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Occasionally I will use a note that is in the wrong key because I feel like it emphasizes the beauty in the original notes by showing contrast. I'm only a hobby pianist, so I was just wondering if it's common.

grassbee
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    What is a "wrong" note? – Neil Meyer Sep 17 '16 at 07:08
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    "note that is in the wrong key" doesn't seem a useful definition of a 'wrong note', because there are many, many situations where notes outside of a key are used in a way that is perfectly "correct" within the musical style. Bear in mind that keys are not really a fundamental musical concept, and in some styles of music the concept of 'key' isn't applicable in the same way as it is in other styles. In some styles, talking about 'key' is meaningless. – Нет войне Sep 17 '16 at 08:37
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    To me, a 'wrong note' to me would be one that goes against the expectations that a piece sets up - though of course different people might have different expectations. The 'wrong note' would still be a perfectly valid artistic statement in any case! – Нет войне Sep 17 '16 at 08:38
  • You also have certain types of pieces where there is ambiguity in the key to the extent that it can be considered to the piece has no key. – Neil Meyer Sep 17 '16 at 14:59
  • There's an entire jazz record label named after this effect ;-) – Carl Witthoft Sep 17 '16 at 23:48
  • Schoenberg ONLY played "wrong notes..." I like Schoenberg, but that is a matter of opinion. And very strong opinion at that. – General Nuisance Sep 18 '16 at 13:37
  • Check out Leonard Bernstein's Wrong Note Rag! – musarithmia Sep 18 '16 at 20:19
  • Maybe you should give an example of the "wrong" note you're talking about. Almost always, something that sounds good to you will also have a basis in music theory, and it can be fun and helpful to learn why your ears are telling you what they're telling you – Some_Guy Sep 19 '16 at 11:23
  • C# crops up frequently in Beethoven's 8th symphony in F major. If it was good enough for him, it's good enough for the rest of us :-) – mlinth Sep 19 '16 at 13:29

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Given a key, say C major, you could make a case for using any 'wrong' note pretty easily. Melodically speaking, you might do this with any black note to do exactly what you said, emphasize the beauty in the original notes, by using the 'wrong' note as a device to create tension and convey a yearning to resolve to a white note.

But all of the 'wrong' notes also have standard harmonic associations, which you would learn about in an intro to Western Music theory class. The simplest way is through the use of secondary dominants. With secondary dominants, we are briefly stepping into another closely related key in order to give power to a chord in C major other than C itself (the tonic). So there is a chord that doesn't fit into C major but it naturally leads to a chord that is in C major.
For example, you might encounter an F# in the key of C because the dominant triad in G is D (indeed the progression D G C is very common!) and similarly we might find an Eb because it is in contained in the fully diminished 7th chord on F# which leads to G. We might also find C# in an A major triad, which is the dominant triad of D (as in A d G C progression), and Bb within a C dominant 7th chord which would be followed by an F major triad. As for Ab, it is quite common in the key of C major because it is occurs in the fully diminished 7th on B, which is a strong tool for leading back to the C major triad itself.

So, any of the 'wrong' notes in C might occur in standard chord progressions as ways of briefly emphasizing other chords living in the key of C. There are also a ton of other reasons that you might encounter these notes in functional harmony, maybe you would enjoy learning more about them!

Badam Baplan
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I wouldn't say it's common, at least in the music classes I had, but I think if it sounds good to you then you should do as you please because it's your song. Also I think that's a pretty cool way you view using an occasional wrong note: emphasizing the beauty in the original notes.

3rika
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Out-of-scale notes and chords are commonplace in all but the most simplistic music. They may be chromatic decorations, they may be complete chromatic chords.

C major SCALE includes the chords C, D minor, E minor, F, G, A minor, B diminished. But pieces in the KEY of C major can also include D, E, F minor, Ab, Bb... to list just a few.

There's an important distinction between "using a scale" and "being in a key". It's a distinction that seems to confuse a lot of beginner musicians, and a few more experienced ones!

Laurence
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I was never very good at composing. In the early 1970's I took a composition class (which didn't help matters). Nice pretty tonal music was very much out of favor. So I wrote a piece with nice melodies and chords and then went back and changed a lot of the notes to grossly wrong-sounding notes.

The piece was well received by the teacher and the other students.

I don't know if this is or was common among real composers, but there are in my opinion some VERY beautiful dissonances in modern music; for instance the very end of "Creation du Monde" by Milhaud, where the melody ends on the leading tone against a major triad. Ending on that note is about as wrong as wrong can be and it's divine.

Mark Lutton
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Edit: Corrected the entire basis of my answer... :-P

My piano teacher sticks a bit of a weird note in with her Bb chord while playing For He Is Lord. I love it. She tells me that everyone else hates it. But she plays it that way. Why?

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

She likes it too...

Basically, some people will hate you forever, but some people with avant-garde tastes will think you're awesome.

General Nuisance
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    Atonality normally refers to lacking a tonal centre or 'home note'. A lot of music goes outside the constraints of the diatonic scale without being perceived as atonal. – Нет войне Sep 18 '16 at 14:23
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    The OP is not describing atonality. It's extremely hard to accidently write something that is atonal as you need to completely avoid tonality which is something that is pretty engraved in all forms of popular music and most types of music in general observe. – Dom Sep 18 '16 at 16:30
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    @Dom: true, yet it's not that difficult to write atonal garbage. Random sequences from the 12-edo palette will with high probability not be tonal in any real sense, and even though you may get some consonant sounds in them I would label them as atonal. The real challange with atonal music is to give it some kind of meaning, direction etc., without resorting to tonality. – leftaroundabout Sep 19 '16 at 14:43