Guitar Chord Transposition - How to Play Lots of Songs With a Few Chords
By Media Corp LLC | November 10, 2008
By M Wheeler
Many guitar players never have to transpose a piece of music in their entire lives, and certainly this is not something that most new players would need to do for quite some time.
Unfortunately, for those of us who like to play with a band, we are limited by a particular instrument. Basically unless your band is gifted with an exceptional vocalist, then you are going to need to play all of your music in a tonal range that the singer can actually handle, meaning we must transpose songs on occasion.
I am a rock and blues player, transposition for me is usually just a case of changing the position up or down the finger board that I play my chords, and this is without a doubt the simplest form of transposition there is. Indeed, if you are playing any form of music that is predominantly played using barre chords or power chords, then transposition is this simple, but what about other musical styles that use open chords and suchlike?
How do we begin to transpose these pieces?
If you are completely down with music theory, can name every note in every scale forwards and backwards, and no every note position on your fret board then you can probably already transpose things pretty simply.
For those of us who lack this entire knowledge, the best thing to do is get hold of a chord chart. Most guitar tuition books will contain one, and many are available on-line. If you need to transpose a piece of music, simply look up the original chord on the row that pertains to the key the song is originally in, then look up the correct chord to play in the column that pertains to the key you wish to transpose the song into.
How To Play a Transposed Piece
OK so now we have covered the basics of transposition, by simply using a chord chart, but what are the other problems associated with transposing song or piece of music?
The major problem faced by the guitar player when attempting to play a transposed piece, is the fact that it is highly likely that their ear will have already become trained or accustomed to hearing the song in its original key, making it difficult to play.
This problem is compounded if it happens to be a track that you have played many times before in the original key, you may find that your hands tend to want to move to the more familiar, original chord fingerings. I used to have this problem all the time, so I found a way to combat it, which I am going to tell you about.
I discovered that a lot of compute sound cards have the ability to transpose the sound that they are generating on the fly, so now I sample the entire track and have my computer transpose it in real time, as I jam along with it. The helps to re-train my ear and make me more comfortable playing the piece in its new key.
Topics: Guitar, Media Corp LLC, Media Corp LLC Marketing and Distribution, Media Corp LLC Worldwide Services, MediaCorp Overland Park Kansas |
Comments are closed.