There was a period from the '30s through the '50s where multiple artists and dance bands would swarm around the latest Gershwin/Porter/whoever song and all record versions of it, hoping to be the one that hit with the public. One also can't cover it in the same way that pop songs have been covered since the 19th c. The writer talks about there not being a melody in a Notorious B.I.G. One point raised in the article that I'd like to read more about is the fundamental difference (not a great one, imo) that hip-hop has made in the American songbook: the irreproducibility of songs. When you can get your big dynamic move out of song by really working the contrasting loudness and quiet, or by building up increasing layers of non-muddy sounds verse by chorus by verse without the huge time pressure of getting it in a few takes with session musicians, etc, you can depend less on using a key change to produce that wow factor or that frisson at the move between a verse and a chorus and a bridge and a big dropout and a big beat drop. Huge memory capacity on mixing hardware and the ability to costlessly experiment with mixes and audio manipulation let people do stuff that would have had to have gotten done in one good take decades back. Generational loss of copies is no longer a thing. decades ago to finesse and fine-tune the micro and macro dynamics of a song in ways unrelated to harmonic structure. Posted by cortex at 9:12 AM on NovemĪnd another idle thought on the shift: I think one of the subtler ways that electronic/DAW song production has changed the situation is that there's a great deal more capacity now vs. It feels so big that even listening back I had to scrub to early and late sections to convince myself it really didn't do a step up at the end. But it's a couple of huuuuge moves, really effective use of that key step in a big 90s pop ballad context. The article mentions Every Breath You Take and it's I think a middling example of this: both in and out of the bridge are good meaty changes but not humongous dynamic ones it's enough to give a little bit of mid-song meat to what is otherwise a very intentionally repetitive and fairly sonically low-key song.Ĭontrast with another one that goes bigger: I was gonna use Mariah Carey's 1993 " Hero" as an example of a song using a key change into the bridge followed by a change to a third, stepped-up key on the way out, but I went and listened to it again to refresh my memory and it doesn't! Just original key, bridge key, back to the original. And you can get two distinct big moves out of it-shifting into the bridge key, shifting back out again-in a way that feels less compositionally trite than doing 2+ steps up on the main loop.
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Which, I feel like the bridge shift may not feel as unambiguously big as a full song key shift, but when it's done effectively it certainly can feel huge. Posted by cortex at 8:55 AM on NovemĪnother wrinkle that seems worth digging in on is the question of bridge key changes: even if a song starts and ends in the same key, using a shift out of that key for the bridge before returning for the chorus creates a similar surge of harmonic energy in a song, which I'm not sure this analysis looks at directly at all but I'm curious if Dalla Riva explores elsewhere.įor that matter it'd be interesting to see how tightly collocated the bridge key change and the coda key change are there former will often in a big ballad lead directly into the latter as a harmonic one-two punch. Feels like there's a bigger, longer story in song-writing and production trends there. That's a reasonable interpretation of the dynamics of his graph over time but to my eye the real moments of big change seem like roughly 2000 where it falls off not just from the previous max but to only half of even what it was ten years prior and then again circa 2010 where it has truly flatlined entirely after a decade of steady further decline. One thing I would like to see expanded in more detail is his point about 1990 as a turning point for the fall-off of key changes. I tend to write songs on guitar or piano, so I still feel that pull to do it in E or D instead of Db if a half-step off my ideal vocal range is the only price to pay. This is an interesting observation! Both of the elements Dalla Riva identify as driving the sea change-the rise of hiphop as a production genre and the move to digital recording and DAW-based composition-really make a lot of sense to me.Īnd the side-point that electronic production created a more even distribution of key choices likewise.
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