I favor chord thinking over key thinking, and here’s what I mean. This is something I think most full-time musicians know, even if they don’t know they know it. You can learn a key by memorizing how many sharps and flats it is, but if you can learn to build a major or minor chord from any given note, you can fast-track your understanding of a key.
The shapes are major, minor, major 7, dominant 7, minor 7, half-diminished. Every one of these shapes falls naturally into a key. Major 7, minor 7, minor 7, major 7, dominant 7, minor 7, half-diminished, major 7.
So if you’re starting in an unfamiliar place, and that the 6th chord is a minor 7, it’s going to place you on this map with a better understanding of where you are. When you internalize the chord shape that goes along with any given note, it’s not so that you always follow that pattern, it’s so that when you deviate from it, you have an idea of where you might be. And I think of that as chord thinking rather than scale thinking.
So let’s take an interesting song like “The Beatles’ “Sun King.” It’s a surprising change because it’s alluding to another key. It doesn’t mean we have to go there, but we’re pulling from that language. Why is that A there?
Well, you could think of this and this as if it’s a 2 chord for F. And I know this might be getting ahead of some people, but when you hear something like this, you might be getting a slight nod to D minor even if you don’t go there. Chordal thinking can help you land in new and sometimes exciting places.
Let’s make our way down to a G chord to get back to a C, but make it a C minor, which is kind of like we’re an E flat. And so when we go to the 4, we’ll choose E flat’s shape. You’ll broaden your understanding of E flat when you remember that the first shape is major 7 and minor 7, minor 7, major 7, dominant 7, minor 7, half-diminished, and major 7.
We’ll be talking about scales and keys in our next theory gym. Come join us and, as always, please share this with someone who belongs in a Beat Kitchen class.
