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I've learned at least 3 new things from this thread..... I think I can learn even more from it, but that will involve printing it out and reading it while sitting at the keyboard.

What a great set of answers!

Have you thought of buying a music theory textbook and reading up on this sort of stuff?

I've noticed that there have been a handful of replies but none from the original poster.

I agree with the idea of studying theory, but would suggest that theory is something you do rather than read about it. To really understand it we need to work through the exercises, do guided analysis, and (what the OP is trying to do) analyze the music we are working on by using the theory we're in the process of learning. The OP has asked about theory in a thread elsewhere.

I am wondering whether you have only the melody without any chords.

Partly summarizing what's already been posted:

- Music in a minor key will tend to sound mostly minor. If you play a minor scale you'll hear the 3rd note (Eb in C minor) is a minor 3 from the tonic or a half step from the 2nd note (D) which gives that minor feel. "Tend" because music often changes colour in the middle to make it more interesting.

- Pieces tend to end on the tonic. So for your D minor / F major example, the final note might be F in the melody; if D minor it would be D. As John mentioned, sometimes the final minor chord is made major (the "Picardy") but then you will see an accidental raising the 3rd degree note from F to F#. (DF#A instead of DFA).

If, as John wrote, it ends on the dominant, then you can look for the dominant of each (C for F major, A for D minor).

- Music often has cadences to separate or pause at phrases which go I-V or V-I. So if you know I-V for F is F-C, and for D minor is Dmin - A, this is another clue. This works best at the end of a piece, since music often modulates to another key in the middle.

- Minor keys borrow the key signature of the major key. However, that would leave the 7th degree note a whole step from the tonic, and it is better to be a half step. Therefore the 7th is raised through accidentals. for F minor you would see lots of C#'s with #'s in the music rather than the key signature. You can also see lots of natural signs if the note being raised was flatted in the key signature.

So figure out what the 7th note of the relative minor would be (C# for D minor) and then look for #'s used rather consistently in front of the C's.

I suggest (with some trepidation) that studying theory works differently for adult students.

Certainly a college student can learn theory: master the concepts, pass the exams, and maybe/probably apply it to music later. I'm not sure about children.

But adults? I think we have to learn differently. I think we have to start with the music and back into the theory a little at a time, like the OP is doing. If we're not applying it specifically to a particular problem in a particular piece, it doesn't stick. At least for me.

Um? I am an adult student. I didn't even know note names 3 years ago. But who knows, we might have common ground. For example, since I had played and heard music for a lifetime, that experience already gave a real music context like in, "So that's what I've been seeing!". The two halves of what we've sensed and used without understanding, and the theory, come together.

Without theory it's hard. Supposing that the OP doesn't fully understand intervals, and that a natural will raise a flatted note by a semitone, which would explain flats as accidentals indicating some minor keys. For me it's like getting some vocabulary and basic principles that are like tools. And for those things I found that going in order was more helpful, because one thing builds on the next and they inter-relate.

What I was stressing, though, is that theory isn't something to read about like in a book telling you things. If I don't work with it in exercises and analysis then it isn't really understanding for me. But I also agree about finding it in real music. There is something I wrestled with last night in a piece, and when I got it, I also understood something that was vague which I'd been studying in theory.

(I'm also not a college student. I'm still stuck learning on my own with the help of one or two kind souls along the way.)

I may have explained poorly. Or I may just be wrong.

When I was in engineering school, I took a class called Statics, where you learn how forces on structures are calculated. After learning the basics, I could apply them to a bookcase, a bridge, a fishing pole, a guitar string, etc. We went from the general, in depth, to the specific. That is the classic school approach. It worked.

Later in life I went through my wife's music theory books, thinking the same approach would work. Learn the basics; start at the very beginning (back to doh-a-deer, Austrian style). But it didn't work for me.

And then, later still, I ended up in charge of a Praise & Worship Band. What's a D5? Gsus2? C/G? How do I spell those chords? How do I choose chords for the songs that don't have them? This is in Eb but guitars can only play in E, how can I transpose? Where do I put a capo? Now I was using the same theory books, but as an encyclopedia rather than a text, and for very specific problems. (I didn't need 12 keys because we only played in 2.) The stuff that I looked up because I needed to, I understood and remembered. The stuff that I tried to learn out of general interest disappeared when I put the book down, and/or was not available to me in real time.

So I dunno, we probably agree more than not. I suspect though that telling the OP to study theory in general may not work as well (for an adult) as telling him to keep a theory book near the keyboard to look up stuff.