DM Blog

Once a song is arranged in a certain key, how hard or time consuming is it to change keys? Do you have to completely rearrange the song? Or does the software drop and raise keys for you automatically?

Changing keys in modern notation software is as easy as picking a new key, selecting whether you want it to move the notes up or down and that’s it — it takes seconds. However, while the software does automatically transpose the chord names and notes to new pitches, it does so blindly so there’s still a lot more to consider:

Playability

You have to make sure that all the new notes are still playable on all instruments. Most instruments have a fixed range so you have to make sure that the new notes aren’t out of range (neither too high nor too low). For example, you don’t want to have a bass chart with notes written below the range of the instrument. At the same time, every instrument also has a certain sweet spot where it sounds best, so you need to make sure that every instrument will still sound good and will be comfortable to play in the new key. An arrangement can sound messy or will lose impact if horn parts are written too low, just as super-high parts can be extremely difficult to play. Some wind instruments might have trickier fingerings in different keys too.

Readability

Sure, professional musicians should be able to play in any key, but that doesn’t mean that certain keys aren’t more challenging to read than others. A very straightforward, easy-to-read arrangement can become hard to read just by changing the key. And if something is already tricky to play as it is, putting it into a harder-to-read key only makes matters worse.

Formatting

Once all the notes have been transposed up or down, you still need to look through every page of each part to make sure that the new notes aren’t colliding with other things on the page. Most commonly, raising notes can cause collisions with chords written above the staff, while lowering notes can hide important text below the staff…

If you’re changing to a new key only a semitone or whole-tone away, you can get lucky and the whole process is relatively simple with just a couple of minutes spent in the software. Sometimes you need to adjust by an additional semitone or two to get to a more readable or playable key and then the process stays just as uncomplicated. But other times, transposing an arrangement to a new key can involve a lot of re-writing. Of course, this isn’t a complete list of things to consider when transposing a chart either, so it really goes to show that there’s much more involved than just clicking a button and expecting the software to do all the work automatically.