Chording Error in New Urban Jazz MIDI pack (or lots of parallel minor chords)?

[Steve McNamara]

Greetings:

I bought the new Urban Jazz EZK midi pack and right away found what I think is a significant mismatch of chords to the relevant major key (I don’t profess to have the deepest knowledge of music/chord theory, so if I’ve overlooked something basic no offense taken).

The background:

Key of E major

song:  “Easy Go” under Straight 4/4.

I first dragged Variation 1 of Verse 1 into the timeline, and got the chords Em7, A, D, G — this is not E major.  I suppose it could be “borrowing” the Em from the parallel E minor scale along with the G major and D major, but the A would be minor, so perhaps A major is kept from E major?  It just would be odd for the very first variation of the verse to be so far from the actual major scale.

Chorus:  Em7 and A:  Could be the key of D basically

Bridge:  I tried just Variations 1 and 4 and got:  Em, D and C — now seems to be the key of G.

The E major chord does show up in the Intro and Pre Chorus as I recall, and the switch to E minor in the verse feels a bit off.  Of course it could just be down to taste.

All insight into the chord choices would be most welcome.

Thanks very much,

Stephen

• This post was modified 7 years ago by Steve McNamara.

Topic

[Steve McNamara]

[comment about post being “marked as spam” removed as the thread has now shown up.  Thanks to the moderators]

Stephen McNamara

• This post was modified 7 years ago by Steve McNamara.

[Viktor Hansson]

Hi Steve,

Thanks for your message.

 

This particular pack is bit different from our other packs. Due to the nature of the genre and the style the pianist has captured in this pack there are a lot of colorations in the chords and the scales used are not only major and minor.

For most of the songs it is major or minor as usual but for example this particular Song (Easy Going) the Key is E Dorian for the Intro-Chorus and the Bridge is in Em Aeolian

[Steve McNamara]

Ah, so it’s a feature not a bug. 🙂

Viktor, thanks for clearing that up; though, might it not make sense for a Dorian sequence such as E Dorian to show up when D major is selected?  Or possibly a future iteration of EZK have a small notation of text indicating the Dorian or Aeolian link?  Just a thought.

And while I’m taking a moment to suggest program changes 🙂 it would be great to have a button on the main page that allows us to choose original key or not.  Having to open the multiple drop downs to get there isn’t a huge hassle of course, but a single button would be great.

Thanks for your time.

Stephen.

[Author]

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