Is There Actually A Difference Between A MINOR And C MAJOR?
Is it possible to modulate from C major to A minor?
You might immediately think not, because the two keys have all the same notes and therefore are the same key.
So you can’t modulate from C major to A minor for the same reason you can’t modulate from C major to C major. It’s the same thing.
Surprisingly, this is actually not true. C major and A minor are not the same key (*)
And so, yes! You can modulate between these two keys... but it’s actually quite more difficult than you might expect.
If you’re in C major, almost anything you do to ‘modulate’ to A minor (unless you do precisely the right thing) will just end up sounding like you’re still in C major.
.... which also means that if you do precisely the right thing... you can modulate from C major to A minor and hear the change in mood.
But how exactly you do that? And what is exactly the difference between C major an A minor (that is, if the notes are the same, why do they sound different?)
If you want to know all that, in detail with played examples, watch the video linked below.
(*) As a hint, one sounds major and the other sounds minor... meaning one sounds "happy" and the other "sad". Unless happy and sad are the same thing, C major and A minor can't be the same thing!
Want to know more about modulations, and how to freely change between any two keys in your music, completely naturally? Check out my new Modulation Mastery guitar course to start learning today!
Video Transcription
Hello, Internet, so nice to see you. I got an interesting comment on one of my short videos, and I think we need to clarify that. This is just a standard chord progression in C. I'm pretty sure moving from C major to A minor doesn't count as a key change.
And why would it not? Because they have the same notes or because they are the same, but C major and A minor are not the same. And I've been receiving similar comments for so long at this point that I think we need to clarify exactly why C major and A minor are not the same, and why modulating between them is actually pretty hard, and it can actually be pretty interesting, okay?
So even if you're an advanced player, follow along with me, because we're going to get into some interesting sounds later in this video. C major and A minor, are they the same key? Well, first of all, no, otherwise why we call them in a different way, okay?
If they were the same thing, we'd have one name for them, not two, okay? Second, one of them is a major key. C major and one of them, A minor, is a minor key. And we study, they tell us at least, okay?
And you can verify that major key sounds generally happy, and minor key sounds generally sad. So if C major and A minor are the same thing, it doesn't mean there is no difference between a major key and a minor key?
No, of course there is, okay? So at this point, people are like, but C major and A minor have the same note. Well, news flash here, I am sorry if you believe that, but C major and A minor don't have the same notes.
C major and A minor don't have the same note. Now, C major, it's C, D, E, F, G, A, B, and that's it. A minor, minor, it's not one scale. Natural minor is one scale, and the notes of natural minor are A, B, C, D, E, F, D.
G and yes the notes of natural minor are the same notes as C major but that's not minor, that's natural minor and I blame practically every single internet teacher here that don't make this distinction and they make your life harder because in minor you can move this G to a G sharp.
They will call these the harmonic minor scale and they can also move this F to an F sharp and then the G sharp too creating what we call the melodic minor scale and these things are used all together to create what we call minor okay especially on the harmonic minor scale we use this G sharp to create chords especially we take the fifth chord which are going to become then an E major not an E minor okay here you don't have this thing.
G doesn't change, G is G, it doesn't become G sharp, you don't have a major... you can build it if you want, but the standard major scale does not have a G sharp, period, it doesn't, okay? Makes sense, you could occasionally have an A flat, which is a different notes, but that's another thing, and it's still a pretty big alteration, okay?
But those are considered natural and normal, okay? That is one difference, but there is another bigger difference that people don't consider, and it's absolutely important, and the difference is this, the tonic of C major is C, and the tonic of A minor is A, and the tonic is the most important thing ever, because this is the note that your brain assign as the main note in the piece.
When you start listening to a piece in C major, if the musician is competent, okay, your brain attaches to this C major and thinks that's the main pitch, and everything else is understood in terms of that pitch.
You don't realize that, your ear does that automatically, but that's what your ear does. When you hear a piece in A minor, instead your ear attaches to this A. The notes are not really important, what's important are the intervals of those notes over this tonic.
So, a D note here sounds in a way, but a D note here sounds in a different way, because the tonic is different, okay? It's kind of hard to understand at the beginning, because you're thinking it's the same frequency, but your ear does not, is not very interested in frequencies.
Your ear is interested in intervals. Your ear, unless you're a perfect pitcher, your ear cannot hear an isolated D and think that's a D. Your ear hears this scale and thinks the D is the fourth note in that scale.
Okay because your ear cannot hear the absolute frequency but you can hear the relative frequency of this D on this A so it's all very abstract if you want but the point is a C major piece will sound major so happy-ish and an A minor piece will sound minor so sad-ish okay they're not the same key.
This also means that changing keys or creating a modulation from C major to A minor and vice versa it's not trivial at all in fact it's one of the hardest modulations if you think about it for a moment because since all the notes are the same you really need to put some of those notes in and make sure your chord progression takes you to the other key and if you don't do it properly you are still in C major and then stay on A minor and think I moved to A minor I didn’t.
I'm still in C major, okay, the A minor chord is also inside here. To move from C major to A minor, I need to put some of those notes. Now the comment here, I'll do a comment on one of my short videos and indeed that's exactly what I'm doing in the short video.
I am in C major, okay, and then from this C major I put an F sharp and then a G sharp and now I'm in A minor. I'm going to break this down in a moment. Right now I want you to listen for a moment. So I am in C major, okay, and I can make it a bit longer, okay.
So I'm playing a note C, F, G, C, 1, 4, 5 in C major, and I'm playing this thing here, then this, okay, then this, and then you hear that something changed, you hear the mood of the pieces moved, okay.
Before I was here, I'm still in C major, I start to move somewhere else, now it's pretty clear I'm moving somewhere else, and now I finally move somewhere else, and that's A minor, and you can hear the mood here.
It's much different than what it was before. So C major and A minor are not the same thing, okay. We have to remember that when some people say C major and A minor are the same thing, they kind of use this as a shortened width.
The C major scale and the A natural minor scale have the same notes. Okay, it's a long phrase so I wanted to use that but There are not the same thing. They just contain the same notes and there's more to a key than the notes So now what I did do exactly here, so I'm gonna transcribe very fast This piece for you Okay, just a little thing.
I'm playing okay So Those are the chords I'm playing I'm gonna I'm gonna explain what they are as we go So the first chord is just a signature the notes are C E and C again I don't have the fifth I can put the 15 You can just put an A here and get there and get the 15 But since I'm doing everything with three notes per chord, I just keep going with the texture Okay the next chord It's still a C But with the bass of this so it's a C chord in first inversion.
That's an E note, that's G and C, okay? And it's just the same chord, I'm still there. But why am I doing this? Because I'm setting up this bass note here to create this bass line here. This bass line will be E, F sharp, G sharp and A.
So having the F sharp and the G sharp here will take me straight into the key of A minor, because there's no sign in the key of A minor, but a note in the key of C major. So it's a way to signal that I'm changing key, okay?
I'm using the notes that I have that are different between the two keys. What is this chord? Well, that's... That it's an alteration of a chord that is built in the A minor scale, but the F becomes an F sharp.
But by and large, you can write this as a D7 with a bass of F sharp. There is no fifth, there is no A, okay? So it's a D7 with a bass of F sharp. The important point is that it contains the F sharp more than anything else.
And you use this because it has one note in common with the chord before and one note in common with the chord after, okay? More than thinking of this functionally, you just think of it contrapuntally, meaning, hey, there's a note in common here, a note in common there, and another note is exactly what I want, F sharp, okay?
So it's kind of interpolated in between this chord. This is an E7 with a bass of G sharp. Like this one has no fifth, but this one has no root, okay? There is no E here. You could put the E, you could put the E here if you want to play a fifth here, but there's no, okay?
So it's G sharp, D, and B. The G sharp is the third of this chord, the D is the seventh of this chord, then the B is the fifth of this chord. Now, this B here is quite important right now because then you hold this B into the next chord, which is A minor, and this B here is an add nine.
And then you resolve the add 9 down to the A, so just A minor. The first chord is just C major. Next chord is C with a bass of D, we are still there. And I get this chord here, and already I am in the melodic minor scale, A melodic minor scale.
Okay. And I get this chord here, which again, I could play the E, the root of the E or not. Then I'm holding this B note here, when I play the A minor, creating an A minor add 9, and then later I can resolve this D, so now it's down, if I want to.
It's flavourful, okay, it sounds good. That's a modulation between C major and A minor. As you see, it's not trivial at all, okay? It's linear, it's very linear, like E, F-sharp, G-sharp, A. But it's not simple.
That's not the only possible modulation by the way. That's just one possible example, okay? But it takes you smoothly from C-major to A-minor, and you can feel that mood change. And when you start playing a chord progression in A-minor here after that, you feel that the mood has completely changed.
Changing key from C-major to A-minor actually counts as a change of key. And it's a pretty big change of key, okay? Okay, there are several different notes between C-major and A-minor, namely F-sharp and G-sharp.
Okay, because we have to calculate not just the natural minor scale, but the harmonic and melodic minor scale. It makes musical sense because you can feel it, and it's a pretty big feeling. This is a very, very, very basic modulation, a very, very simple one, okay?
There's way more complex stuff in there. If you guys want to know more about modulation, I just launched a new course called Modulation Mastery. It's not a beginner course, but if you already know some of your chords, you can go and take it, okay?
And this course drills down deeply in any kind of modulation. This is a simple cadential modulation, okay? There are several other kinds of modulation, chromatic modulation and harmonic modulation, modern steering modulation, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
There are many of those, okay? That's a simple cadential modulation, the most common kind. Depending on the effect you want, there's much, much more to be discovered. I find that modulations and key change are the least, the topic in which you find the least information on the internet, so I created this new course specifically to give you guys some knowledge about that.
And the course is geared toward writing modulation, so it's done in a practical way. You have a song, you want to join two different pieces of the song, and you want to do it in a meaningful way. This course teaches you how to do it.
I don't care about analyzing modulation. I don't care about all the academic theory. This is a practical course that help you writing music. So if you want to get it, you'll find the link on the top right on this video, and then you can go and get it.
This is Tommaso Zillio for musictheoryforguitar.com and until next time, enjoy.