Find your song’s musical key or scale

First of all, you need to find the key of your song. You can know the frequencies that correspond to each note, but this is useless if you have no idea about what are the most important notes in the song you are mixing. Experienced musicians and music producers can detect this immediately or just playing a few seconds a keyboard while they are listening to the song. However, if you are new to the music production you may find this difficult, so here there are a few easy ways to find the key of your song.

Check the key signature

Firstly, If you have access to the music sheet (or maybe you are working with a famous song and can just google it “name of the song + sheet music”), you can check the key signature at the beginning of the sheet. If you don’t know anything about music theory, don’t worry just find the ‘symbol’ in this chart and you will have the key of the track you are working with.

Use your DAW’s pitch detector

Most of the recent DAW versions in 2019 includes their own pitch correction or pitch analyzer plugin. You can also use third party plugins like Melodyne or autotune. These plugins will analyze the musical notes a track is playing. You can analyze the vocals or the piano and check the notes on the piano roll. After this, you only have to go to a piano scales chart like this (this website also has a complete piano scales chart) and find out what scale or music key corresponds. 

Use DJ’s software

If you are a music producer, there is a big chance that you also are a DJ or at least have access to  DJ software. Most of these software in their recent versions have a key detector, so it is as simple as loading the file in them.

Use specific plugins like ‘Mixed in Key’

Some plugins manufacturers have brought this technology so common in the DJ’s software to our DAWs. They are made to analyze the musical key of all our audio files.

I don’t recommend getting used to this kind of plugins because they will make your ear ‘lazy’. From my point of view, the best way to go is always a little bit of practice and training. This way, you will be picking the key of any song in seconds. In other words, you won’t have to do any of this!. On the other hand, if you are a complete beginner this kind of tool can help you to take off. 

Note to Frequency Chart

Now you have several ways to guess the key of your song, and therefore, your root note, you need to know which frequency corresponds with that root note. For that purpose, we have the Note to Frequency Chart.

Okay, I know the root note and its frequency now… what?

In the first place, you can use this information to pitch your samples. This will bring a more musical result to your tracks. Moreover, when you are equalising your tracks with low-frequency content!. For instance, imagine you are mixing a Hip-Hop song and you feel that the bass line isn’t defined within the mix. Are you going to boost any random low frequency? No! What you need is to boost the frequency which corresponds with the root note of your song!. Let’s say your track is in Em, you can see in the Note to Frequency chart that the rote note (D2) corresponds with 73Hz. It’s that simple. You can do the same with your Kick, Snare, percussion elements etc.

Do you want to know how to use an EQ? Check this post with everything you need about Equalization in Music 

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