Quote:
Originally Posted by Black&Blue
Thanks for the correction Fretsource- I had meant to write C Myxolydian but got lost in the mechanics of typing.( Well thats MY excuse). Your broader point about the sequence that I wrote being in C- did interest me though. I find this part hard to understand- but I would have thought that the chords would have dictated a key signature of F (or Dmin) as they are the only keys that contain all those chords. I am inclined to think of C Myxolydian as a subset of F.
However a friend tells me that the two ideas have "nothing to do with each other". So this is where the ideas get a bit slippery. I'd certainly be interested in your comments on this.
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Although the chords can provide a good clue to the key of a song, the only thing that can really tell you the key is by hearing the key note and the chord built upon it. That's what a key is. It's a central note (and chord) around which a bunch of notes and chords can be arranged to produce 'tonal' music
Whatever that note and chord is - THAT'S the key.
So if I write a song with 3 chords: Am Dm and Em - and I play my song in such a way that everybody can hear that Aminor is the home chord that ends every verse, then the key of the song is A minor.
The key of this song has nothing to do with C major even though those three chords also appear in the key of C major. Your friend is correct. It's just a coincidence that they have the same notes. My song can't possibly be in C major because there's no C chord there acting as the central point or tonal centre. And even if there was a C major in the song, I chose A minor for that job of being the key centre, so the key can only be A minor.
As you pointed out, F major and C Mixolydian have the same notes (FGABbCDEF & CDEFGABbC) but there's a huge difference between them, and that difference is that they have different KEY CENTRES. In F major all those notes are made to relate to the key centre F and in C Mixolydian they're all made to relate to the key centre C. The fact that both scales have the same notes is about as significant as the words TAN and ANT having the same letters.
BTW - a good example of C Mixolydian is the end 'na na na' section of Hey Jude. The whole song is in C major using all the expected chords then it switches to C mixolydian C - Bb - F - C repeated for ages.
Despite having the same chords as a song in F major you can hear clearly that F isn't the main chord - it's C.
The bottom line is that what determines the key is the key centre, not the chords. But if you can't
hear which chord is functioning as the key centre, then the chord arrangement provides a good clue.