{"id":20823,"date":"2023-10-01T10:24:02","date_gmt":"2023-10-01T17:24:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/?p=20823"},"modified":"2023-10-01T10:25:18","modified_gmt":"2023-10-01T17:25:18","slug":"transposing-guitar-chords","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/2023\/10\/01\/transposing-guitar-chords\/","title":{"rendered":"Transposing guitar chords"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n

One of the issues that I have with playing some of the songs in Rise Up Singing<\/cite> on guitar is that I feel like the chords are often written for someone with a slightly higher voice than mine.<\/p>\r\n

(My vocal range is mostly somewhere in the bass\/baritone area; a voice teacher once told me that I should be singing tenor, but singing the high part of the tenor range feels awkward and forced to me.)<\/p>\r\n

The songs that I\u2019ve picked from RUS<\/cite> to try playing and singing are songs with chords that I know how to play on guitar. I can sing along while playing those chords, but some of the songs get into an upper area of my vocal range that I feel like I\u2019m not as comfortable with and don\u2019t sound as good in. (I\u2019m talking through my hat here; I haven\u2019t checked pitches. But that\u2019s how it feels.)<\/p>\r\n

I could just sing an octave lower, but I\u2019m having a hard time getting that to sound right.<\/p>\r\n

If I wanted to transpose the guitar chords up<\/em> without changing the fingering, I could use a capo. But I want to transpose down<\/em>. (I could transpose up with a capo and then sing an octave lower\u2014but again, I\u2019m finding that difficult.) And I\u2019ve gotten used to thinking of transposition as something that\u2019s too complicated to do manually. (All the keyboards I\u2019ve owned have been able to transpose automatically.)<\/p>\r\n

But a guitar-playing friend pointed out to me that you can<\/em> transpose guitar chords \u201cdown\u201d manually, by changing the chords that you play. Transposing a chord \u201cdown\u201d doesn\u2019t necessarily result in playing lower notes on the guitar (for example, the two lowest notes in the usual way of playing an E chord are lower than any of the notes in the usual way of playing a D chord, so transposing \u201cdown\u201d from E to D results in higher notes), but the melody that you sing with those chords also gets transposed down. So transposing the chords downward has the effect that I want, of making the song\u2019s range a better fit for my singing range.<\/p>\r\n

(\u2026I recognize that if you transpose guitar chords \u201cdown\u201d 12 half-steps, you end up back with the original chords. So maybe it makes more sense to think of transposing guitar chords as moving them around the circle than as going up or down. But regardless, the effect is that I can change the chords in such a way that I can sing the melody lower.)<\/p>\r\n

So I took one of the RUS<\/cite> songs and tried writing down a new set of chords that were a few steps lower than the original chords, but I made several mistakes. But eventually it occurred to me that I could look to see if there was an automatic guitar-chord transposition tool\u2014<\/p>\r\n

And lo! There is!<\/p>\r\n

There are probably lots of them. But the one that I found and used is called Chordchanger<\/a>.<\/p>\r\n

On that page, I typed in the chords in the song I was working on:<\/p>\r\n

C C F G \/ C C D G \/ C C F G \/ C Am F G C<\/p>\r\n

and clicked the Down button a few times. It wasn\u2019t looking promising\u2014it was showing me lots of chords that I don\u2019t know. But I clicked the Down button a couple more times, and then, five half-steps \u201cdown\u201d from where I started, it showed me this:<\/p>\r\n

G G C D \/ G G A D \/ G G C D \/ G Em C D G<\/p>\r\n

And those are all guitar chords that I know! In fact, they\u2019re easier for me to play than the original ones. (I\u2019m still weak on the F chord, which appeared a few times in the original version.) And the melody transposed down by five half-steps feels like a significantly more comfortable range for me.<\/p>\r\n

And it turns out that most (but not all) of the chords that I know have other chords that I know that are five half-steps down, so I can probably do this same transposition with most of the other songs that (a) have RUS<\/cite> chords that I know, but (b) feel like they\u2019re in a higher singing range than I want them to be. (It\u2019s also possible that some of the RUS<\/cite> songs that have chords that I don\u2019t<\/em> know will become playable if I transpose the chords. I haven\u2019t tried that yet.)<\/p>\r\n

All very pleasing.<\/p>\r\n

\u2026After I got all that working, I took some further steps: I found sheet music for the song in question, and entered it into the Lilypond<\/a> sheet-music-engraving software, and told Lilypond to transpose the sheet music, which it did. I then added guitar chords in Lilypond\u2014and was pleased to discover that Lilypond also transposes guitar chords. In fact, even if the sheet music and the guitar chords start out in different keys, Lilypond can transpose them both to the destination key that you specify.<\/p>\r\n

So I might not need Chordchanger after all. But I think it\u2019ll still be useful for quickly checking on chords without having to deal with Lilypond\u2019s sometimes-complicated syntax.<\/p>\r\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20823","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-music"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20823","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20823"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20823\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20826,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20823\/revisions\/20826"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20823"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20823"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20823"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}