Par t 4:Accompanying
- The second chord is a G Major. If you move this chord up three half steps,
it becomes a BMajor 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: