geordiebluesman
762 posts
Aug 19, 2013
12:48 PM
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Hi Guys, I know I'm gonna get a lecture about training my ears for this but I'm gonna ask anyway.
Is there an App that enables you to identify a song key in real time in a live situation with your phone?
There is a great music pub near me with Guitars hung up to encourage people to grab one and play and often I will want to join in with a group of people playing and I would love to be able to verify the key of their song and pick the appropriate Harp and just gently blend in.
At the moment I have to ask which isn't always ideal as it can ruin the moment.
Often I think I know the key and if I have a suitable harp I will give it a try but I have got it wrong often enough to want a bit of a heads up before showing my hand, (with the Harp being a bit of a stealth instrument until you whip it out and start to play)
Is there anything that allows you to do this with a smart phone? I don't have a smart phone but I am due to renew my contract and would consider upgrading if something like this was available.
Last Edited by geordiebluesman on Aug 19, 2013 12:49 PM
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The Iceman
1110 posts
Aug 19, 2013
1:29 PM
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damn..
I'm always losing my car keys and was excited to see this posting.
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The Iceman
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STME58
525 posts
Aug 19, 2013
5:43 PM
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I use a tuner. Once I have listened to a song enough to be able to sing the tonic, I sing it into the tuner and the tuner tells me the key.I don't have a smart phone but I understand there are many tuner apps.
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timeistight
1328 posts
Aug 19, 2013
6:01 PM
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If you can sing the tonic, you can find it on a harmonica. Why bother with a tuner?
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STME58
526 posts
Aug 19, 2013
7:54 PM
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"If you can sing the tonic, you can find it on a harmonica. Why bother with a tuner?"
That works too, but for me right now, the tuner is faster and easier. I expect that will change as I become more familiar with the harps.
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joe
59 posts
Aug 19, 2013
11:45 PM
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with the others, i'll spare you the lecture geordiebluesman
but i have been posting on this and related skills
lately in reading and transcribing
it's made trickier because the key your are hearing
might not necessarily be the harmonica you need
- depends of course
if you are getting it right 'often' then you are on the
right track. use a computer, headphones and a harmonica
to practice in a way that appeals to you. there are
many fun activities you can set yourself
joe
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UTC+10
Last Edited by joe on Aug 19, 2013 11:46 PM
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Baker
316 posts
Aug 20, 2013
3:19 AM
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I'm not sure about apps which do this but a quick trick I use if it's busy or loud is to look to see what chords the guitar player is playing, see which chord they're playing when the tune "comes home". This is, 99% of the time, the root chord and will give you the key of the song.
Obviously this means knowing a bit about playing the guitar. You don't have to be a great player, just know enough to know what the chords look like.
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Boots
11 posts
Aug 20, 2013
1:21 PM
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I don't have any tips on figuring out what key a song is, but I usually keep this in my pocket at gigs. It's quite handy if you're trying to figure out what harp you should be using.
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STME58
527 posts
Aug 20, 2013
3:22 PM
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I was at Walt Richard's Slo Jam in San Diego last Friday and he mentioned the importance of being able to watch the guitar player and know what chord was being played. He also mentioned you need to understand what a capo does to the cords. There is always something else to learn!
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oldwailer
1979 posts
Aug 20, 2013
3:48 PM
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Well, I've been playing guitar for over 50 years now--and I'm often at a loss on figuring out the key--there are just so many inversions up the neck--and you get one of these modern day shredders and I don't think they even know a straight first position chord.
I just go with my ears--then try something really softly and see if it works. Adam has an excellent video up somewhere on how to find the key, but I couldn't find it in a quick scan. . .
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jbear
23 posts
Aug 21, 2013
3:19 AM
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Someone asked me this a while ago with a view to adding it to my key finder app.
There are two ways an app like this could work and as far as I know, neither exists.
The first way is a kind of AI where it works out roughly what notes are being played (not sure if that's even possible), chords etc in the song, works out what the chord progression is, decides the genre for that, and decides on the key. That's a super hard thing to do and would be unreliable.
The other option is a song database where users can 'tag' a song with a key, and it gets saved off so that later on when someone wants to know what key it's in, they can get it. Kind of like Shazam. It'd be a lot easier but building up the database would take time.
In short...use your ear or ask someone!
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nacoran
7047 posts
Aug 21, 2013
6:39 PM
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There used to be a plug-in for an older version of Windows Media Player that analyze the songs and give you it's best guess at the key. It was a little unstable, and would crash WMA occasionally, but WMA automatically disabled it after a crash, so you could reboot the next time. I'd toggle it on and off depending on if I was actively keying songs.
I don't remember the name of it, but I mentioned it a few times in old posts. A search would probably track it down, and theoretically, at least on a regular computer (I'm not sure about on a cell phone) you could install the older version of WMA and use the plug-in.)
Key can sometimes be a little fuzzy. Sometimes songs modulate a little, short of a full on key change) from a couple neighboring keys, and major/minor can be hard for software to guess, (C to G sort of stuff), but the way it displayed showed it's best guess. Whichever key it said would sound okay with the song, although it was usually worth trying the harp on either side of it on the circle of fifths to see if they sounded better.
On my old (sadly crashed) hard drive I had a lot of my songs keyed using that. WMA lets you add the metadata field for key (if you select it from the dropdown menu). I'd write it down like C/G to indicate harps that worked. Until my harddrive crashed it was wonderful.
There is also an app that lets you whistle a couple bars of a song and it will search a huge database and tell you what the song is. (It probably was developed for scanning sites for illegal uses of music originally. I can't imagine someone developing a database that huge that solely out of the goodness of their heart). There are also tuning apps.
Taken together, those three technologies (or really, just little pieces of a couple of them) makes me believe there wouldn't be a technological barrier to something like a universal key finder. The best non-WMA key finding programs seem to be for beatbox DJ's. They are often (like harp players) in a situation where they need to know keys (for them to mix different song snippets together). I'm not sure they do much of their mixing on phone apps though (although maybe more on tablets?)
As for just a key database, I found one the other day for guitar players. I'll try to find the link tomorrow. It's by no means comprehensive. If I was going to try to build a database of that information, the first thing I'd try to do is pool people beyond the harp community. There is a lot more guitar tab out there than harp tab. The more instrument groups you got pooling info the quicker the database could be built. Of course, that assumes the band is playing in the original key.
A quick Google search can sometimes turn it up. Guitar tab often doesn't have the key listed, just the chords. You can figure it out if you know the chords in a key, but for me that's a painfully slow process. A good cheat sheet way to do that is to look for sheet music. Lots of sheet music sites will give you a view of the first page of a song's music, and you can look at the key signature. If you don't read sheet music, count the number of sharps or flats in the key signature. You can make a cheat sheet for that pretty easily. The problem is, that still takes a little bit. It's fine for keying songs at home, but it's not going to be fast enough if the band has started playing (unless maybe they are playing Innagadadavida.
A nice first step we could all take- when you record stuff, most programs have a field for adding key. Add it. It means someone else can just look at it and know the key. You do it for the 12 songs on your album, I do it for the 12 songs on mine, and pretty soon you start to have a real database.
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geordiebluesman
763 posts
Aug 22, 2013
1:10 AM
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Thanks for the replies lads, I suspected that this hoped for App wouldn't actually exist and it seems I was right, just to reiterate I wanted something to help me figure the key of a song being played LIVE so I could then know if I was carrying a harp that would let me sit in (I'm not Howard Levy so I need more than one Harp to do that!)
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