September

Music Theory: Relative Majors and Minors

Posted In: Music Theory, Uncategorized by claybutlermusic

Once again, we’re expanding the series, “10 Things Every Musician Should Know“. Today, we’re going to deal with Relative Majors and Minors.

Every Major key has a relative minor key. This means that they share the same key signature, which, in turn means that the same accidentals are used to build the keys. There are a couple of ways to determine the relative minor of a major key (or chord). In our last post, “Datonic Triads: Chords by Key“, I mentioned that the relative minor of a major scale was found by using the 6th note in the scale as the starting note. So, the sixth note of the C major scale is “A”, therefore its relative minor is A Minor.

The second way to find the relative minor is to start at the first note in the scale and go down a minor third. A minor third consists of a half step, followed by a whole step. So, for C Major, we start on C, go down a half step to B, then a whole step to A. It just so happens that this process also leads you to the 6th scale degree.

Now that we know how to find the relative minor for each key/chord, here’s a list so you can commit them to memory: