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Blocs Wave and the minor key conundrum
Hello folks
Does anyone have a clue how to choose a major key in Blocs Wave. For some reason it always makes my selection a minor key. Any suggestions?
Comments
I think is only minor as changing key of audio is close to impossible. If a chord of 3 audio notes is minor is 1 file to make it a major chord would involve changing pitch on one note but not the other two. There may be PC/Mac software that can make a stab at doing this to separare notes in sungle audio file but I think seeing anything like that on iPad is a way off. If you put a major chord in changing "minor" to other minor key it will stay major. Not sure why they labeled it minor instead of just the key
yeah - the developer said when it was released that only minor key options right now.
They're a melancholy bunch....
No worries. From here on in I shall predominantly write songs of sadness! Cheers for the info people's.
I never really got bothered by it....what's that say about my songs
Enharmonic equivalent of a minor, like Am = CM etc. Right?
http://musicnotation.org/tutorials/enharmonic-equivalents/
I assume they're just doing a pitch shift in which case if you put a loop in the relative major and label it as its relative minor, so for example put a C major scale loop in but tag it as A minor you should be able to transpose it around properly although I haven't tried it so I'm not sure.
That does make sense. I will give it a try. Cheers helpful people.
Out of interest, when we looked into making this decision, we surveyed a bunch of music in crucial Spotify music categories.We found a huge percentage of the most successful tunes, to be in minor keys (At the time this was 85% minor). This may have changed now slightly, but it's an interesting find, even 'happy' tunes we're seemingly in minor keys ( or major and minor ie. 'Pharrells happy' for example.
The problem with playing the relative major of a minor chord is that you'll inadvertently get the minor 7th interval (g in the key of c). You may or may not want that.
And 'Happy Birthday'
The Pitch shift is working on the phrase as a whole so it doesn't care whether the phrase is major, minor, diminished, Maj 7 whatever. In order for it to pitch shift, all it needs is the root note, this means that you can pitch shift any scale using blocs wave without changing the scale type of the original.
The type of scale (maj, min) is only relevant when pairing loops/samples.
My main problem is that a ton of my loop libraries for some inordinate reason have the loops in major scale. While it works when using only imported samples and putting them in their relative keys it doesn't gel well with the factory loops or actual minor key samples.
Just out of curiosity, how exactly did you research this? Because I would actually be very surprised if it really was the case that 85% of any type of popular music was in minor keys.
In fact, harmonically it's almost certainly the opposite, the most common chord progressions are I - IV - V, and I - vi - IV - V, with cadences on the major chord. Minor cadences, such as i - VI - VII are less common.
In R&B the vocal melody is often based on the blues scale, but this is usually sung over major chords. So while the vocal melody might have a minor key feel, the harmonic backing is still in a major key. And since Blocs Wave is about creating the backing track, you might want to reconsider your approach, or at least double-check your research, because unfortunately I think that the conclusion you have come to isn't really correct.
I completely concur. I love that you used a data driven approach but I have to believe that your methodology skewed the data somehow. I've played in both cover bands and original bands from multiple genres--and I play two songs in a major key for every one song in a minor key.
I'm another one just hoping for an easy option one day (easy for me, not for devs) of more scales, including Major
It wasn't a super sized survey. We literally, on that day, surveyed Spotify to resolve a debate we were having. We had to prioritise, so we picked 6 genres that we wanted to focus on, and we sat down and wrote out the harmony for them (6 tunes in each genre). A few members of our team are pretty nifty at this.
We're were surprised ourselves. Either way, this does NOT mean major is not important, it was just a way to move forward.
We've got major on our list for sure. Out of interest, some of the tunes we found on spotify didn't even have a third chord. What is coming of the modern music world!
Punks with their three chords were over-rated. One chord music is the new Punk
Sniffin' Glue, 1977:
Guys, I think the Blocs Wave team is talking about EDM. Don't forget they're in Europe where the club and pop scene could be different. EDM and Dunstep indeed are minor chords 80% of the time. When you're talking "1-4-5", you're talking about "Runber Soul" perhaps or indie pop. I'm pretty sure they must have surveyed some FL studio guys to come to that conclusion.
Hey @telstar electronic music represented only a portion of our sample survey in spotify. The rest was: Rock ,hip hop, pop/producer , alt Indie, house/ techno , electronic. As I say, far from a perfect survey, but useful for us, and with some surprising results. Safe to say, Blocs Wave is not focused on edm and dub step creation, although it can do it well. Launchpad is a bit more focused on that as its free. Blocs Wave should be more diverse and eclectic, hence, evolving how our keys work is certainly on our to do list.
Hi @Launchpadforios - really loving Blocs Wave so many thanks. Would you consider an enhancement to allow slice sizes to be manually adjusted - like in Samplr? Also the ability to set a small loop name under each sample, all mine say "imported" which makes it difficult to remember which is which. Keep up the great work.
We're listening to all slicer feedback right now. I think people are still getting used to it, so will add this one to the pot. It sounds to me like you're kinda asking for transient detection, selection, and moving of transient points. Which are all very useful things.
This makes sense, and we've been thinking about adding it sooner that we first thought. You might get this pretty soon.
I would love auto transient detection and selection in Blocs Wave, because it would build on the intuitive-but-powerful approach that you've already established with this app vs the more "fiddly" other slicer apps.
@launchpadforios: Still, a survey can only go so far. In pop music, as in jazz , so often minor resolves to dominant and major chords. Not being able to input major chords limits the app severly.
This limitation is pretty major.
The limitation is minor, it's the work to change it that is Major
Well done.
Weller done.
Cool to hear about the approach @Launchpadforios, thanks for sharing. Love this stuff. I have to wonder if the team was leaning minor already and there was some confirmation bias in there; particularly when talking about songs with 2-4 chords, they key and scale can be somewhat open to interpretation.
Sidebar along the lines of what @richardyot was saying... I remember one day in the 90s being blown away by how many 'sad' songs (or moody or melancholic or brooding songs) were made up of primarily major chords.
hahahahahahahahahahaha
I'm enjoying the app, but to make it more useful for a conventional musician, please include major keys. It's kind of like a paint program where you can import green, but not really use it with the other colors.
If I'd designed the app from scratch, the root note and key would be two separate components of the loop. Major, Minor, and Neutral keys. You can filter out major or minor keys to eliminate what isn't going to work for your loop.