Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Pianist Corner - Non Classical Happy Keys, Sad Keys

What keys are the sad song keys, mellow songs, and which keys are for the happy songs? What keys do most singers prefer?

You have sad songs in all keys and happy songs in all keys. It depents on the progression as far as I understand it.

Try the app "Chord Progression" Android, don't know if it exists on iphone

Traditionally, flat keys are "mellow" - the more flats the better, and sharp keys are "spikey" - to the extent that this is anything other than personal perception,I think it goes back to the idea of "equal temperament" where there are very small differences between the notes in different scales. I like Eb and Db for ballads, and D is a good key for marches. I'm not aware that singers have preferences - other than to choose a key which keeps what they have to sing within their "comfort range".

Minor key tunes are a downer for me compared with the majors, also seems keys of F & G fit most vocal ranges a little better than say C.

A few lower register musical tones bring in the mellow sounds for my ears.

D minor is the saddest of all known keys...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NgViOqGJEvM

I was going to post same video before anyone had responded. Thanks for thinking like me, or me thinking like you.

Does this scene actually comes from the movie?

yes

<face palm emoji>

I found this on the internet: supposedly the 'thinking' of the 18th and early 19th centuries:

C major – completely pure, innocence, simplicity
C minor – obscure and sad
D flat major – a leering key, degenerating into grief and rapture
D major – joyous and very warlike
D minor – melancholy, serious and pious
E flat major – the key of love, devotion

Paolo Pietropaolo has assigned the keys to different 'personalities'. You might find this link and thoughts interesting:

https://www.artofcomposing.com/key-signatures-make-the-music

While I sometimes think that different keys have different characters, some sources way that with equal temperament tuning on the piano, this is an illusion; all the major keys are the same and all the minor keys are the same.

Isn't the question rather 'does the key signature that a piece is written in change the feeling/perception of a piece'? rather than discussing tuning of keys to equal temperament?

I'm raising the question of whether the fact that we think pieces "feel" differently in different keys is an illusion. Under older tuning systems, the different keys really were different, but under the tuning system that is now almost universal, the keys are all identical. The intervals are the same, so no key is brighter or mellower. ( Of course, there is a big difference between pieces in major v minor keys.)

So isn't a certain progression of chords make a song happy or sad?

I think we're talking about a given progression sounding different in different keys.

There's this:
https://soundcloud.com/thesignatureseries

The way a tune is delivered may have more effect than keys ... this one starts about 7:50:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P5qdfTIrOw8

Hey Knotty, I'm in DC and looking for a teacher that can guide me through Dave Frank's JOI. Can you help me? Dan

lol, this was funny! I'm kind of a skeptic, but that's also cause I only have relative pitch, not absolute pitch. Maybe those that have perfect pitch have more opinion on the matter.

I mostly attribute happy to major keys and sad to minor keys. But I played some slow songs in major keys for one of my piano kids and she felt it sounded sad. So.. I guess it's a bit subjective.

I'd agree that most minor chord/key tunes sound melancholy.

As far as popular singing keys. . . . . in my circle of associates, it would be G, D, with C a close third. Johnny Cash popularized E. Bill Monroe popularized B & Bb. Fiddler's seem to lean toward A. For some reason very few in F.

Ummm... It depends on the song and the singer's voice.
I happen to have many recordings of songs that are sung in F.

So the very notion of "popular singing keys" is absurd.

At best, FOR A GIVEN SONG, you could say that men USUALLY sing in this key, and women in this other key (USUALLY a fourth or a fifth apart). But even this can vary.