The Complete Idiot''s Guide to Music Theory

Part 4:
Accompanying
2. The second chord is a G Major. If you move this chord up three half steps,
it becomes a B
Major chord.
When you get done transposing all the notes and chords, you get this:
180
The same melody, transposed to the key of F.
It’s grunt work, that’s for sure—but it gets the job done.
Degree-Wise Transposition
If you’ve done a good job reading this book—and developing your music the-
ory skills accordingly—there’s another approach you can take to transposition.
This approach requires you to break all the chords and notes down to their
degrees of the underlying scale; you can then apply those degree representa-
tions to the new key.
The easiest way to understand this approach is to look at chords—in this case,
the chords from our previous key-of-D melody:
The original chord progression, in the key of D.
To get the ball rolling, we’ve noted the chord type above each chord—I, IV, V,
and so forth. For the next few minutes, we’re going to work strictly with this
degree notation and forget (for the time being) about the original chords.
The chord progression in Roman numerals only.
With the chord progression broken down by Roman numeral, you can write
out each of the chords in your new key—in this case, the key of F. When you
write out the new chords, you get this:

---

Chapter 14:
Transposing to Other Keys
181
The chord progression transposed to the key of F.
Voilà! You’ve just transposed the entire chord progression—and you didn’t have
to count any half steps to do it.
You can apply this same technique to the notes in the melody. Work through
the original key-of-C melody and put the degree of the scale (1, 2, 3, and so
forth) under each note of the melody, like this:
If you’re not sure
which chords to use,
refer back to the
Scale-Based Chords
table in Chapter 10.
Tip
Marking up the original melody, write the degree of the scale under each note.
Now get a blank sheet of music paper and, in the key of F, write out the scale
degrees below the staff. If you fill in the actual notes for each scale degree, you
end up with the completed melody:
Your transposed melody, by the numbers.
This method is a little more work for melodies than it is for chords, but it defi-
nitely works.
Interval-Based Transposition
In interval-based transposition, you have to transpose the first note from one
key to another, but then you ignore the key change and work completely in the
new key. You do this by noting the intervals between each note in the melody,
and then using those intervals to “compose” the transposed melody on the fly.
Let’s turn again to our original melody, and note the intervals between each
note in the melody, like this:

---