Transposing sheet music to fit the ocarina

One thing that you are going to run into when playing the ocarina is sheet music that is out of range. A single chambered alto C ocarina can play from about C to F in the second octave (excluding subholes), which in sheet music looks like this:

You may however run into a piece of music which as written has a range of G to C on the second ledger line. Remember that you find the range of a song by scanning through it, looking for the highest and lowest note used.

On first impression you may think that this to be unplayable. But it actually can be played using a technique called transposition. Transposition allows you to raise or lower the pitch of a song to bring it into the range of your instrument.

How does transposition work?

In western music, we divide the octave into 12 equally spaced notes, the distance or 'interval' between any two of which is called a 'semitone'. All semitones have the same tonal character. This is called the chromatic scale.

Transposition relies on the fact that all of the major scales (or keys) are formed from the chromatic scale following on the same pattern.

Because of this, the different scales are equivalent. We can number the notes of any 7 note diatonic scale (major or minor) starting from its tonic, like this:

All you have to do to transpose a melody is to take the notes in one scale, and translate them into the equivalent notes in a different scale. It will still sound like the same melody, but sound at a higher or lower pitch.

Here for instance are the scale degrees of C major. If you started with a melody in D that starts 'D, F♯,, E' and transposed it to C, you'd get the notes 'C, E, D'.

Another way of thinking about this is to move all of the notes in a melody up or down by some number of semitones within the chromatic scale, as demonstrated by the tool below. The 'transposition' slider moves the notes, and you can press play to hear how it sounds.

There are a few different ways we can achieve this. First we will walk through how to transpose sheet music manually so that you understand the logic behind it, and then we'll address some easier ways to achieve the same thing.

How to transpose sheet music by hand

Transposing sheet music is a matter of doing two things, moving the notes and correcting the key signature. In some cases we will also need to correct accidentals.

Step 1, find the diatonic interval between the two keys

The first thing we need to do is work out how far to move the notes up or down on the staff. As you know, we have 12 semitones per octave, and we can write them out in a line:

C, C♯, D, D♯, E, F, F♯, G, G♯, A, A♯, B

Say that you wanted to transpose a melody up from C to G. If you start on C and count forwards, the distance between these two keys is 7 semitones.

But as you also know, the lines on the staff themselves only represent the 'whole letter' part of these names, unless we use sharps or flats. So, to work out how many staff positions we need to move our notes, we need only consider the diatonic interval:

..., C, D, E, F, G, A, B, ...

And thus, to transpose from C to G we need only move our notes up by 4 positions. If the key you want to transpose to has a sharp or flat in the name, it can be ignored:

• The distance we need to move to transpose from C to F, and C to F♯ is 3 in both cases.
• To transpose from C to C♯ you don't need to move the notes at all!

Step 2, move the notes on the staff

Once you know the diatonic interval, the second step is to write out the melody again, moving all of the notes up or down by the required number of positions on the staff.

For instance, if you wanted to take this melody and transpose it up to E major:

You need to move all of the notes up by 2 staff positions like this:

Step 3, change the key signature

The next step is to fix the key signature to the one of the key you are transposing to. You can find all of the key signatures by looking at the circle of fifths, and the key signature for E looks like this:

Note that if the diatonic interval between two scales is zero, you don't need to move the notes at all, all you need to do is change the key signature. Such as transposing from C to C♯:

Step 4, fixing accidentals

If your music contains accidentals in the body of the music you may need to correct them. As accidentals are not additive any accidentals that overlap with the key signature will need to be changed.

For instance, if in your source music you had a sharp note that after transposition overlaps with a sharp in the key signature, it will need to be changed into a double sharp. Double sharps look like an 'X' and raise the pitch of a note by two semitones.

Similarly, a flat that duplicates a flat in the key signature needs to be replaced with a double flat. Double flats lower the pitch of a note by two semitones.

Other conflicting accidentals will become either a sharp, flat or natural depending on the context, and can be worked out by thinking of the note's place within the chromatic scale.

• A flat in the key signature interacting with a sharp in the music will become a natural.
• A sharp in the key signature interacting with a flat in the music will become a natural.
• Natural will become a sharp or flat depending on the context.

In most cases you'll only need to fix accidentals in the music when transposing into a key signature that itself uses a lot of accidentals, but it is worth being aware of.

An example to try out

Things get easier once you start to put them into practice. Have a go at transposing this tune into a few different keys, both up and down.

Easier approaches

Software transposition

If you are using a computer notation software like Musescore, transposing music is literally trivial. All tools of this kind have the facility to transpose music by selecting the new key from a drop down menu.

If your music is in a computer readable format like ABC notation or MusicXML, there are also tools to do transposition just as easily, both online and as stand-alone software.

Transposing music at sight

Knowing that all of the scales are based on the same pattern reveals some things that make it easy to transpose music at sight.

If you consider this:

And the same music transposed into C:

Do you notice that the distances between the notes are the same? In both:

• The first note to the second note is one staff position.
• The second to second note is one staff position.
• Third to fourth is two staff positions, etc.

The key to transposing music at sight is to read music using the intervals between the notes, instead of their absolute pitches. Let's have a go with the following example:

We can see that the lowest note in the tune is a G, and say that we wanted to transpose it down onto a C ocarina so that the lowest note is C? That can be done like this:

• Start reading from the second line G, and finger low C on your ocarina.
• As the distance between the first and second note is ascending by one staff position, you move up one note on your ocarina (lift the right pinky finger).
• Keep reading using the differences between the notes.

If you follow through with the rest of the notes and read the intervals correctly, the tune will sound correct, transposed to C. It will get easier the more you practice.

The only things that you need to consider when doing this is the difference in the key signature between your instrument, and the sheet music. This issue is discussed in detain in the article An easy method of playing ocarinas in different keys.

Closing notes

Transposing music becomes easy with a bit of practice, and opens you the ability to play sheet music that you may have thought was out of range, but it doesn't work in all cases.

If the range of the music is larger than that of ocarina the only options are to use a multichamber ocarina, or alter the music to fit into a smaller range as discussed in Modifying music to fit the ocarina.

Also note that I intentionally ignored the distinction between major and minor keys in this article, as for the function of transposition it doesn't matter. The key signatures of relative major and minor scales are the same.