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Re: Transposition

Author: kdk ★2017
Date: 2019-04-27 17:04

BGBG, the way you describe is fundamentally what many musicians do. We just don't all write everything out - particularly the two scales - as you do. It's another advantage to learning the scales well enough that you don't need to see them on a staff to know what notes they contain. Knowing the scale of the original and the scale of the key to which you want to transpose the piece, you find what scale degree (which number of the 7 notes in the scale) a note of the song is, then count up to find which note in the new key is the same scale degree. So, for Danny Boy, the first four notes would be the note below the scale's 1st ("tonic") note - the 7th note of the scale - followed by the (tonic) 1st note, the 2nd note and the 3rd note (sometimes also named "si-do-re-mi"). In your original version, that's (low) F#-G-A-B. When it's transposed to D major (your new version), the notes become (low)C#-D-E-F#. They need to be F# and C# because those sharps are in the key signature of a D major scale.

There is another way. You can count the half-steps (notes of the chromatic scale) up or down from the original scale's tonic (1st) note to the 1st note of the new key, then move each note of the song the same number of half-steps up or down. You don't need to know the contents of either scale or their key signatures to do it this way, just the number of half steps (the "interval") you want to move everything.

Of course, you could always buy a "light" version of one of the music notation software programs, key in the original and have the software do the transposition, but that would take the learning opportunity out of the process.

Karl

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