The Complete Idiot''s Guide to Music Theory

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-BasedChords

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: