Key? I still don't know dif between Amajor and Aminor

[Strick]

Maybe I have a learning disability. Lets say I'm playing Louie, Louie with G,C and Dminor. Is this the key of G or Gm? It seems that applying box one of the scales works. Help me out here.

 

[MikeS]

Pretty sure Louie Louie is G Major, but you will find that the minor pentatonic will work over Major chords, but Major Pentatonic may or may not work over minor chords.

 

[mpaq]

You could either play Gmin scale over the whole thing, or Gmaj on the first chord then switch back to minor...if you don't switch it may sound odd over the C, definitely would sound odd over the Dmin chord

 

[Norfolk Bill]

Depends if you mean blues tunes or general songs, A lot of normal songs you would play major scales over, ie a song is in G then play G major through it.
Heres an example, Key of G play through with Gmajor scale then Gm hear the difference, Gmajor is sweeter
https://soundcloud.com/justinguitar/g-major-backing-track-justinguitar-com

A lot of pop and indie type music i play use the major scales for riffs and melodic lead lines eg

 

[Strick]

I still don't know the difference between a song in the key of G and a song in the key of Gm. I'm missing something.

 

[mountain man]

Maybe I have a learning disability. Lets say I'm playing Louie, Louie with G,C and Dminor. Is this the key of G or Gm? It seems that applying box one of the scales works. Help me out here.

With the short example you have here, knowing of how the tune sounds, keeping with the Blues concept, I would try two things as I jam to the song; 1) I would play Maj over the 1 chord and min over the 4,5 chords. 2) I would play min over everything. Further, I would try some subtle Maj/min shape combinations within the entire song. Last Fall I worked a lot on Griff's Maj Min Blues Shape course and I found it a great help for this. In fact, I was just preparing for a Blues Jam and playing Tore Down. I've played this tune at open mics and had fun playing the min Blues scale over everything. Yesterday I played the Maj over the 1 and it sounded much better. I hope this helps.

 

[Timothy W. Cook]

I still don't know the difference between a song in the key of G and a song in the key of Gm. I'm missing something.

Griff's theory course is excellent.

 

[OG_Blues]

I still don't know the difference between a song in the key of G and a song in the key of Gm. I'm missing something.

Strick,
I think we are having trouble clearly understanding exactly what you don't understand, although the question seems perfectly plain and simple.
Is it the "technical" difference that you are unclear about? If so, you need to look at the song's key signature, and do a little analysis sometimes to identify when it's intended to be minor.
Let's take a simple example.
The key signature of A major has 3 sharps (F,C,G).
Each major key has an associated "relative minor", where the key signature is the same, and the notes are the same, but the root is considered to be the 6th of the major scale.
So, in the key of A major, the 6th note in the scale is F#, so it's relative minor key is F#m.
So looking at a piece of music that has 3 #'s, how do you know if it is A major or F#M?
Two ways -
1, let you ear be your guide - you should be able to hear if the tonality of the piece is major or minor.
2, look at the last note in the piece. The last note in most music is the key of the song (not always true, but is s a good guideline).
So if you have a piece of music with 3#'s and it ends on A, it is likely written to be major, but if it ends on F#, it is likely written to be minor.
If it ends on some other note, your ear must guide you, or possibly it's jazz

These things can be derived and learned from a chart of the Circle Of Fifths (just google it) - which will probably be very confusing at first.

To answer your question about the key of G and Gm, looking at the Circle chart, you will see that G major has one sharp, and that G minor (which is the relative minor of the key of Bb major) has two flats.
Possibly that is all you really wanted to know, but hopefully this helps in some way, or at least gives you clue about what you need to study to understand it.

By the way, lot's of Griff's materials do not indicate the key signature, which has been a long time pet peeve of mine, but Griff has a plausible explanation for leaving it off. He can explain why
If the music has no key signature indicated, you might assume it is the key of C or it's relative minor Am, but that might not be true if the signature is simply not shown. In this case, you need to do more analysis like looking at the chords and what note the song ends on for starters.

Don't feel bad if this all seems really confusing - that's perfectly normal, and it takes a while to wrap your head around stuff like this in music. I haven't seen Griff's theory course, but as others have said, I have no doubt it is excellent and highly recommended if you want or need to get some understanding of the theory.
Tom

 

[Strick]

So, the guys in the band say "lets play Louie, Louis in G." Then we play the song using the chords G, C, and Dm. If the band guys said lets play it in Gm, what chords would I use?

 

[mountain man]

Strick,
I think we are having trouble clearly understanding exactly what you don't understand, although the question seems perfectly plain and simple.
Is it the "technical" difference that you are unclear about? If so, you need to look at the song's key signature, and do a little analysis sometimes to identify when it's intended to be minor.
Let's take a simple example.
The key signature of A major has 3 sharps (F,C,G).
Each major key has an associated "relative minor", where the key signature is the same, and the notes are the same, but the root is considered to be the 6th of the major scale.
So, in the key of A major, the 6th note in the scale is F#, so it's relative minor key is F#m.
So looking at a piece of music that has 3 #'s, how do you know if it is A major or F#M?
Two ways -
1, let you ear be your guide - you should be able to hear if the tonality of the piece is major or minor.
2, look at the last note in the piece. The last note in most music is the key of the song (not always true, but is s a good guideline).
So if you have a piece of music with 3#'s and it ends on A, it is likely written to be major, but if it ends on F#, it is likely written to be minor.
If it ends on some other note, your ear must guide you, or possibly it's jazz

These things can be derived and learned from a chart of the Circle Of Fifths (just google it) - which will probably be very confusing at first.

To answer your question about the key of G and Gm, looking at the Circle chart, you will see that G major has one sharp, and that G minor (which is the relative minor of the key of Bb major) has two flats.
Possibly that is all you really wanted to know, but hopefully this helps in some way, or at least gives you clue about what you need to study to understand it.

By the way, lot's of Griff's materials do not indicate the key signature, which has been a long time pet peeve of mine, but Griff has a plausible explanation for leaving it off. He can explain why
If the music has no key signature indicated, you might assume it is the key of C or it's relative minor Am, but that might not be true if the signature is simply not shown. In this case, you need to do more analysis like looking at the chords and what note the song ends on for starters.

Don't feel bad if this all seems really confusing - that's perfectly normal, and it takes a while to wrap your head around stuff like this in music. I haven't seen Griff's theory course, but as others have said, I have no doubt it is excellent and highly recommended if you want or need to get some understanding of the theory.
Tom

Good discussion Tom. You are bringing out some real good examples of how to tell if the tune is in Maj or min. That last note tells us a lot in the Blues. Once you start mixing the Maj and min scales it can get a little more complicated to determining the scale by the last note alone. Because you can end the tune playing bits of both scales and still end on the correct note. But this is generally not mixing the "relative" Maj or min. But perhaps G-Maj and G-min, or A-Maj and A-min.

I was just doing a bit of work with my looper pedal. Lying down a basic shuffle. At that point I could have gone either Maj or min. But then when I put in an over dub of the Maj triad for the 1 and a min triad for the 4 and 5 chords. And then playing lead over it. As I added a Maj 3rd in the 1 chord, I established that I needed to play the Maj scale for the 1 chord. And then I played the min scale over the 4 and 5 chords. I played lead to all of this within the same block being careful only to play Maj over the 1 chord and min over the 4 and 5 chords. When Griff put together the Maj Min Blues Shapes course, he mixed the Maj and min shapes in the last measure at will......... So sometimes it's important to look at the chord structure of the song and look for the Maj or min 3rd and how it's used in the tune.

 

[Steve_Sawyer]

I think there may be two different things being discussed - the key of a song vs the key of a chord. A song that is in a minor key uses different intervals than a song in a major key. Take the key of C and the key of Amin - they both use the same notes, but in C you treat "C" as the root, but in Am, you treat "A" as the root and you get an entirely different sound. A song in a major key can have minor chords in it, and can even have minor intervals in it, but the song is still in a major key. If you see a song written out in C, but you see a lot of sharps or flats in the notation, then it may be employing minor (or other, non-major) intervals, but the key is still C major.

You wouldn't ever play the tune in your example in Gm - it's not a song in a minor key. Sometimes musically inventive folks will re-do a song and transpose it into a minor key, but it will sound very different. Most of the stuff we do in the blues is written in a major key. When we encounter a song that is in a minor key (something like "The Thrill Is Gone" is a good example), you'll see all of the chords are minor, and you have to stick pretty close (I think) to the minor pentatonic for things to work, otherwise the major 3rd in the major pentatonic is going to clash against the minor 3rd in the chords.

Not sure if I've helped the discussion here, but I tried...

 

[mountain man]

So, the guys in the band say "lets play Louie, Louis in G." Then we play the song using the chords G, C, and Dm. If the band guys said lets play it in Gm, what chords would I use?

At the open mics I've been playing, they usually would say in "let's play it in G". Which makes it a little confusing at times unless you know the song well. Sometimes you can play a 7th chord which has a Maj 3rd and still play the min Blues scale over it. If they said "lets play it in Gm? I would probably play a min chord and not use the Maj 3rd in the 1 chord. I would also play the min chords for the 4 and 5 chords. I'm sure folks can chime in where they would play a 7th chord or something different.......... Blues is Blues, we break a lot of rules......

 

[mountain man]

I think there may be two different things being discussed - the key of a song vs the key of a chord. A song that is in a minor key uses different intervals than a song in a major key. Take the key of C and the key of Amin - they both use the same notes, but in C you treat "C" as the root, but in Am, you treat "A" as the root and you get an entirely different sound. A song in a major key can have minor chords in it, and can even have minor intervals in it, but the song is still in a major key. If you see a song written out in C, but you see a lot of sharps or flats in the notation, then it may be employing minor (or other, non-major) intervals, but the key is still C major.

You wouldn't ever play the tune in your example in Gm - it's not a song in a minor key. Sometimes musically inventive folks will re-do a song and transpose it into a minor key, but it will sound very different. Most of the stuff we do in the blues is written in a major key. When we encounter a song that is in a minor key (something like "The Thrill Is Gone" is a good example), you'll see all of the chords are minor, and you have to stick pretty close (I think) to the minor pentatonic for things to work, otherwise the major 3rd in the major pentatonic is going to clash against the minor 3rd in the chords.

Not sure if I've helped the discussion here, but I tried...

I agree Steve. Except for the part where most of what we play is in a Maj Key. I'm not sure about that and still working on the concept. It's possible as we play a lot of 7th chords which allow a Maj or min lead pattern. It just seems like I've played a lot of min since I've started with Griff several years ago. But now with the new course out last year on the Maj min Blues Shapes, I've been playing much more Maj over the 1 chord which would infer a Maj scale.

 

[PapaRaptor]

So, the guys in the band say "lets play Louie, Louis in G." Then we play the song using the chords G, C, and Dm. If the band guys said lets play it in Gm, what chords would I use?

That's not going to happen, because Louie, Louie is written in a major key. The easiest way for you to hear the difference would be to play the three chords of Louie, Louie in major and then again in minor.

• In A Major, the chords would be A - D - E7
• In A Minor, the chords would be Am - Dm - Em

However, Louie, Louie is probably a bad example, because it follows neither of these and it isn't truly a 1-4-5. If it was, the Em would be E7. What happens instead is a progression using the the third (C#) of the I root (A) and the fifth (E), followed by the root of the IV chord (D) and third (F#) of the IV chord. Then the fifth (E) and seventh (G) of the I (A) chord. But the bass line is playing the root of the I (A), the IV (D) and the V (E).

Here it is in G(major).

The top two strings are playing:

• B and D (third and fifth of a G root)
• C and E (Root and third of a C root)
• D and F (fifth and 7th of a C root)

If you play them that way, which is what the organ plays on the Kingsmen version, that's not a 1-4-5.
However, the bass is playing a 1-4-5.

 

[HotLks]

In Griffs guitar theory course, he explains step by step how to determine what key a song is in. I haven't progressed to that point yet, but it's there.

 

[Fingerlick]

I am not, by any means, an authority, but in the sixties I played in a rock dance band and we always played Louie, Louie in G Major.
(Some say you can't really play Louie,Louie correctly unless you know the exact meaning of the lyrics...Ha!)

 

[OG_Blues]

So, the guys in the band say "lets play Louie, Louis in G." Then we play the song using the chords G, C, and Dm. If the band guys said lets play it in Gm, what chords would I use?

Strick, Well, if you played Louie Louie in a minor key, you would probably get boo'ed off the stage, your guitar smashed, and kicked out of the bar!!!! LOL. It would not have that "party" sound in a minor key!!!
But seriously, I think your question is really more general, i.e. what are the chords associated with the key of Gm. Without sounding like a broken record, google really is your friend, and a little effort put into figuring this stuff out will result in seeing lots of other and related educational stuff. Look here: http://www.guitar-chords.org.uk/chords-key-g-minor.html
You will see that if you want to play a I - IV - V pattern, the chords are Gm Cm Dm. Try playing and singing Louie Louie to this progression and tell me how you like it.
Tom

 

[giayank]

Taking the theory out of the question my response would be what tone are you trying to play . If it's upbeat and happy I play major . If it's down and sad it's minor . For a simple guide . Most country is major . Most blues is minor but not always . In blues the major pentatonic only sounds right over the I chord but not always . You can let your ears be your guide if you want to play your music . If you want to play a specific genre you need to follow that specific format .What we learn from Griff is major or minor over the I if the I is a major chord . If the I is a minor chord we play Minor . We then play minor over the IV and the V for each doesn't matter if the IV and V are major or minor we still solo in the minor pentatonic or blues scale . This is a guide line for playing blues solos . It is not the only way to do it . For hacks like me it's a nice formula to not just play the wrong notes but to actually play something that sounds good .

 

[PapaRaptor]

Taking the theory out of the question my response would be what tone are you trying to play . If it's upbeat and happy I play major . If it's down and sad it's minor . For a simple guide . Most country is major . Most blues is minor but not always . In blues the major pentatonic only sounds right over the I chord but not always . You can let your ears be your guide if you want to play your music . If you want to play a specific genre you need to follow that specific format .What we learn from Griff is major or minor over the I if the I is a major chord . If the I is a minor chord we play Minor . We then play minor over the IV and the V for each doesn't matter if the IV and V are major or minor we still solo in the minor pentatonic or blues scale . This is a guide line for playing blues solos . It is not the only way to do it . For hacks like me it's a nice formula to not just play the wrong notes but to actually play something that sounds good .

Blues solos are usually based on the minor pentatonic scale against a major background chord... or a minor pentatonic scale solo against a minor chord background. But the tune itself is not minor, the solo is. You can take any number of mainstream blues tunes, Sweet Home Chicago, Stormy Monday, Crossroads, Terraplane Blues, Mustang Sally and lots more. All the rhythm guitar on those tunes and the bass are playing major chords (and usually 7th on the V), but the solos (or vocals, whiche are really solos) are generally done using the flatted third of the pentatonic minor scale. Yes, on the I chord, the pentatonic scale will also generally fit.

 

[Strick]

When I played Louie, Louie (by the Kingsmen) in our college band, i.e. for drinks, we'd play it for what seemed like hours. I was mostly on the bass, but then I moved on to the 6 strings of a Strat. Now that I'm retired I have more time to devote to learning more about playing. Music theory is fascinating. In this thread I have no idea what most of you guys are talking about but it sure does sound impressive. I did put down the basic progression (G , C, and Dm) on my looper and was playing box 1 over it. It sounded okay, but it probably has some errors in it. I found a site with a music teacher instructing a class of college kids on scales and what they look like on sheet music. For instance, take the scale starting with C. C D E F G A B C no sharps or flats. Then start with F. F G A Bb C D E F only one flat. He showed the formula of WWHWWWH W-whole step H- is a half step. And so on. Fascinating. Now I know these are not pentatonic scales, they are the old "do, ray, me scales" I'm going to have to look at Griff's music theory course. Thanks guys for trying to help me out. And I thought the key of a song was what note or chord it started on. I got a lot to learn.