Relative Major and Minor
Relative minor
The three chords we learned about–the tonic chord, the subdominant chord, and the dominant chord–are used very often, in almost all popular songs, but playing just these three chords is not enough for the majority of melodies.
Quite often, the melody won't stay within these three chords of its main key, but will jump to its relative key.
For a major key, a relative minor is a minor key with its tonic 3 half steps lower than the tonic of the original major key. Too complicated? For C major, the relative minor is A minor: A and C are 3 keys apart on the keyboard. For D major, the relative minor would be–counting 3 half steps lower–B minor.
What is the relative minor for A major? Answer: it is F♯ minor.
Why is the relative minor important? The music theory will say that its scale contains the same notes as the original major, so they have the same key signatures; without going that deep into theory, let me just show you that C major and A minor chords indeed share two of the three notes:
Just press each button and notice that the C major chord, C E G, and the A minor chord, A C E, have C E in common.
Also, just compare the C major scale with the A minor scale:
Have you noticed that these two scales use the same notes? That's the reason why they are related.
Relative major
The same thing works the other way around: for a given minor key, e.g. G minor, the relative major is 3 half steps upper: B♭ major. For A minor, it's–obviously, as we discussed above–C major, and so on.
Movement between relative major and minor
The main reason we need to talk about relative major and minor is because chord progressions often jump between them. So when you play chords for the given melody, not only you need to build the tonic, the subdominant, and the dominant chord for its main key, but also for the relative key.
Here's one example to show how this all makes sense. You might know the song “Those Were the Days”; its melody is actually a somewhat older Russian romance song “Dorogoi dlinnoyu”, and here are the first two measures of the chorus; I'll play them in A minor for you:
But what happens next? The subdominant chord Dm opens the door to some adventures, so the melody jumps into its relative major. The next chord after Dm is G, which functions as a dominant of C. Here is that fragment again, with two more measures. Use the buttons to play chords!
And if you remember the melody, you can already predict that the second part of the chorus goes back to its original A minor key:
So let's take a look at the chorus once more:
- it starts with a common A minor chord sequence: Am, Dm
- it temporary moves to its relative C major: G, C
- it goes back to A minor: Dm, Am, E, Am
Try playing it without the chord hints so you could feel this transition!
Let me give you one more example. We already looked at the first phrase of Mozart's 40th symphony when we looked at the tonic-subdominant-dominant progression, here is another fragment from the same piece, again, in G minor. Try playing this fragment and see how it moves from the minor to its relative major:
I gave you the chord buttons you needed, were you able to catch the transition to the major? The symphony is written in G minor, so the related major–3 half steps above–is B♭ major, and its dominant chord is F major (sorry, a little bit of black keys make it a little bit harder to play here). Here are just the chords you need. Try listening in this order: Gm Cm F B♭, and you will surely hear the progression that could easily be in any modern pop song. But this is Mozart in 1788!
Here is that fragment once again for you, this time with chords marked:
We'll see more examples of switching between relative major and relative minor keys when we talk about descending bass lines.