The death of the key change
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tedium.co
You can especially note that when it comes to harmonies, and harmonic shifts (aka key changes) are not the only aspect that has been greatly simplified. Elaborate harmonies are just not a thing anymore.
And that's not just the typical effect that old generations cannot relate as much to the music of new generations. No, it's that today's taste - which, of course, has been mostly shaped by the exposure to today's music - appreciates songs that are, from a musician's perspective, much simpler in almost every aspect. The only exception that I can think of is that the performance capabilities of the singer have been put much more in the focus, so you can find songs today that are really difficult to sing well. This is mostly true for female performers, though, and the beginnings of that trend can probably be traced back to Whitney Houston and especially Mariah Carey, who made a certain Coloratura-style of singing fashionable.
I think hardly anyone will dispute the observation that today's music business is much more professionalized than it had already been since the beginning of recording technology. And that goes to tell. It really _is_ a business, and the process of producing a hit song has been streamlined tremendously.
Of course, we need to keep in mind that the focus of the article (as well as my comment) is on chart pop music. And of course, this is a big-picture kind of observation, not claiming that you couldn't cite some (however, rare) exceptions here and there. A thriving alternative scene with much more elaborate song writing has never ceased to exist, but that's not what gets played on your average top-40 radio station (for the youngens: "streams").
For example the article mention more different keys are used today.
Key changes used to be something most bands handled easily, and the best songwriters got a lot of mileage out of it.
As everybody has a more individual selection of music, due to easy and cheap access to almost all published music ever, the common denominator becomes smaller.
I don’t think music is becoming dumber overall.
People have been saying that as long as popular music have existed. Jazz was considered dumb and unsophisticated, crooners were considered dumb and unsophisticated, rock music was considered dumb and unsophisticated.
Each of these genres just discard previous measures of sophistication and introduce their own. The article have an interesting observation about "vertical" vs "horizontal" songwriting. Newer music is just different.
Kendrick Lamar is not dumbed down compared to Bon Jovi just because he doesn't change the key before that last chorus.
"Lute players spend half their time tuning and the other half playing out of tune"
If you look at the demographics of top 40 listeners today compared to forty years ago, the popularity of the hits are more narrowly confined to teens and young adults, particularly in the working class US and in developing Latin American countries. You can also look at the ethos of the top genres, such as rap and country, which are less broadly appealing than popular genres of the past such as rock, R&B, or even jazz.
This is driven by economics. Young people have more free time than adults, and they have greater access to music than they did in the pre-Internet age. So unless we think young music streamers have comparable taste to music-buying adults of the past, it seems likely that dumbing down to a certain point to meet the audience's expectations is more profitable than the alternative.
I didn't know that. Can you point me to the source of these numbers? I would like to know more.
> If you look at the demographics of top 40 listeners today compared to forty years ago, the popularity of the hits are more narrowly confined to teens and young adults
So how do I look at these demographics and confirm this claim?
There are always competing forces pulling music towards simplicity and complexity. Whenever the complexity is squashed in one place it comes back in another.
The biggest change over the last decade or so has been increasingly ornate production. In the 80s mixes were semi-automated, but you couldn't do much except change levels. Now you can automate everything - levels, EQ, EQ type, effects, effect parameters - with extreme precision and accuracy.
So most modern mixes have constant subtle changes. They don't leap out like a key change, but (for example) the vocal tone and the effects on the vocal will often change phrase by phrase. Or even word by word.
Listen to a 100 gecs or other hyperpop song and listen to some of rhythmic motifs being used. This isn’t a fringe genre either, it’s hugely popular with gen z. It may not have key changes like a rock ballad, but it has lots of musical ideas which songwriters from the last 60 years never even had access to.
I think one way to categorize music is harmony focused (European classical music) or rhythm focused (African tribal music).
In the last 30 years we've seen a big shift towards more rhythm based music, especially in electronic music.
I don't think it's just a fad, I think it's deeper, rhythm can put the brain in a trance like state, this is harder to do with harmonies.
Reason for this is that most instruments could only fill part of the spectrum. Organ being one notable exception. Still, even on organ, to fill the whole spectrum, multiple notes need to be played at the same time. So, harmony was very important to produce a full sound.
Today, a single synth can fill the whole frequency spectrum by playing just one note. So, to have a full sound, harmonies aren't necessary anymore.
I think that's a niaive analysis of a lot of popular music. If I listen to Justin Beiber or Sam Fender or Taylor Swift, their songs often contain very rich harmony, not necessarily (but definitely including) vocal harmonies but across instrumentation, deviation from the 4-chord song and even a lot of mixing of influences in, what I have to say, are some very unique and refreshing ways that I have either not heard before or certainly not in the mainstream.
I think most people just have getting old syndrome. The stuff I listened to when I was in my formative years was great and everything since then not so much.
I'm personally very pleased with the quality of new music without having to like all of it.
I think vocal harmonies affect people differently for the same reasons people find vocals so compelling: we have wetware devoted to the human voice. It isn't just another instrument, perceptually, at least for most people.
Even within the pop world, contemporary percussion/drumming is often significantly more complex than in the past (and outside the pop world, almost always).
Some musicians also find timbre rather exciting, and the possibilities (and usage) here have also expanded significantly over the last 60 years.
Neither of the lists was based on sales by the way, since the state media monopoly was supposedly non-commercial.
Anyway the Sweden top 20 stuff stayed dance-based (think jitterbug, not rave). Somewhere someone started talking about the key change. Even non-musichians learned to hear and point out the key change (easy, almost always the last refrain). Sweden top 20 leaned in to it. More humor oriented songs now include the key change in the lyrics ("here comes the pull-up).
Also, as a bass player. I don’t care. I mean, I’ll whine if you go to Gb, but it’s mostly just for form. Any awkwardness in fitting low lines on the instrument is more than made up by telling a guitar player to play the Cb chord.
Some songs did them in a way that was predictable, just following the formula of others, but some did them really well.
One stand-out example, to me, is how Seal closes the song “People Asking Why” (around the 3:16 mark):
With his vocal range, he was one of the few that could pull something like that off.
If chord changes had become more, not less popular, I'm sure that the rise of digital production would be cited as the reason, since it makes it much easier to modulate all the instruments.
I think a better hypothesis is what was alluded to in the editorial at the end:
> Say what you will about key changes. Maybe you find them at best heavy-handed and at worst trite. I know that I often do.
They have just fallen out of fashion as being gimmicky.
I don't really buy that vertical production would kill the key change. After all, beat switches are alive and well. We still have verses and choruses and interludes and beat drops.
Sorry - Cant get to link but there's a canadian musician on yt that plays guitar solos for quite some time over the same looped backing tracks. Lovely stuff.
The difficult part is finding a nice change and the right chords and notes to work as a bridge. Also if sung, not getting out of range.
Can relate to that.
On guitar, what I come up with will more likely be a progression — which then gets layered (horizontal first). On Ableton, it usually starts with layering a loop before I build it over time (vertical first).
Key changes are so common in Eurovision songs that it is mentioned in the ultimate Eurovision spoof song "Love Love Peace Peace", which also features at least one key change: https://youtu.be/Cv6tgnx6jTQ
The reports of the death of the key change, dare I say, are greatly exaggerated.
Eurovision is hugely popular and continuously and commercially successful outside of the charts world.
In Swedish, this key change is generally called a "schlagerhöjning", where "schlager" [2] is the broad genre word for the type of songs that compete in the Eurovision. The term is old, obviously there's a rather wide genre spread these days but it used to be more same-same.
Edit: added a "Swedish" above, I did not realize that the chart only lists Swedish music, saw another comment mention this. Very weird of me.
[1]: https://sverigesradio.se/topplista.aspx?programid=2023&date=...
Also there are local musicians popular in each country. And there are musicians from countries other than the US that are international but unknown in the US.
Anyway, Eurovision is quite irrelevant in Europe too :)
Edit... for native English speakers, consider this: there're songs in which the lyrics are more important than music. That kind of music is usually boring if you can't understand what they're saying.
Look at the Billboard (or equivalent) charts for Germany, France, Argentina, or any other non-Anglo country; maybe 10% of the entries are English language or from American artists.
Historically I would say that to be an accurate statement. It used to be a Eurovision-staple.
The latest few years though, I’ve been surprised that literally none of the songs making it to the finals have key-changes like this any more.
When it’s usage is decimated, even in Eurovision-songs, I think that clearly shows the author has a solid point.
But key changes are not popular in popular (sic) songs. Very few EuroVision songs transition to the radio/....
You can easily tell which songs were mostly influenced by a singer (made for them) or by a producer (made for plays/profit). Stuff which is popular with singer, elaborate vocal constructions don't typically make for a good song.
Which is why you need a producer to say NO to the singer if you want a popular song. Of course, the singer can be the producer, but it's a different skill set.
In Eurovision though, the cheese is part of the fun.
But it isn't just key changes that have gone away. We used to let drummers speed up and slow down with the emotion of the song. Now we want everything on a grid for ease of production, we pitch-correct even when it isn't really needed, we sample sounds rather than have real musicians play. The result of all that is that songs have a narrower envelope of variation, and they tend to be more simplistic.
Though with traditional vinyl the pitch can shift as one record is sped up or slowed down to match the tempo of another. It can be challenging to simultaneously match both the tempo and tuning of two vinyl records.
As noted in the article, grid-based tools do seem to be designed to facilitate loop-based production. But Logic is also frequently used for soundtracks and certainly supports key and tempo changes. Moreover the chromatic piano grid used in many DAWs and sequencers seems more key agnostic than a staff with a key signature. Not only that, but some DAWs (Ableton Live for example) are very good at processing samples so that their rhythm and tuning can easily be adjusted.
That can't be true, surely? Only one number one song with a key change in a whole decade? (I assume we're talking US charts?)
Crazy by Gnarls Barkely has some nice key changes but it only got to number 2 apparently.
Starts and ends in the same key. There's some minor<->major mode shifting over the course of the song, but the tonic remains the same.
https://flypaper.soundfly.com/produce/the-flurry-of-harmonic...
(btw whoever invented the name "parallel key" for majors and minors with the same tonic did a terrible job)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZnRxTW8GxT8
That song makes everything else look like amateur hour. Somehow it hit #4 on the Billboard Top 100 in 1983.
I think I'll stick to bluegrass. In G.
(FWIW I write songs with key changes all the time (usually tonic->dominant). If only someone would listen to them ...)
And maybe it just winds up with a dedicated niche audience. Never fully mainstream, but never out of the current culture either. It's hard to predict what people will like in the future. The best we can do is just do things we like.
I feel personally attacked whenever I want to learn a song, and it has a key change in the middle of it.
Yes, key changes went away in US pop music at some point a few decades ago.
But the idea that this has to do either with hip-hop or with digital music production is frankly ludicrous, and the author presents zero causal evidence here except that all three things happened very roughly around the same time. And the proposed explanations make zero sense.
The real answer is simply that the shifting the key up in a dramatic energy-raising fashion just went out of style, like a thousand other things in music. As the author themself notes, they're "heavy-handed" and "trite". I could add corny, old-fashioned, and overly earnest to that list.
Everything in music gets overdone and then fades away to make room for the next new thing. There's no more reason needed for this than people just got tired of the old thing -- which they always will.
Claiming it's because of hip-hop or digital music is just strange.
Part of it is driven by the need to make production cheaper (since music is less profitable now), so it's hard to say if it will come back.
Also, key changes present some increased difficulty (not insurmountable of course) in live performance on certain instruments like guitars. And the fact is (at least frontman) music artists are getting less talented at their instruments on average
If you listen to top 40 only, then maybe. (Although a lot of top-40 music back in the 70's was pretty bad too. We only continue to listen to the cream of the crop from back then, not the average radio station song.)
But if you're listening to top 40 music these days, well that's your fault. Outside of it, there's never been more complexity and variety and interest and genre-mixing in the history of music than today. You're not stuck with the radio, you've got Spotify and the stuff you can find outside of the mainstream is amazing.
Modern music is watered down and simple. The drums are all 4x4, the chords are all the same, the progressions are predictable, etc. I'm not talking about just a genre using a particular set of chords, I am talking about literally being able to predict the next note using only 10 seconds of audio. Moreover, there is so much tooling around making absolutely talentless hacks sound good (auto-tune, quantization, very clever filtering) it's hard to actually know if someone is even real sometimes.
More than ever I've also noticed modern music videos are simply advertisements for luxury brands. I just think the new generation lacks the sophistication to enjoy good music. Every generation since the invention of arguably the highest most supreme form of musical arrangement, orchestral arrangement, has resulted in slowly stripping away any sort of intellectual endeavor listening music had held. There's a reason classic rock is called classic rock and stuff made in the 90s onward doesn't qualify. It was probably the last period of time where music actually required talent rather than a ghost writer and an advertising deal. This isn't just my age speaking. I suspect in 50 years people will still remember Zeppelin, but no one will remember Jay-Z.
Of course rock made in the 1990s is classic rock now. That's how it works: Music made when the target demographic was in its teens and young adulthood is classic, and the music from the era when the currently dying generation was young gets aged out. When was the last time you heard Dion and the Belmonts on terrestrial radio? How about Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers? That's music. That's how all this works. Soon enough, Jay-Z will be in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. I mean, if Jelly Roll Morton (look him up, kiddo) can make it, they obviously abandoned the "Rock and Roll" part of their name long ago.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Rock_and_Roll_Hall_of_...
Jay-Z, on the other hand, is in the main category.
However, in modern times, the barrier to entry of record an album is virtually 0. You can make a masterpiece in your bedroom if you want to. There is SO much interesting music happening right now I really resent this idea that music has somehow lost its way.
Examples : king gizzard and the lizard wizard, the dillinger escape plan, bjork, death grips, tim hecker, danny brown, etc etc the list is damn near infinite. Lots of incredible, boundary pushing music has happened in the last 15 or so years, and continues on a daily basis
Anyway I keep getting downvoted for this which is hilarious. It's obvious people have virtually no idea what musical talent sounds like. Talent is not what you like, it's legitimate hard earned skill. Sampled trash and top 40s 4x4 beats augmented by auto-tune and filters is not skill no matter how much lipstick you put on the pig. Neither is shouting into a microphone behind overdriven noise-music. Being avant garde also doesn't imply skill, the relationship is not a bijection.
Death Grips is legitimately good, as in, I bob my head and sing along to it, and it gives me goosebumps because its awesome. Also, there is absolutely 0% chance you could create something that comes close to their music. Their keyboard player is an insanely talented producer and their samples are masterfully collected and utilized.
So honestly sounds to me like you are just closed minded and pretentious.
The author is referring to the up-a-half-step modulation that Barry Manilow tactically used all over the place.
I call it a "Manilow".
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But yeah, it's just one of the many elements of musical craft that's missing in today's popular music.
Sampled sounds are (by definition) lifeless.
Sequenced rhythm tracks are unnaturally consistent.
See Paul Lamere's "In search of the click track": https://musicmachinery.com/2009/03/02/in-search-of-the-click...
A lack of rhythmic variation. Consider the folk tradition of wandering from the time signature; Pete Seeger and early Paul Simon for instance. And the Beatles, certainly
Generally a lack of pickup notes, or "anacrusis".
And the lack of an inspirational melody or chord change.
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60's pop music was, I think, a special case because the hit songs had to get noticed and appreciated in a worst-case listening environment; typically a crappy AM radio.
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Digital isn't inherently bad, but...
If the ENTIRETY of your music production is done on a DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) app, with its available tools and plugins, that's gonna have an effect.
And I think that's what we're seeing.
If today's music producers used the DAW only for recording, and stayed away for composing, arranging, and becoming proficient at playing instruments, things would be much better.
It makes as much sense as saying the popularity of young-adult novels is due to authors using word processors instead of writing by hand. The two have nothing to do with each other.
"The Blues" is a very limited form, yet it has provided about a century of wonderful creative music.
If I'm writing a string quartet, I don't complain that a particular note can't be sung by a gospel choir instead of a cello. Just as a painter doesn't complain about the canvas being 2 dimensional.
Of course DAW's can handle key changes.
The issue is that working full time in a DAW environment seems to have a tendency to displace a number of important musical sensibilities.
Music, as any art form, thrives on new possibilities.
And I'm a huge fan of new possibilities.
BUT most of the musical operations we see in the digital world are not "new possibilities", but rather cheap imitations of previous work. Samples, drum machines, simulations, emulations, modeling, etc.
And especially the separation of the musician playing the instrument from the sound making mechanism. That's a biggie. It's a kind of alienation, and that's going to have a dramatic negative effect.
And this is consistent with the original complaint about modern pop music not being very good. Sure, the key change might not be the best example, but the point still stands. If there are so many new possibilities, why does the music suck?
Is there any popular music that belongs to multiple keys because they only use the notes that are shared between them?
Or, is there anything that doesn't belong to any key because it uses more notes than are allowed by any key?
There are probably one or two examples somewhere, but it's certainly not common.
Keys are like the rails that keep a train on the tracks. If you don't have them, or if they're too non-linear, you lose a sense of momentum that keeps untrained people listening.
Classical music meanders for a while and then stops at cadences, which reinforce the key. It's like a train ride with stations. A key change switches the ride to a different track, but you always get a series of pauses and restarts.
Modern music uses ambiguous chord sequences - usually four chords - that repeat over and over but never come to a climax or a pause. The chords are ambiguous because they fit with a couple of keys - usually related major and minor, or perhaps a mode - but without the stops there's no clear sense which applies.
So you get continuous but repetitive motion on a single track without the stops. It's like being stuck on a loop and going through the same station over and over without stopping.
Sometimes the scenery changes between the verse and the chorus/drop/whatever. But without the clear key stops you can't get off.
I don't agree with that.
A key is not just a collection of allowed notes, there is a kindof frequency distribution to them too, so that the tonic is either the most used or the most implied. The fifth is often the second-most-used. Its sortof like a key has a 'center of gravity' in the tonic note. Either it will be used a lot or alluded to a lot.
So a chord sequence might technically fit into different keys but usually there is an implied tonic and that 'tells' you what key you are in.
So within a (well constructed) chord sequence in modern pop you can still have suspense and resolutions and so on. Kindof the same as cadence but done in a different way.
And the trick to a good key change is to subtely shift the 'weight' in the direction of the new key just before you make the change.
It's not even "modern," people still sit around arguing about which key certain beatles songs are in, when again "more than one" is a more useful explanation.
And I mean I know you know this but for other readers: music theory isn't like a math formula where song goes in, answers come out. It's a practical framework and a vocabulary for communicating about music, and evaluation of a successful analysis has to be based on the usefulness of the evaluation. There can be multiple "correct" analyses of the same piece of music, with different usefulness to different people at different times.
Pop music has influences from outside the mainstream european music traditions, and so certain assumptions that almost always make sense within those traditions (eg songs have a key, with a tonic) will lead you to goofy places sometimes.
A key is not just a collection of allowed notes, there is a kindof frequency distribution to them too, so that the tonic is either the most used or the most implied. The fifth is often the second-most-used. Its sortof like a key has a 'center of gravity' in the tonic note. Either it will be used a lot or alluded to a lot by the other notes.
Is there any popular music that belongs to multiple keys because they only use the notes that are shared between them?
Sortof - the notes might technically be part of a few different keys - but usually there is an 'implied center of gravity' pointing to a tonic note and that tells you what key you are actually in. But if you make it ambiguous for a few bars it can be a useful musical effect, sorotf suspense. And then you resolve to one or the other possible candidates and it sounds cool. But if you do it for too long it sounds muddy.
A good key change is sortof like that, you hover in a space that could be either key for a bit then resolve to something specific.
Or, is there anything that doesn't belong to any key because it uses more notes than are allowed by any key?
Jazz goes all over the place. Accidentals, key changes. An accidental is like a single note that isn't 'in' the key. Perhaps like a one note key change. The keys are still part of it but its more adventurous.
If you completely ignore key altogether its polytonal and it sounds kindof annoying.
Or people invent their own ones, e.g. Aleksi Perälä and the Colundi Sequence https://thequietus.com/articles/20493-aleksi-perl-perala-col...
Althought there's a big argument as to whether western keys are all just conditioning or something intrinsic. e.g. Does Major sound 'happy' and Minor sound 'sad' to all humans? Octaves are pretty universal in human music but after that it gets complicated. I think there's some good pointers to how overtones in in inner ear correspond to frequency ratios which correspond to classic intervals such as the third or fifth. And then how best to construct a scale that squeezes in the most useful thirds and fifths and so on. If you follow that exercise then the white keys/black keys on a piano start to look quite optimal. BUT social conditioning, anthropology and so on so maybe not.
It's all patterns, and getting the balance between repetition and change.
Not exactly, take for example the Cmaj scale. You can write different melodies that "gravitate" around one of the 7 notes and that effect makes up for a particular mode of the scale of C. Even if the notes are exactly the same you can easily hear the different flavor of each mode.
The easiest way to hear the modes is to play continuously the Cmaj scale against a C drone (a long note), but each time starting from a different grade of the scale of Cmaj. Same notes, different feelings. It's unclear to me (and I think controversial even among musicians) if you should use the mode name as a qualifier for the key and usually people just say that a song is in the key of $note, but you can definitely hear the difference. In particular, it is (was?) common to modulate to the relative minor/major key to highlight a section of a song (e.g.: key changes from Cmaj to Amin, same notes).
> Is there any popular music that belongs to multiple keys because they only use the notes that are shared between them?
It's very common in jazz, a classic example: Giant steps by Coltrane. The song continuously modulates in major thirds and loops around three keys.
> Or, is there anything that doesn't belong to any key because it uses more notes than are allowed by any key?
Look up "serialism" and "atonal music".
It uses all the notes on the chromatic scale, so it doesn't "fit" into a specific key. (But it's still considered to be in a specific key. The notes outside that key are the exception not the rule.)
https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=sunny+hebb+guitar+tab&ia=we...
People have been pointing out how little modulation there is in modern pop music for a while. Combined with click-tracks, pitch-correction and sampling, there is just less variation in most modern pop songs.
Also, if this is only looking at popular music as defined by the Billboard charts, that's more likely caused by the homogenization of music production and a very small group of producers that are responsible for the majority of hit songs. This is a much better analysis:
https://pudding.cool/2018/05/similarity/
I really don't like the assumption behind these types of articles that increased complexity of music theory-wise automatically means better music. Just like adding unnecessary complexity when writing code is always better.
Both complex and simply structured music both have merit, and I'd argue that more simple music is harder to do well beacuse you need a really strong central idea/concept to make it work.
For example, musically Perfume Genius is extremely simple, but it's still some of the best songwriting I've ever heard. It works so well because of the simpliclity makes the subjects he's singing about even more stark and makes it feel more vulnerable. If complexity were all it took to write good music, then everyone would be listening to things like Ornette Coleman (who is great at doing the exact opposite).
You can still be an excellent musician without knowing a lot of theory, and it also should be pointed out that our system of music theory is based around classical composers who made up the rules as they went. All you really need is muscle memory and recognizing harmony and dissonance.
As much as I respect people like Rick Beato that are into this old school view of music needing to be heavily backed by theory and saying "they don't write songs like they used to", I think it's very elitist and extremely artistically myopic to claim authority on something that's completely subjective.
Yes it can help to know theory depending on what type of music you want to make, but you might also make even better music not having that sense of what's correct or not. This is the approach that Giorgio Moroder took and he's one of the most successful and inventive producers of all time.
And just remember that pop music is a market demographic and a product more than it is a distinct genre/style, and that we should all be free to listen to whatever music we want, however correct or wrong someone else tells you it is.
What’s priceless is having the opportunity to think something through and explain it and Tedium rises above the shitposting world. Bravo!
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That's particularly extremely important when the thread is fresh, because threads are so sensitive to initial conditions. Tossing flamebait in like this risks ruining the entire thing.