, lacking the 3rd, is neither Major nor minor. (There are tons of tunes which people refer to as “minor” and guitarists chord as minor but are in a scale that’s missing the 3rd.)
This helps a lot. One of the things I was curious about is how loose the term “major” and “minor” were used versus referring to more specific dorian, mixolydian, … Sounds like it’s a mixed bag depending on who you’re talking to.
This is where I think it is very helpful to understand the four modes I mentioned earlier. Ionian mode is basically what most people would call the major scale. Often, people will just say a tune is in D or G, when it is in D major or G major. The major or ionian mode terminology is just left implicit.
Things get more problematic when people talk about minor tunes. Strictly speaking, the natural minor scale is equivalent to the aeolian mode. However, in ITM there are a lot of tunes that are in dorian mode.
For example, E dorian and A dorian tunes are particularly common. You often hear people refer to these as E minor and A minor, but you have to be careful with that. Tunes in dorian mode have a major 6th, whereas the natural minor/aeolian has a minor 6th. So in the case of E minor tunes, do they have a C natural or a C#. If its a C#, then its dorian.
This is particularly relevant for players of backing instruments who can quickly become unpopular if they unknowingly play the wrong chords!
There a various reasons people might call a dorian tune minor. One is that the third is minor, and for many people anything with a minor third sounds definitively minor.
Another may be that the tune doesn’t actually contain the 6th, and so it is ambiguous whether it is dorian or aeolian. But if anyone uses chords that contain a 6th, that ambiguity has been broken, so we have a situation in which everyone in the group really needs to agree for a performance, even if the tune itself isn’t definitively one or the other.
Much of this is not really an issue for flute players, but I think it is interesting to know about.
Each of the modes has its own sound, which you can fairly quickly pick up on in ear training. Once the major/ionian sounds familiar, then listen for the subtle difference in sound that comes with the minor 7th of the mixolydian mode tunes. It is distinctive, but not really minor sounding to most people.
And once you can recognize that, then listen for the difference that a minor 3rd makes in dorian mode tunes. To most people that does sound minor, but there is still a subtle difference between that and the natural minor / aeolian with its minor 6th too.
Eventually, you should be able to hear these differences regardless of what key the tune is in. I don’t really like talking about key, actually, because I think it is a bit misleading. The notion of key and key signature are too closely linked, and that just causes confusion.
Instead, I think it is better to focus on finding the tonal center of the tune, and then figuring out the mode/scale. The former is basically a matter of distinguishing between tonal center pitches, whereas the latter is a matter of recognizing the pattern of intervals in the tune’s scale. And these are orthogonal concepts.
Whether it helps you to have terminology to describe these concepts, and a formalism for explaining how they interrelate, probably depends on how you think. Many good musicians can recognize these distinctions directly in the music, by ear, and hence don’t see much need for the theory and terminology. But others, like me, find it much easier to train our ears when we have some idea of what we are supposed to be listening for.
Pancelticpiper’s last post reminds me that for me being aware of the five-note and six-note scales is almost as important as the modes. As a melody player I may not pay attention to why a guitar player’s chord sounds wrong but I often register something unwanted when a (often modern) version of a tune fills in the gap. There are also tunes that seem to use this as a ploy to catch the listener - often mixolydian tunes that only use the seventh note once after I have got used to the ambiguity of it not being there.
Almost certainly more that most people need/want can be found at Scales and Modes in Scottish Traditional Music (browser may give a security warning but it seems safe enough) There are lots of example tunes in ABC format that illustrate the sound of the various scales. Focused on Scottish tunes but seems to apply to much western european traditional music.
I’d say only worry about it if you’re struggling with an aspect of tune learning or playing with others. Or if you’re curious to learn more about music theory.
If not, you can get along fine without it. I learned to play as a youngster with no idea what notes I was playing, let alone what key a tune was in. I used my ears and instinct, and doubt I’d have been a better player for knowing theory or how to read music.
The only time key comes up in sessions is when someone asks for the name of a tune they’ve heard us play. They look it up online, find there are transcripts in two or three keys, and ask what key we play it in. It’s never got any more technical than that; no one calls the key either, the accompanist either knows the tune or they don’t.
This is exactly how I’m thinking of key now: tonic + note distribution around that tonic.
I actually found it very confusing on how many definitions of modes are given relative to the major scale. For example, I would read “D Dorian is C Major starting on D”. While this is true, I find it more intuitive to interpret “D Dorian” as “Tonic D with distribution that is not major, minor, but it’s own thing”. I’m probably ignorant to a lot of other theory, defining modes in terms of major and minor really confused me at first.
For me, that is both more intuitive and captures the spirit of what this is all about.
The tonic is just a matter of determining an overall pitch at which the tune is centered. Conceptually, its the same tune whether its is played in C, D, E, etc. Choosing a different tonal center just pitches the tune up or down a tone or two. And if you have a quiver of flutes in different keys, doing this becomes trivial (just tying this back to one of your early questions about why people might want flutes in different keys).
The distribution of notes around the tonal center (the mode) is something different entirely. This is what imbues the tune with its particular mood or feeling. And this mood or feeling is something that you should try to train your ear to recognize.
The natural major and minor scales are just two of many possible modes. They are no more important or special than the other modes commonly used in ITM … of which there are basically 4 in total. Perhaps the most significant aspect of the major/ionian is that our flutes and whistles are structured that way, with the bell note as the tonic. But that doesn’t stop us playing in other modes if we use other tonics. The choices we have are obviously restricted by the notes we have available, and it is no coincidence, that the modes and tonics we end up with happen to be most of the most common ones in ITM.
Eventually, you’ll be able hear the mood and determine the mode quite intuitively and that will give you lots of clues about the scale, or about what notes/chords are appropriate in a backing context. Of course, you can just list out the notes in the scale and not worry about what the particular mode is called etc, but I think it helps to know that there is a finite and fairly small number of fundamental patterns that capture nearly all of the tunes (again ignoring the accidentals). After a while you start to group the tunes and get a good feeling for how they are related, and this really helps to cut down the complexity.
I agree with paddler but think of two main aspects.
The distribution of notes around the tonal centre is the important one - the mood or feeling of the tune.
For me the relationship to the major scale allows shortcuts when thinking analytically about the tune - and I count almost any thought about the names of notes as analytical. With a whistle or unkeyed flute there are two major scales that come naturally once we are beyond early beginner stage. Typically D and G. The only mode ‘positions’ I can remember straight off are that dorian starts one note up from major scale and aeolian two notes down. So a tune that has E as home note is either E dorian or E aeolian (‘E minor’ to those who did music at school). So we just have to check if its C# or C natural. Home notes of B or A are easy as there is only one option - but if A and things are not working bear in mind we may need to half-hole an F natural. Anything else is unusual. If it sounds unusual it it may be a another mode, if it sounds ‘normal’ we probably need a different whistle or a keyed flute
I can figure it out or look at piano keys, but I can’t really remember which numbered note of the major scale defines the mode.
I notice that each mode is a fifth up from the tonic chord, starting with major and moving towards increasing “minor-ish” feeling:
Major, Major-ish, Minor-ish, Minor
Ionian, Mixolydian, Dorian, Aeolian
D → A → E → B
You can go backward by 4ths to get the same thing. These thoughts come from my abandoned experience as a three-chord folk guitarist: Tonic, Fifth up, Fifth down. More formal or trrained musicians are pretty good at understanding chord progressions with numbers, like: I IV V.
As I said, I can figure it out, but I remember my guitar fingers playing: D-G-D-A, D-G-A7-D
It’s just occurred to me that the other thing I can remember when playing but rarely have to apply is that mixolydian in 5 notes up the scale from major. So A and D mixolydian are available with the familiar set of notes on a D whistle or flute.
For me, that is both more intuitive and captures the spirit of what this is all about.