Join us as we teach you the most simplistic and easy ways to transpose your music.
Getting That Riff In Your Favorite Key!
How many times have we composed a riff that we absolutely love, or perhaps found a song that we really enjoy playing and wanted to put it into a new, original song and truly make it ours? Chances are that we've all wanted to at least try it out once or twice but always came across one roadblock... Keys.
As mentioned in our last article, the probability that two riffs will be in the same key is very low if you are writing a lot of songs or wish to link two well known songs together. This is where you need to transpose one of those riffs so you can connect them together and put them in that song.
Another scenario is that you just wrote an awesome riff that you envision going into one of your band's songs... The only problem is that it's in the wrong key! With transposing, you can still use that riff and play along with the rest of the band.
If you're a true band nerd, like myself, you have probably been around transposition since the days of Jr. High or Middle School. Now, if you're still like me, you didn't have two clicks on how to do it either. I was always amazed to see how my teacher would take a trumpet part and transpose it so I could play it on my sax and still be in the right key!
With guitar, this is invaluable. You can take a sax part and transpose it to your guitar. If you happen to have a sax player around, you can now play along with that sax and still be in the proper key.
One of the most unique things about playing guitar is that we have a number of tools available to us to use for easy transposition. Many other musicians envy us for this and call us cheaters in the game of music theory, however, if you can use it... Why not?
The tools that you can use.
One of the most common tools used to transpose music on the guitar is the capo. The capo is essentially a piece of rubber that is glued onto two pieces of metal with a spring placed in between. When clasped onto the neck of your guitar and placed behind a fret, it acts as a new nut (AKA the "zero" nut.) This new nut raises the pitch of your guitar, therefore changing the key.
Most guitarists use them so they can make really complicated chords into easy open chord shapes. This is where the whole joke about cheating comes in. Instead of actually practicing those really hard chords and getting your technique down, you can transpose that chord using the capo and turn it into an open chord shape such as an E Major or an A and still have the same chord.
While I don't recommend that you always do that because it's always good to know how to play a song if your capo breaks, it's great for live performances where you want to minimize the risk of messing up a complicated chord. If you're a lead guitarist, you can still use a capo but in all honesty, it's far easier to find the key that everyone else is playing in relative to the capo and just use the scale that suites the song best.
In most cases, it's actually quicker for a lead guitarist not to use a capo and just find a scale. Switching a capo around the neck of your guitar can cost valuable seconds between songs.
This short article gives a woolly description as well as a more technical one to make you well-known with Relative Minors. A relative minor is a musical scale that is "related" to a major scale. As they work together harmonically, thus they can be regarded as being in the same family. Relative minors provide a remarkable mode to move from a major to a minor key without too much of a jump or use of multiplex chord sequences and so they are considered as a well-set tool in songwriting. Here is a more technical description: The relative minor of a certain major scale is a scale that starts 6 intervals up and after that shares all of the same notes. Firstly, what is an interval? It is not easy to answer it precisely but you can say that an interval is a note in a scale. You can understand all this with the help of an example. Let's look at the scale of C ??" it is liked by most of the people because it has no sharps or flats. It consists of followingnotes C-D-E-F-G-A-B-C We find that A is the relative minor of C by going up 6 notes, (C-D-E-F-G-A). Therefore the possible notes we will use for A minor are A-B-C-D-E-F-G-A. Although we start on the note of A, all of the notes also exist in the C major scale. Taking it a step further, looking at the scale in terms of half and whole notes, as in the Major Scale 101 lesson, for a relative minor we would apply the pattern: W H W W H W W, or 2 1 2 2 1 2 2 You can practice this formula to figure out the relative minor scale for any major scale by starting at the 6th note and practicing it. Now, to conclude, a brief note of a couple of fascinating facts about Relative Minors is given. Firstly, three various minor scales are there in western music ??" with a slight divergence in their formula. The scale above is actually a "Natural Minor" or "Pure Minor" scale - two names for the same thing while the other two are called "Harmonic" and "Melodic". As their formulas differ from each other, so they do not share the identical notes as the associated relative major scale and are harmonically speaking not such a right match as the Natural Minor. And eventually, the Natural Minor (or Relative Minor) scale of a certain major scale is also known as the "Aeolian Mode". Modes are a concept that we will discuss later on, but for now, you can say confidently that you have proper understanding of Relative Minors, Pure Minors, Natural Minors, and the Aeolian mode.
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