Lesson Twelve: Transposition
"Trans" means to move something. Think of the word 'transport'. That means to move someone or something from one position to another. Position means where something is. In music, the word transposition means to move the sounds to another position. Do you recall, that in your lessons on scales, you learned how to make the new scale sound like the old one by changing a note? When you changed the C major scale to G major you had to change the F to F#. When you changed the C major scale to F major you had to change the B to Bb.
Many tunes that you know are written in a scale such as C or G major. If we wanted to change a tune instead of a scale to a different starting note this is called TRANSPOSITION.
To make it easy to change a tune to belong to a different scale we simply give each note in the scale a number from 1 through to 8. The lowest note of the scale is 1 and the highest is 8. In the C major scale it looks like this:
| C | D | E | F | G | A | B | C |
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 |
| G | A | B | C | D | E | F# | G |
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 |
Try numbering the F major scale:
| F | ___ | A | ___ | C | ___ | E | ___ |
| ___ | 2 | ___ | 4 | ___ | 6 | ___ | 8 |