Changing songs from MAJOR to MINOR

this video is sponsored by ripex a piece of software that allows you to isolate and manipulate the different instruments in a piece of music [Music] [Music] I guess you could say I took a sad song and made it sadder that was of course Hey Jude but in the minor key in the harmonic minor scale rather than its original usual major scale and I was able to re-pitch it from the original down to this minor scale using today's sponsor rip X which I'll be talking about more later in the video but for now let's take another Beatles song and change it from the original major key to a minor key and I thought well what's the most positive and major sounding Beatles song that I could possibly turn into a minor key song [Music] Smiles returning to the faces foreign [Music] the only difference between the major scale and the harmonic minor scale is the third degree and the sixth degree so all I have to do to change these Beetle songs to their parallel minor key is to lower every third that we get and every sixth that we get in the vocal Melody down one semitone then all that's left to do is to adjust the chord progression with both Hey Jude and here comes the sun it was really easy to switch the chord progression from major to minor because at least with the sections I chose the only chords being used are one four and five and these are three chords that switch between major and minor really cleanly because the first fourth and fifth degree of both the major and minor scales are the same so the chord progression still winds up operating in a fairly consistent way regardless of major or minor for example with Here Comes the Sun we switch to one chord from a major to a minor we switch to four chord from D major to D minor and we can actually leave the five chord as E major because we're switching to the harmonic minor scale which has a major V chord if we were instead switching to the a natural minor scale then we would also switch this chord the E major to its equivalent minor chord E minor like this [Music] [Music] foreign as you can hear though switching from major to Natural Minor doesn't work quite as well this is because the natural minor is yet another note different from the major scale in addition to the third and sixth that we already had to change to turn major to harmonic minor for the natural minor we also have to change the seventh degree so we've minor keyed a couple Beetle songs let's minor key something else a song that I think is a very major key sound a very bright and positive song is Don't Stop Believing by Journey so what would this song sound like in the minor key well let's find out and for this one let's use ripex to also keep the original drum part intact because of course the drums are not major or minor they're a tonal so the exact same drum beat will work regardless of key [Music] something [Music] Midnight Train [Music] this time the chord progression included more than just the one four and five chords Don't Stop Believing also features the sixth chord of the key and the third chord of the key this makes the switch from major to minor a little less straightforward because unlike with the first fourth and fifth degrees of the scale the third and Sixth Degrees are different in the minor scale as they are in the original major scale so whereas in the original we had a C sharp minor chord here in the minor key we have a c natural major chord and instead of this G sharp minor for the third chord in the original we have a g natural major chord this means the character of the chord progression doesn't transfer as cleanly between major and minor Okay so we've switched a song from major to minor now let's do the opposite House of the Rising Sun made famous by The Animals is in the key of A minor so let's switch it to a major [Music] [Applause] [Music] down in you falling just like before all we had to do to make the switch from minor to Major is to adjust the thirds and sixths that's the only difference between the major and minor scales but this time of course we're moving those thirds and sixths up a semitone then we adjust the chord progression switching the a minor chords to a Majors the c major chords to C sharp minus and the F majors are switched to F sharp minus the fourth chord of the key in the original was already a major chord it was already D major so we were actually able to keep that the same so as I mentioned earlier I've been switching the key from major to minor using today's sponsor rip X when you load a song into ripex it will separate out the different instruments and you can now isolate and manipulate them separately so if you wanted to you could have an isolated vocal where's my mind and then without even leaving the software you can start adjusting the notes in these parts not only can you move the notes freely up and down but you can stretch their durations you can also quantize the pitch so basically Auto tuning them and you can even add things like vibrato and Pitch slides repet is perfect for anybody who wants to remix or experiment with classic tracks and it proved to be the perfect tool today for changing all of these major key songs into the minor key so if you're interested try it out yourself with a 21 day free trial using the link in the description as I mentioned before the only notes we have to change to get from major to harmonic minor are the third and sixth this means that if a vocal Melody doesn't use the third or sixth very much at all then it will move really smoothly into the parallel key for example with the Melody from Love Me Do by The Beatles doesn't actually use the third degree of the scale so the only note we need to change here is to switch the Melody from major to minor is the Sixth and the sixth only really appears once in the melody here so if we just change that sixth down to E flat rather than e natural all we now have to do is change the chords from major to minor and we're now in the minor key I've also decided to throw in this D major chord here as well just to create a satisfying perfect Cadence at the end hitting home that G minor resolution you know you know I love you I've always been true so please [Music] you may have also noticed that even love me Do's regular original major key Melody features the lowered 7th degree F natural instead of G Major's regular F sharp this is because Love Me Do is actually not based on the G Major scale but on a similar scale called G mixolydian mixolydian is exactly the same as major but has this lowered seventh degree giving it a slightly bluesy sound and this actually brings the scale one step closer to the natural minor scale meaning that swapping left me Do's Melody from major to minor works even more effectively now when this whole switching from major to minor gets a bit tricky is when the song in question the song we're trying to switch isn't strictly in just the major or minor key but instead it's sort of straddling the space between the two keys for example Creep by Radiohead is basically in the key of G major however two out of four of the chords in the progression don't strictly belong in the key of G major if creep was 100 in the key of G major it would sound like this foreign you're just like they're an angel skin makes me cry so that's creep if it was a hundred percent in the major key what if creep was in the minor key when you were here before [Music] the G major the one chord gets swapped for the G minor chord the B major is a pretty tricky chord to switch because in its original context in the original song the B major chord is what's called a secondary dominant without going into too much detail that means it's a chord that doesn't strictly belong in the key of G major so switching it into the key of G minor is actually quite fiddly in the original context it's acting as the dominant chord the V chord of the sixth chord of the key E minor so it's got that dominant function to it so I think the best choice is to go with a D major chord here which is the dominant chord of our new key of G minor and crucially the D major chord will support the F sharp we have in the melody because the chord of D major contains an F sharp now in the original song we'd have a C major here so I've swapped that for a C minor and in the original song the fourth chord here is actually already a C minor so what I've decided to do here is actually not maintain that c my China but swap it for a similar chord a minor 7 flat 5 which may not sound like a similar chord to C minor but actually if you look at the notes an A minor seven flat 5 is literally just a C minor chord with an a in the bass and the reason I chosen to do this is because if I just had C minor for both this position and this position we'd have a different harmonic Rhythm than the original song and the chord would be changing in different places than the original which would further remove us from the sort of spirit and sound of the original song and for a bit of flair I've decided to end with this D chord which wraps the whole thing up nicely when we resolve back to G minor foreign [Music] foreign foreign

Channel: David Bennett Piano

Views: 211,081

Keywords: major key, minor, switch, music, theory, how to, change, chords, mode, beatles, radiohead, journey, harmonic minor, natural minor, ripx

Id: Ytty5M1nLAE

Length: 11min 45sec (705 seconds)

Published: Wed May 31 2023