It seemed to be a thing for awhile. Peggy Lee had a half-step changes in “Fever.”
Allan Sherman does this twice during the “list of last names” section in “Shake Hands with Your Uncle Max.”
Maybe, but in my experience “Guitar Player Keys” are all sharp keys–G, D, A, E–because they can use open strings for that ringing sound:
I think most people have trouble with B. Not to mention F#.
Can’t speak to piano, but saxophone and horn players prefer flat keys–F, Bb, Eb, Ab.
C is neutral territory.
One more example of a half-step modulation: “Surrender” by Cheap Trick. The two-chord lead into each verse modulates after the intro, and the last verse, chorus and outro.
Oh, one more! “Red Rubber Ball” by The Cyrkle, for the last verse and chorus.
Schoenberg’s commentary on the subject is in his usual hilarious style, yet one ignores his advice at one’s peril:
Can’t forget Beep, Beep by the Playmates https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ayTJtVzHOLs
B major feels good under the hand, but, as said above, it just sucks for blues for where the blue notes are, and you can’t do those nice grace note slides from a black key to a white key. Just feels wrong. I remember being a kid trying to play along to the Black Crowes’ “Hard to Handle” and just having a wreck of a time trying to do so.
F# is intuitive for some players. There’s a famous composer, and my middle-aged addled brain is not remembering who off the top of my head, who would compose everything in F# because he found it easiest on a piano. Similarly, my jazz piano teacher told me of a student he had that came to him only playing in F#. I mean, if you just want to mess around on the piano, you have a nice pentatonic scale there and you don’t even have to know how to really play to make something sound good. I’m not so much a fan of F# major myself, but I do really like Db major, another black-key focused key.
I think you are referring to Irving Berlin who fiddled around on the piano’s black keys.
That’s the one!
Supposedly once he got reasonably well off he had a mechanical transposing piano, where a lever would shift the hammers sideways relative to the strings?
Someone with better ears than me will need to explain how the bridge of Christopher Tin’s “Baba Yetu” goes up and up and up until it reaches what sounds like the furthest possible key but then somehow settles back into the original key.
[Video should be cued to 1:12, one-half stanza before the bridge]
Good question, T_E. I was gonna oblige but somebody has already done exactly as you requested:
I guess that’s the definitive analysis as it’s from Christopher Tin himself.
That only gets you as far as the C#m chord, which puts the song in E major, using E, A, and B chords. To get back to the original G major, there’s an additional point where it plays A (the IV) then does a bVI-bVII in E—what I’ve called the Mario chord progression. It’s often used at the end of pieces to give a very triumphant fair.
But, instead of going to E, it treats those chords as IV-V resolving in on G, the original key.