Chords for How to Find Out What Key You're In

Life offers a lot of mundane questions, like, what key am I in?
What's the scale?
How did you get into my house and why are you wearing my pants?
But living in ignorance is not the answer.
So today, we're gonna learn how to find out what key you're in, if you know the chords that you're playing.
Now I'm probably gonna do a couple videos on this, like how to find out what key you're in if you don't know the chords,
and what to do when you're in a key, but we're just gonna learn some tips on how to find out what key you're in,
if you know the chords, and assuming that the song doesn't have a key change that's all in the same key.
So what is a key in music?
A key is essentially just a group of notes that sound good together.
These notes can be combined to make chords, and chords can be combined to make progressions or songs.
If you were to say a song is in G, or in the key of G, all that means is you're using the notes from the G major scale
to make all the chords and make the progression.
So it all comes down to the major scale like things usually do in music.
Now the major scale are just seven different notes, and these same rules apply to any key that you're in, right?
So we have notes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7.
Each one of these notes can become a chord, right?
And the chord that it becomes depends on which note you start on.
For example, the first note in any key, like in the key of C, C would be the first note,
that becomes a major chord if you were to make a triad out of it.
I'll link to a video in case you want to learn more about how to make triads and stuff like that too.
But just remember that the first note, the fourth note, and the fifth note all become major chords.
Also, the second, the third, and the sixth note all become minor chords.
The seventh note becomes what's called a diminished chord.
Now I've got videos on how to make all these things and using the major and minor scale and all that stuff too.
But right now we're just going to assume that you know that 1, 4, and 5 become major chords,
2, 3, and 6 become minor chords, and 7 become diminished chords.
So this is really helpful information in being able to discern what key you're in if you know a couple of these chords.
Because it's just a pattern and you can just plug in the chords until you find the right one.
_ So the main tip, and usually how I find a key, is I'll look for commonalities of different chords in a key.
So for example, what I mean by that, the first thing I see when I see the 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 thing is
I notice that the 4 and 5 major chords are right next to each other.
So if we had a progression that had an [F] F [G] and a G in it, _ F and G sit right next to each other in the alphabet and also in a major scale.
So if I see a song with an F and a G in it, I know they're right next to each other,
I know that I can plug those in to the 4th and 5th slots for the chords,
and then I can kind of reverse engineer backwards to find out that I'm in the key of C.
Now I can do the same thing with minor chords.
As we've seen, the 2nd and 3rd notes of any key become minor chords, right?
So let's say the only information I have to operate is a song has the [Am] chords A minor [Bm]
and B minor.
I can find out what [F] key that is because I know that A and B are right next to each other.
So I know that A has to be the 2nd note, B has to be the 3rd note,
and I can reverse engineer that to find out that I'm in the key of G, G being the 1st note.
[C] Now sometimes it's not going to be as easy as this.
Sometimes you'll have keys that share common chords, right?
Like let's say I have a C and a G, right?
That's [G] _
all I know [C] in the chord progression, right?
Or even let's say, let's even add another one, like a C major, [G] a G [Am] major, and an [G] A minor, right?
So I could be like, alright, well maybe I'll take that C major and I'm going to think I'm in the key of C
because I played a C first, right?
So I can populate everything else and I see the G major, that fits, that's in the 5th spot,
and also that A minor chord that we have, that fits, that's also in the 6th spot, right?
But what if I was actually in the key of G?
_ Therefore, that first chord I played is a C, right?
If I populate a C as being in the 4th spot, G, A, B, C, right?
Then G would be in the 1st spot and A would be in the 2nd spot.
So sometimes you actually don't have enough information to find out what key you're in.
In that case, you kind of have to use your ears and try to figure out where the resolution is.
That's why, kind of a misnomer that I see a lot of players,
and I've heard actually like a lot of really good players think,
is like the first chord you hear is the key that you're in.
Like if a song starts with a G, a lot of people will think,
well maybe that's a G major chord.
Sometimes that is the case, and maybe more often than not it is.
But that's not a rule, that's just kind of like an indication of
maybe it is in the key of G and it's giving you a good idea of where to go.
Now some chords will also be a dead giveaway as to what key you're in, right?
And that's going to be the diminished chord.
If you ever see a diminished chord or a minor 7 flat 5 chord,
which is a type of diminished chord,
you know that is occurring only on the 7th note in a key.
So if you [B] see a B minor 7 flat 5,
and again we're operating under the premise that everything is in the same key,
which isn't always true, because you can go out of the key,
you can add chords from other keys and stuff like that too.
But if we see [Bm] a diminished chord or a minor 7 flat 5 chord,
we know that that's going to be the 7th note,
so we just have to [C] go up a half step [D] to find the first note, which would be C.
So B minor 7 flat 5 or B diminished only truly exists in one key where it's the 7.
Again, this is plugging those numbers in.
Another one is if you ever see a 7 chord,
like a D7 chord, a dominant 7 chord.
It's a really popular one, right?
Well that chord actually technically only exists within a key on the 5th note.
So you would plug a D into 5,
and then you would count, you can count forwards or backwards again, right?
So if D is 5, E is 6, F sharp is 7, and G is 1.
So you can find out that you're in the key of G.
So the most helpful tip that I can give you to find out what key you're in
is to start looking at relationships between chords,
and see where the 4 and the 5 and the major chords are together.
See what's close.
These intervals of chords are going to be really important
to kind of distinguish in songwriting
and just being able to kind of figure out what key you're in,
what to do in different keys.
And eventually you'll start seeing all these patterns,
and you'll see a group of chords,
and you won't even have to plug them in.
You'll just know, okay, oh this has an F sharp in it,
so I know I can't be in the key of C, stuff like that.
Just little things like that go a long way.
And at first it might seem kind of daunting,
trying to like remember all this stuff,
but if you just remember there's only 7 spaces for notes,
and each of these notes can become a chord,
therefore there's only 7 chords,
I can always reverse engineer my way to find out what key I'm in
just by mentally plugging in those notes.
But most importantly, just keep in mind
that these are just tips to try to help you find out
what key you're in if you need help with [Bbm] that.
Like it's just music theory, these aren't hard rules.
If you're writing a song, you don't always have to
have all the chords line up in the spaces.
You can always just really do whatever you want
and just follow your ear and do what sounds good.
It's just always helpful to know what key you're in
because then you have more options
and it's easier to communicate with other musicians.
And it's also kind of like a way to guarantee
that you'll never truly be stuck
because you can always just randomly pick
another one of those numbers to find a chord
or find an arpeggio or really find anything
and you'll never be stuck
because you can always just randomly pick a number
and you're good to go, it's going to