What Key Should You Use For Your Progressive House Song?

In this article we will show you our findings of the 100 song analysis on Progressive House. One of the first choices you have to make when you start writing a song is what Key (or Scale) you are going write your song. This is something I have struggled with a lot because you can be overwhelmed by the amount of options you have even before you start writing a song. This is true for any genre of music, but with most subgenres of Electronic Dance Music (EDM) you want your song to be mixable with existing songs. To make sure your can easily mix your song, or use it for mashups you want the Key of your song to be the same (or one Camelot key away) as the song you want to mix with.

The most common keys in Progressive House

To create this list we did an analysis on 100 popular progressive house songs (half of this list can be found here). We listened closely to all these tracks to determine the root key, then we verified our findings with a quick search on BeatPort & TuneBat. Both websites are great for finding the Tempo & Key of a song, but they are not always correct so be sure to verify the Key yourself. The way we determine a Key is by playing the piano while listening to the track and looking what notes are in every key. This can be done with a poster like this: Notes in Keys Poster. When playing the piano while listening to a song all notes that are not in the key of the song will sound off.

The most common key in this genre that we found is the G Minor scale, because this is a minor scale this key sounds more emotional. Some popular songs that use this key are: In My Mind (Axwell Mix) by Ivan Gough & Feenixpawl, Lions in The Wild by Martin Garrix & X You by Avicii. The second most common is the D Major key. Because this is a Major key this makes the song sound more energetic. Well known songs using this key are: Don’t You Worry Child by Swedish House Mafia, If I Lose Myself (Alesso Remix) & New Memories by DubVision & Afrojack.

Major vs Minor Keys in Progressive House

Besides looking at the individual keys that are most common in this genre, we analyzed what percentage of songs are written in Major and Minor scales. As you can see in the image above, Major keys are more common than Minor keys in progressive house. We think this has to do with the fact that Progressive House is a very energetic type of dance music.

Camelot Key Analysis

The final analysis we did for this genre was on Camelot Keys. Camelot Keys are most commonly used for mixing, using a Camelot wheel. The Camelot wheel gives all keys a number and a letter. The letter A means the that the key of the song is a Minor key and the letter B means the key is in Major. For clean great sounding mixing it is recommended to use harmonic mixing, this means you can only mix from A to B staying in the same number, or mixing to one number higher or lower (for example from 6 to 5 or to 7). More information in mixing using Camelot keys can be found on the website of MixedInKey. In our analysis we found that the most common Camelot keys for Progressive House are 6A and 10B, these correspond with the G Minor and D Major keys found earlier.

Thank you so much for reading this article! I hope you got some value out of it, I learned a lot about Progressive House writing this. If you have any questions about the production of this style of music feel free to send me a DM on Instagram.