HOWTO shift any song into a major key

If you liked the REM's Losing My Religion shifted to a major key post, check out Eliot Van Buskirk's Evolver post on recreating the effect using Celemony Melodyne, a package that sells for $99 and up.

“Losing My Religion” is in A minor. I want to make it A Major, the same way Major Keyed did.

Luckily, I didn’t have to go through and change every relevant note manually, although you can do that too. Melodyne has a scale editor, so I simply switched the whole song to A Major and exported it, which took a few clicks and fewer minutes.

How Major-Key Version of R.E.M.’s ‘Losing My Religion’ Was Made (Thanks, Eliot!)

• [William Joseph Dunn]

  Eeew.

• [Alexander Janssen]

  The funny thing is, this might circumvent these nasty “The video is not available”-GEMA-fails in the Germanys.

• [philmillman]

  Wouldn’t it make more sense in C Major? 

  • [Incipient Madness]

    Yeah, if you’re playing piano of guitar that’s easier as fingerings will be the same to an extent, just shifted. Easier from a mechanical point of view if you are playing an instrument, but would require changing every single pitch in a digital file. 

• [Paper Kosmonaut]

  It sounds bad. And weirder than the more elaborate note-for-note version, if you ask me.

• [Bushbaby]

  You’ll need the polyphonic version (“Singletrack”) — quite a bit more than the $99 version (which only handles monophonic material).

• [Douglas Smith]

  It sounds like a hack.  The chords don’t fit together as such.  You can’t just transpose chords from minor to major and have the melody make sense

• [Steve Rowell]

  I dunno… Making an app to shift pop songs into minor keys would be much more interesting.

  • [Donald Petersen]

    Personally, I prefer having flesh & blood musicians do it.  (Check out the weirdness that A Perfect Circle visited upon their cover of Lennon’s Imagine.)

    Having machines transpose songs into unorthodox keys and modes?  That there’s the devil’s work.

• [Adam Yeargin]

  I think that REM song transposes it to the relative major key, keeping the same key signature.  It’s different than just changing it from A minor to A major.