Re: [Harp-L] Reading Music, Different Key Harps (was "Re: A couple questions from a beginner")

[Winslow Yerxa <winslowyerxa@xxxxxxxxx>]

The problem with Way 2 is that while the end product of pre-transposed music is easy to use, it's take a lot of work to obtain as you have to do the transposing yourself.

I do a lot of reading on different keys and types of harmonica, so writing out transposed parts is just not practical - too time-consuming. Instead, I've put my efforts into learning to read transposed on whatever harps I'm playing. This probably means I'm not as good a sight reader as I would be if I stuck to playing just, say, a C chromatic where the same note on the staff always meant the same note in the same place on the harmonica (and sometimes I do get confused), but it's still better (for me, anyway) than doing the work of writing out transpositions.

Winslow

Winslow Yerxa

Author, Harmonica For Dummies ISBN 978-0-470-33729-5

--- On Thu, 11/19/09, David Payne <dmatthew@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:


Way 2: Change the music. Like when I was in band, there was all this F instruments, Bb instruments, etc. stuff, like if the music is written in E, X instrument will play it in Gb or whatever it is. 
Thus, if you applied this to music, you'd take a piece of music, transpose it all into C and play it like you would on a C diatonic, only the output key would be different. Say you're music was in A. You transpose it to C and then play it on an A harmonica. You read the music in C, but the output is in A. If you have a finite number of numbers you want to do, that might be a good idea. If you're playing a new song every day, probably not.