3 Ways To Determine A Song’s Key

What key is this song in? This is one of the most asked questions during guitar lessons in El Dorado Hills when a guitar player would like to jam or play by ear. Guitar players can make out the ways to come across the key of a song with a handful of super simple techniques. Here, in this quick 3-step guide, we are going to learn a very easy technique of playing the right notes, although you do not know what key the song is actually in.

ü  Guess and play notes

One of the simplest techniques to improvise or play lead over a jam track, like say, one of the jam tracks, is to just play a note and guess with the ears. What this means is if you play a note over a jam track, you may intuitively listen to what sounds bad or good. This is for the reason that when you play a note that’s not in the key of the jam track, it is going to sound a little off, or disconnected, and it’ll be jarring.

However, when you play a note that shares the same key as the jam track, it’ll be in synchronization, and it’ll sound pleasing to the ears. The majority of the time you can just play a small number of notes up or down the fretboard and you will listen to the difference between a note that sounds good and the one that fits the key of the song. Give it a try!

ü  Sing the notes to stumble on the root

Singing the notes will help you stumble on the root note, and sooner or later, find out the key of the song. So if you hum the notes, or the riffs of the song you may find out which note sounds most like “home”, or which note sounds the best all the way through the whole song. You will be shocked by how many musicians do this and it truly works wonders.

Once you find that note, and it can take a bit of time, particularly if you have never done this before, and try and find it and play it on the guitar.

ü  Find out if the key is minor or major

Once you recognize the root note from singing it and playing around to find it on the fretboard, now you’ve to find out whether the jam track or song is in a minor or major key. The simplest technique to do this is to play a major or minor scale over the track. For instance, if you’ve decided that the root note is an A, you can play an A minor or A major scale over the track. You will observe that one scale will sound better than the other.

The scale that sounds better will let you know whether the song is in a minor or major key.

These are the three ways that you will learn during guitar lessons in El Dorado Hills that will help you find out the key of any song!