 Hi guys, this is Jason Zach from Nathaniel School of Music. In this lesson, we are going to tackle one of the most important and most common problems or challenges faced by pianists and musicians in general transposing or how to transpose. So when we transpose, it's very important to understand the difference between the scale and the key which I will break down very shortly. There's also a video we leave in the description which explores this subject in great detail. And to focus on transposing, first of all, to get you keyboard players or piano, especially keyboard players, open to the art of transposing, I would like to just say a couple of things. First of all, when we play songs, especially the great songs like Bohemian Rhapsody by Queen or Jazz Standards like Misty or any other such song which which is sophisticated in its harmony, you're not going to be playing on one key. You're not going to be just playing on C throughout the song. So that good old transpose button for some of you which you might have on your keyboards will not help at all. In fact, it's going to be counterproductive. In the long run, assuming you all play the keyboard for about three to four years, that's what happened with me, you're going to end up having perfect pitch or at least somewhat perfect pitch. You'll kind of know that is E and so on. But if you use that transpose button on the keyboard, which I highly do not recommend, then what's going to happen is you'll hear a different sound and you'll see something. So what you're seeing is not matching with what you're hearing. And that's the clash of the sense organs, which ends up happening. And there was this one show where I absolutely froze on stage, playing it in one of the hard rock cafes in our city where what happened was the band just decided to take the whole show two steps down. And I thought, okay, cool, let's do it. I was young. I was still in college. I went on stage and it was just unplayable to a point that in that 20 song set, I froze for song one, but then I transpose the song to the actual key of, you know, the way it's measured normally. And that was tough, but it was a lot easier than hitting that transpose button. So another advantage of learning how to transpose would be how we can improvise a specific lick of choice. Let's say we listen to a great master of improvisation, let's say, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, we just extract a lick out of what they play in a tiny lick, maybe a second or two in a song. And we could then learn and study that lick move that in different keys, different scales, different modes, different chords, and it will really improve our vocabulary as an improviser and as a composer or a player in general, I would imagine. So that was the background of the video. Now let's get started to get started. We are going to just have an assortment of some notes, which I guess are just I've just randomly written them and we will try and move those notes. We will try and transpose those notes. We'll figure out the right process to doing so. And I have quite a few notes which might help supplement your learning for this lesson. Do consider heading over to our Patreon page and you'll get yourselves a copy as a downloadable PDF. And if you like the lesson, it'll be awesome. If you could hit like, if you could leave us a comment with what you thought. And if you have suggestions for the future, and there's this subscribe button which tends to help channels. And helps us go a long way. So do feel free to hit that subscribe button and there's a bell icon for regular notifications. Let's get cracking. So a random assortment of notes for you. Let's first deal with those notes. That would be for now. I'm just taking the white keys, the natural keys, C D E B A G E C G F E C D lower B C. Let's do that again. C D E B A G E C G F E C D B C. Let's get some fingering into the play C D E B maybe the pinky C D E B A G E C cross that G F E C D B C. Now this is a random assortment of notes. The way I like to now decide how, how should I play these notes? The first thing you ask yourself is do I want to play it in a straight feel? Do I want to play it in a swung feel? Or do I want to play it with some triplet? So if I just do straight. I always like subdividing. I don't like thinking that these are crotchets. So these would be eighth notes at the very least. So. Or you could even swing that. When you study all these notes, you'll observe in this case, especially that all of them are the natural or the white keys. So which scale do we play C major or it's relative minor A minor. So remember when you're choosing a scale, it could either be major or minor or something else. So don't commit and assume that it is major. And another thing you may not want to commit to is the first note of the song. In this case, the first note is aligning with the key and the scale, which is C, but in a lot of other melodies, for example, this particular melody, as you observe it's starting on G, but the scale is not G major to prove that it just feels unstable if you play G as the tonic in your left hand. In this case, you'll have to actually play happy birthday to you because that's G major scale, isn't it? One sharp. So hence happy birthday has got to be on C major if you're starting on G, which is the fifth. So this coming back to the assortment of notes, which I have here in this lecture, C, D, E, B, A, G, E, C, G, F, E, C, D, B, C, we can assume that since all of these notes are white keys, it is in the key of C major, but also be open to the fact that it could also be in its relative key. So if you thought it was minor, which is A minor, it could also be C major. So good way to test that out very quickly on the keyboard or any instrument, whatever you play, would be to just hold a tonic chord or the root of the scale and see how it vibes with the melody. If I play C, hoping it's C major, C seems to work quite well. I would also play the tonic chord, which would be the C major triad. That kind of works well too. Maybe a major seventh extension, all works good. You could also try the minor counterpart. Works fairly well, doesn't it? But I'm guessing C major is what you would all go for. Or let's just assume for now that this particular melody is C major and not A minor. But do think twice. If it's this, it could also be that because the major and the minors have the same notes. They just have different keys. So the first goal towards transposing anything is to figure out the interval relationships of all these notes which are assorted for you with respect to the root which you have decided on. So if I'm deciding on the C major scale or the C root, then observe each note with respect to C. So that would be one or the root, unison, D, which is the second or the major second, you could officially call it E, which is the major third, B, which is the major seventh, A, which is the major sixth, G, which is the perfect fifth, E, which is the major third, C back to tonic and then What's that? 5, 4, 3, 1, 2, 7, 1, 5, 4, 3, 1, 2, 7, 1. And if you're an Indian trained musician, you don't have to go by numbers or official intervals like major and minor. You could do it with swaras. 1 is sa, 2 is re, 3 is g, 4 is ma, 5 is pa, 6 is dha, 7 is ni. If you're a soul-fetched person, then you say dore, mi, fa, sola, ti. I am not a soul-fetched person. I'm from India. So we use swaras a lot here in our music. So if you sing it, it'll be helpful to sing with swaras. That would be something like sa, pa mag sa re ni sa. One more time. Okay, so we have now figured out what the intervillic relationships between each note is with respect to the tonic and we have executed that skill with the western way, which is major second, major third or just with crude numbers. 1, 2, 3, 7, 6, 5, 3, 1, 5, 4, 3, 1, 2, 7, lower 7, 1. I like to write the lower 7 with an apostrophe. You can check it out in the notes. And also in the swaras, we've figured out the sa, re, g, pa, dha, ni relationship. And now that you've got that under the belt, you can now figure out the process of transposing. So a lot of people think transposing is a fairly trivial process. Okay, I want to now move from C major to A major, but I can also move from C major to B flat minor, or I can move from C major to F Lydian or G Phrygian, or I can think of what I'm doing over a chord over a mode and do some really interesting stuff, which is all under the bracket of transposing or transposition. And I was kind of inspired by transposition, at least the theoretical description of it, more from a notation software like Sibelius or Muse score, rather than the textbook music theory course, which you might learn somewhere where it's just transposed by scale major, major, minor, minor. I've not seen other kinds of transposition, which you would do in day to day life. Now coming back to the melody, I'm going to play it in a swing fashion. Okay, now I'm on C. Now, what's the quickest way to move this thing onto another scale? Let's take D. D is the next tone after C, you could say. So I have my, my math for the intervals, I could just follow the maths. One, two, three, seven. So you need to write down your D major scale, which will be very helpful, of course. One, two, three, seven, six, five, three, one, five, four, three, one, two, seven, one. So D, E, F sharp, one, two, three, stretch to the seven. Can add a little lick there, if you wish. So it's almost a carbon copy. If I played it for you on C today and played it for you on D tomorrow and if you didn't have perfect pitch, you'll probably think, hey, this guy played the same song or the same tune, isn't it? Or if I played it on B flat, which is a tone below C. So if one way to challenge yourself is play B flat and try to sing the intervals with your voice. That's a bit tricky. One, two, three, seven, six, five, three, one, five, four, three, one, two, seven, one. So sing it before you play it. Otherwise, playing it on the piano, then you may make a mistake and then it messes with your ears because your ear will believe what it just heard. You know, the most recent thing which happened. So if I take on B flat, again, write down B flat, superimpose that with the numbers, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven. And then of course, the melody and then play. You observe here, I hit the octave. I should have hit the seven as per the chart. There we go. I have to realign your fingers. Maybe E. F. B. And as much as possible, I'm using my voice to help me go forward as after about two or three scales, your voice knows it. You see, your voice will know it better than your piano will ever play. Now, I'd like to also point out that on instruments like a guitar, guitar, maybe the bass, maybe even the violin, these are pattern based instruments. And what happens is you might you might end up following the same pattern and moving up the fingerboard or down. But ideally speaking, you need to know what notes they are and try to sing it before you play it. So even if you're a guitar player watching this lesson, don't transpose by the same or to the same shape, transpose based on what you're hearing. So hear it in your mind, sing it out, and then played on the guitar. And on the guitar and bass, you can always try different positions. The positions in simple words would be which finger you start the liquid, which string you might start the liquid, or are you going to use some open notes or, you know, fretted notes and so on and so forth. So let's now move forward. This is what you could call transpose by key. So you're keeping the same scale, but changing the key, the key in music is the key. It's one of the 12 keys in music, A, B, C, D, E, F, G, B flat, or also known as A sharp, then we have C sharp, also known as D flat, then we have D sharp, also known as E flat, F sharp, also known as G flat, G sharp, also known as A flat. So it could be one of those 12 keys, which you would need to transpose to, but the scale was major. So now what shall we do? Let's say I'll be on the key of C, but I would like to transpose it to the scale of C something else. So what's a nice scale apart from C major, maybe C minor. So what's the difference between minor and major? Minor would be three flat, six flat and the seven flat. We also could call the minor as the A-olian from time to time. C, D, E flat, F, G, A flat, B flat, C. Now what do we do with the melody? Anytime you see a three, make it a three flat, so E gets removed and in its place you play E flat. Then whenever you see a seven, then you play seven flat instead. Whenever you see a six, you play six flat. So the difference between minor and major, at least natural minor or the A-olian scale and major would be it has three flat, six flat and seven flat with respect to the major scale. So now one, two, three, I'll play it and then show you what's happening. I'll just play it and then show you the interval change again. See the feel has completely changed because it moved to minor. The scale changed. The key is the same. The key doesn't matter actually for emotional perspectives. The key doesn't really matter. It's the scale which matters because the scale is your plucking seven notes out of a possible 12 and those seven notes have to have an interval relationship with the tonic. That's the scale. So scale is going to sound emotionally, radically different than the key. You may say C major sounds very different than G major. Not so much. Quite similar really. Yes, the notes are different but the emotion is kind of the same. If you play happy birthday in C major, try playing it on G major. You might find it's still happy birthday. No, it's not. It's not. It's a nicer way to play happy birthday perhaps. Maybe I should sell this somewhere. So we've now looked at how to transpose both by the key and by the scale. Let's look at scale again with a few more C type scales. Another scale I like to use very often is the harmonic minor scale which is the flat three and the flat six. So let's see how that goes. If you're wondering what my left hand is doing, I'm playing chords which are available from the harmonic minor scale. If I were to play this again on the major, I'm choosing the C major chords which is C major, F major, G major, at least some of them. And if I do this on another scale which I like to do a lot, the Dorian scale which would be, it would be a major scale with a flattened third and a flattened seventh. And you leave the sixth pretty much as a major sixth. So that's nice on Dorian. Again, I'm trying to sing it to get a feel of what it would be on even the Dorian scale. So that was transposing by key and transposing by scale. These are the two most common ways of transposing anything to anything. But now let's go a bit beyond and say, I want to now transpose to any key of any scale, or transpose to any scale of any key, however you want to term that. So what was our original tune? I'm just off the top going to say B flat. C is there, B flat is there, but not B flat major. Maybe B flat minor. So maybe you'd like to go in the initial stages as a two step process. First, you be able to play it on the B flat major scale correctly, after which you can then transpose it to the same key, but the different scale which is B flat minor. So let's do that on B flat natural minor. Then you write down the B flat natural minor as well. Quite like that. One more time. So transposing can be done to any key of any scale, isn't it? So that's what you just saw now. C major went to B flat minor and there's still that familiarity. And you might also end up calling this cheating or stealing, because if you heard your favorite artist playing a lick and if you or a melody or any phrase which you heard in one of your favorite songs, maybe you like a guitar player or you like a violin player or whatever, you can just take, extrapolate about a bar or two of their work, practice it, get better at it, execute it, practice it then on different keys and then maybe transpose it to a different scale and who is going to ever know that you took out, you got that inspiration from that particular lick of that particular artist of that particular song. And you may also never know because you might use it on stage and use it as an improvisational lick over a chord and even you don't know how that happened, but how did it actually happen through all of your hard work and patience and diligent efforts to write all this down and digest all the information. So that's another thing I'm trying to promote in this video. It's not just how to transpose, it's how transposing can help you as an improviser, as a composer as well. So I have a couple more things to do which I think you might find useful, transposing by mode and then transposing with chords. Let's move forward. So if you take a modal context now, let's use C major. That would be C Ionian, which in theory would be the first degree or the first mode of C major scale. That would be C Ionian. Then you move up to D which is the second one and that'll give you D Dorian. Okay. And remember D will have the same notes as C major, but the vibe is completely different. The Dorian scale or the Dorian mode sounds very brave. While the Ionian doesn't. Okay. Then you can go to E Phrygian, which is the third mode of the C major scale. Very different vibe. F Lydian, fourth degree is F. Then G Mixolidian, which is the fifth degree. A Aeolian, which is our good old minor. And lastly B Locrian, which is a very diminished sounding mode. Okay. So that's just a very brief rundown of the modes of the C scale or the C major scale. Now if you take the same lick which we've been doing throughout our lesson, we can now say I want to move this to the very next tone and start off like a Dorian vibe. I'd like to digest it a bit, played a bit slowly because I can even think of a chord. Right. One, two, three, seven, flat, six, five, three, one. And you don't have to play the whole lick. You can get into that world of Dorian for a short while. In any case, your fingers need to get used to the lick. Right. So might as well take your time. Just do that. Now I did one, two, three, seven, six, part of our original tune. Finish it off a bit more. Again. I like that. Put it together like that G major there was left C major for good. You don't know why you should even come back anymore from where we started. And the journey can continue for you. You could perhaps look at Phrygian. Yeah, it'll work nice over an E minor and maybe an F major chord. Very different vibe, right? Phrygian. F Lydian four because it's Lydian and Lydian likes that four sharp. So when you go from mode to mode, you could find the essential ingredients of that mode. And if your original source melody doesn't have a four sharp that often, you could sneak that in. And there are no rules here. It's just a matter of taking that initial lick and seeing how it can inspire you. So you go through the process, Ionian Dorian, Phrygian, Lydian, Mixolydian, Aeolian and Locrian and see how you enjoy it. And lastly in this lecture, you can also do this over a chord. Let's say someone plays you a D minor chord, D minor seventh. So you want to play your lick. So kind of works there. But what if that chord were to change to D dominant? That one. So obviously you don't want an F in there. You see the third has changed to F sharp, right? Yeah, you could also do over a diminished chord. I like that. Get in some Locrian. I like that scale. So you could transpose it to the chord. The chord could kind of tell you, okay, over that chord, I'll do it Dorian. Over the chord, I'll do it Mixolydian or over the chord, I'll do major because that's a major seventh chord. But a dominant chord will yield maybe a Mixolydian improv. So any chord could determine the lick. And the last thing which I'd like to point out, since I'm on the topic of chords, if you want it, if you look at this shape, if you look at the chord, it's one, three, five, seven. And I'm starting my lick on the first note of the chord. Why can't I start the lick on the third note of the chord and see where that goes? Works quite well over the D minor chord versus. So as you can see, you have four pivot points or four starting points for the phrase or the lick which you're building. If you were to play a seventh chord, and that's quite awesome. If you ask me, the same lick which you which we've been dealing with throughout this lesson, and this lick could so easily be a snippet of a tune you really like a guitar solo or a anything improvised. You just like that one part. So always when you listen to a song, mark out moments of interest, mark out moments which you think are magical moments in the song. And the thing about improvisation is it's more like conversation. Someone says something or someone phrases something a certain way and it kind of catches on virally to the next person or if that person is very influential, a community of people. Hence you need to listen to some of the great masters of their craft and try to extrapolate some licks out of them too. Apart from what I gave you in this lesson, which is a very simple lick, of course. Right guys? So let's just have a quick recap of what we've ended up doing today. We've explored the topic of transposing or transposition. We've looked at the fact that you can move a song or a lick or an idea or anything to a key, to a different key, to a different scale, same key, different scale, different key, same scale, everything different, different key, different scale. You can also do modal transposition. You can also do chordal transposition where in the entire lecture I've taken a simple lick and try to move that tiny melody into different things. And off the top, I would say before you get down to your favorite songs or jazz improvisations by John Coltrane and the like, do it for happy birthday or do it for a simpler song, a song which is stuck inside your head. Do it for a pop song or a rhyme and then see where it can go from there. And do consider getting the notes. It would probably help supplement your learning. It's waiting for you on Patreon and your support for our channel would also mean a lot. Thanks for watching the video, guys. Don't forget to hit the subscribe button right now. 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