Some cousins don’t get along with each other, but others are “kissing cousins”. And that’s exactly what the C major scale and the A minor scale are - kissing cousins.

What makes them like that? They are related because they share the very same notes. If you play the C scale from A to A, what you have is the A natural minor scale. (There are other varieties of minor scales, such as harmonic and melodic, but that’s not our subject here.)

Please watch this 14-minute video and learn which scales are related to each other and why:

For an exhaustive course on scales, come on over to All About Scales & How To Use Them!

To play in any given key, such as the key of A or the key of Db or any key, you really need to be able to think in that key.

When I was in college I spent one semester in Mexico City while attending Mexico City College and lived with a Mexican family. I had taken 4 year of Spanish in high school, but I certainly wasn’t great at speaking Spanish. But before the semester was up, I began to actually think in Spanish to some extent — certainly not very much, but some. And as a result, I could begin to converse more comfortably when I spoke to the locals.

And I could see that if I had spent a couple years there instead of just 3 months, I would be a lot further down the road in thinking in Spanish.

It’s the same with you when it comes to music.

You can probably think in the key of C — most piano players can, because that’s the key they almost always start in. And that’s fine. But if you had started in the key of Bb or E, you would be just as comfortable as you are in the key of C.

But there are 2 HUGE advantages in music over languages when it comes to thinking:

1. There are hundreds (probably thousands,if you count dialects) of languages. There are only 12 major keys.

2. Those languages have different alphabets in many cases. All keys in music use the same alphabet - A, B, C, D, E, F, and G. That’s it.

3. Language alphabets have many letters — English has 26, Greek has 24, Hebrew I believe has 27, and so on. And of course, the letters are not the same as in English.

So learning to think in all 12 major keys is not that hard compared to learning languages (in fact it is super easy compared to languages!). And since there are 12 months in the year, why not devote one month to learning the key of D, one month learning the key of Eb, and so on throughout the year? At the end of the year you’ll have a pretty good grasp of all 12 keys, and you’ll begin to think in those keys instead of fighting with the sharps and flats as perhaps you used to.

If you would like some help, go over to How To Think In All 12 Keys.