Finding The Key

Even with rudimentary ear skills, you can quickly find the key by following this 3-step process:

1. Find the Tonic

   Before we try to identify which letter name the tonic note is, we need to hone in on it in the music. Our goal is to be able to audiate, sing, or hum the tonic.

2. Identify the Tonic

   Once we can sing, hum, or audiate the tonic clearly, we can use a single known note (a “reference note”) and our sense of Relative Pitch to identify the tonic’s letter name.

3. Determine the Tonality

   The final step is to determine whether the tonality is major or minor. Once we know the tonic’s letter name plus the tonality, we know the full set of notes in the key.

We’ll also cover below how to “check your answer” once you’ve found the key by ear.

Step 1: Find the Tonic

Our first step is to try to hone in on the tonic note by ear, so that we can hear it very clearly in our mind’s ear and we can hum or sing it back.

It’s important to note at the outset that finding the tonic is a slightly “fuzzy” skill. A lot of musicians won’t be able to explain how they can find the tonic by ear. It’s something that genuinely does develop quite naturally as you learn music. You can accelerate that a lot by doing the specific steps we’re covering here, but even then you might feel like your ability isn’t rock-solid. Why? Because the tonic itself is a slightly intangible thing!

We have a formal definition in terms of the key, but that’s a music theory construct. If we think purely about listening to music, the tonic is not actually a scientifically-defined characteristic of a piece of music. It’s not a 100% clear-cut thing and in some cases it can be very debatable!

The more you practice, the more you’ll find it easier to identify the tonic, but it’s a matter of using “clues”, trusting your instinct, and doing a bit of experimenting, rather than there being a foolproof way to always jump to the exact right answer.

So don’t worry if at first you get it wrong, you find it tricky, or you’re not quite sure what you should be listening for. Trust that this will develop in time as you keep practicing.

You can listen for the tonic in a number of places.

In music with a prominent melody (for example a rock song with a vocal part, or jazz trio where the pianist or guitarist plays the lead), that should usually be your first place to focus. However, we can also find the tonic through the harmony, by listening to the chords or by tuning in to the bassline. Draw on your Active Listening skills to explore the music! Since the tonic is such a core, defining property of the music, it’s the same across every instrument. Unless the composer is doing something really wacky, they will all be playing in the same key, and so they’ll have the same tonic.

Wherever you choose to focus your listening, there are two main “clues” which can help you find the tonic:

Clue #1: The Tonic Sounds Like “Home”

The tonic also gets called the “home note” of a key or a piece of music because it feels like coming home. It’s the note which sounds most at-rest, or most stable.

It’s often the most-commonly used note in the music. You’ll normally find it coming up a lot in the melody and in the harmony, so it’s a very prominent note. It’s also very often the note that each section (e.g. verse or chorus) or the whole piece of music will finish on, because it has that sense of completion, resolution, being at rest. So if you take a certain melody, for example, it’s going to use all kinds of different pitches, but there’s going to be one that, more than any other, makes it sound like that melody is complete. Like if you stopped on that note, it would be okay. Whereas if you stopped on one of the other notes, the listener would be left feeling like, “oh, it hasn’t quite come to the end yet…”

So that’s the main thing to listen for. Once you practice tuning in to that role the tonic plays, you’ll find it easy to automatically notice it. This is a special case of what we talked about earlier regarding Solfa, that each note of the scale has its own distinctive character in music, and you learn to spot “Oh, it’s that one!”

Clue #2: The Tonic Is Always Welcome

The tonic, generally speaking, is going to sound good throughout the music. As always, we have to throw in a caveat that in certain pieces, or certain styles of music, or certain temporary moments in a piece, that may not hold true! But overall, you can think of the tonic as a note which is always welcome, musically. Other notes of the scale will sound good with certain chords, or they’ll sound fine momentarily as a passing note in a melody, but the tonic is the most consistently and universally “comfortable” note throughout.

This “clue” actually serves as a really useful way to do a quick check. Supposing you used Clue #1 and had found a note you thought was the tonic. Now try singing or humming that note as you listen to the music.

If it generally sounds comfortable (or “consonant”), that’s a good indicator you’ve found the right note. If you find it’s often clashing (or “dissonant”) with other notes, that suggests you may have tuned in to a note other than a tonic.

Just hum or sing the tonic for 5–10 seconds and see: does that sound like it’s the central note, the “home note”? Does it sound like the resting place that all of the others are built around? If so, you’ve probably correctly found the tonic.

Step 2: Identify the Tonic

Once we’ve found our tonic and can sing or hum it, it’s time to identify it. What is the letter name of that note?

This is where most musicians struggle, because often they can find the tonic by ear but then it becomes a matter of total guesswork to find that corresponding note on their instrument. They hunt around, playing notes at random, trying to find the one which matches.

Remember from Chapter 2: Mindset that we want to aim for “Trial and Improvement” rather than “Trial and Error”. So our basic process is similar, using an instrument to check, but we won’t guess at random. Instead we’ll use a single known “reference note” and our sense of Relative Pitch to go more quickly (and eventually directly) to the correct note.

If right now you don’t feel like you have a good sense of Relative Pitch, don’t worry. That’s exactly what you’ll be developing in the subsequent chapters! As you gain skill with Solfa and Intervals, you’ll be able to use those to more directly hear the relationship between your known reference note and your found tonic, and so identify the tonic.

For example, you might have a known reference note of “C”. You hum or sing the tonic note you found, and can hear it’s a Perfect Fourth above the C, so you know the tonic is an F. Or you might use your Solfa skills to recognise that the C sounds like “re” compared to your tonic, so your tonic must be B♭.

Where do you get the “known reference note” from? There are a few options:

1. Simply play a note (e.g. middle C) on an instrument, or use a tuning fork.
2. See what other musicians are doing. For example in a band practice you might be able to spot that the bassist is playing an F.
3. Memorise a single reference pitch, as covered in the section on Absolute Pitch above.

The option you choose will depend on the situation. For example, using a learned reference pitch is great if you’ve learned one, and there isn’t music playing—but if you’re joining in a jam session, it may be hard to audiate that reference pitch clearly and reliably, and you’d likely be better off quietly playing one note on your own instrument, or looking to other musicians to spot a note or a chord you can use as your known reference.

Armed with that known reference note, you can use Intervals or Solfa to identify the tonic you found. At first, don’t expect yourself to nail it! Remember “Trial and Improvement”. Even if using your Relative Pitch skills just gets you close to the correct answer, it can mean you identify the tonic with only two or three guesses, rather than the totally-random hunting-and-pecking that can take several guesses before you finally luck out.

Step 3: Determine the Tonality

The final step is to determine whether the key is major or minor. Like with finding the tonic, it’s something that musicians often find just comes naturally. You’ve spent so many years playing major scales and minor scales, or major chords and minor chords, it’s very easy to just judge “is this piece major or minor overall?” But if you haven’t acquired that skill passively, you will need to do a little bit of practice to learn to distinguish major from minor, and again there are various clues we can take advantage of.

Clue #1: Listen for the Third

This is a helpful clue if you’ve spent enough time playing scales to be able to sing a major scale and a minor scale. One critical difference between major and minor scales is whether the third note of the scale is a “Major Third” Interval from the tonic, or a “Minor Third”.

Having found the tonic, try singing up from it as if it’s a major scale, and then as if it’s a minor scale. That third note will either sound like it belongs neatly with the music (e.g. the notes used in the melody) or it will stick out oddly, revealing whether it’s a major or minor scale being used, and therefore whether the tonality of the key is major or minor.

Clue #2: Listen for the Tonality of the Chords

In major keys, typically most (if not all) of the chords used will be major. In minor keys, most (if not all) will be minor. Again, depending on your musical background, you may find it easy to tell a major chord from a minor chord, or not. If not, we’ll be covering that in Chapter 11: Chords and Progressions.

It’s not always obvious, or clear-cut. Sometimes the exact harmony of a piece or the sequence of chords in a progression can muddy the waters, so that the simplistic rules of thumb like “major sounds happy and minor sounds dark or mysterious” don’t help. A lot of the time though, musicians will have a sense of major versus minor, and applying this to the chords can help you sense the tonality of the music overall.

Assuming you feel like you can tell major chords from minor chords by ear, simply ask “are most of the chords in this music major or minor?” and you’ll have the tonality of the key.

Clue #3: Listen for the Tonality of the Root Chord

One chord is even more revealing of the tonality than all the others: the root chord, or tonic chord, meaning the one built with the tonic as its root note. Most music will end on that tonic chord, and often start with it too, and (like the tonic itself) it’s the one which sounds most “at rest” or most like “home”.

So if you can spot the tonic chord by ear, and tell whether it’s major or minor, that will tell you the key’s tonality too.

How To Check It

So you’ve listened and tried to hone in on the tonic note, and you think you’re singing the right one. You’ve identified that tonic note using a known reference note and your sense of Relative Pitch, and you think you’ve got that letter name right. And you’ve listened for the tonality and determined whether it seems to be major or minor.

Now you’ll probably want to check whether the key you’ve identified is correct or not. Without needing to run off and look up the notation, here are three ways you can self-check:

1. Check the tonic

   As noted above, generally the tonic will sound like the “home” note and it will pretty much always sound welcome or comfortable. So listen again, and simply play the tonic you’ve identified constantly or repeatedly as you listen (this is called an “ostinato”).

   Does it mostly sound fine? Or are there quite a lot of clashes?

2. Check with the tonic chord

   Knowing the tonic and the tonality tells you the tonic chord. For example, in the key of C Major, the tonic chord is a C Major chord. In the key of B Minor, the tonic chord is B Minor.

   If you play a chordal instrument (e.g. guitar, piano), play the chord throughout the music. If you play a melodic instrument (e.g. saxophone, violin) you can use the broken chord or arpeggio (i.e. play each note of the chord in turn).

   Again, does it fit in pretty well with the music throughout? Or does it seem like it’s only occasionally comfortable? It won’t match everything all the time, since the music is probably moving between various chords. But if you’ve chosen the wrong tonic, or the wrong tonality, you’ll probably find it only rarely sounds “at home” in the music, if at all.

3. Check with the scale

   Knowing the tonic and tonality tells you the scale being used. You can use this to self-check in three ways:

   Firstly, you can simply play the scale up and down, just like we did with the tonic and tonic chord, and see if it “fits”.

   Secondly, you can use the scale to try playing the melody or other parts of the music by ear. You should find that almost all, if not all, the notes you need can be found in the scale you’ve identified.

   Thirdly, you can try improvising using the notes of the scale. Again, if it’s the right scale (i.e. you’ve found the right key), your improvisation should fit in well with the rest of the music, otherwise it’s an indication that you might need to check the tonic and tonality again.

Remember what was mentioned above, that the key of a piece of music is very clear and precise in music theory terms, but can be very fuzzy indeed when it comes to the sound of the music itself! So allow yourself a lot of grace as you practice finding keys by ear.

Unless you’re branching into some forms of modal jazz, post-modern chromatic music, or similarly specialised genres, you’ll probably find that the music does have a single, clear key throughout, and it’s easy to check your answer using the options above and feel confident that you’ve got it.

Of course, the proof is in the pudding, so the real test will come when you start using the key you’ve identified to carry out the actual musical activities you were interested in to begin with! For example, as you try translating your Solfa-identified melody notes into absolute pitches to play by ear on your instrument, or you try using the Intervals you audiated to improvise what you imagined out loud. You may have made a mistake or two with the Relative Pitch side of things, but if everything comes out sounding “wrong”, that’s a good sign you may need to check the key again!

Key Changes

One last note about keys (no pun intended!). One tool which songwriters and composers have in their toolkit is to change key during the piece of music, known as modulation. This creates a feeling of “everything is a bit different now” and often marks a significant change in section, as discussed in Chapter 5: Active Listening when we looked at listening for the Form of the music.

This is good news and bad news for you, as the budding key-by-ear-finder. The bad news is that you’ll need to be aware that there may actually be more than one key used in the piece of music you’re working on. The good news is that its “everything is a bit different now” nature tends to make it stand out quite prominently. Even if you haven’t known about this before, you are almost certainly familiar with what it feels like when a piece of music changes key. With a bit of practice, you’ll be able to easily spot when that happens, and simply apply the process above to each key separately * There are common conventions in key changes, for example the famous “Truck Driver’s Gear Change” where the key is shifted upwards by a half step or whole step, to inject fresh energy for the final chorus of a pop or rock song, modulation to the relative minor key (the key with the same set of notes but a tonic which makes the tonality minor rather than major), or modulation by an interval of a Perfect Fifth up or down. Knowing a bit about these conventions can shortcut your process of identifying the new key, though the self-check steps will still come in handy! .