Hey all, I apologize in advance if this topic already exists, but I searched for it and didn’t manage to find exactly what I’m asking. There’s a lot of topics on how to transpose and seemingly none on why?
I don’t have any proper musical education and I only produce music at home/for myself, so never played any live sets (well except drunken acoustic guitar campfire sets in my youth ). As mentioned above, I’ve been seeing many people ask for or talk about transposition in Elektron boxes (or M8 or whatever else), but personally I’ve almost never used it for my writing in DAW or hardware.
I know some things it’s useful for: to change the pitches of a sample you want to use to match your key signature, for non-musical effects when the MIDI sequence being transposed is not playing pitches (e.g. it’s playing sample slices), also for transposing instruments like saxophone where you pretty much always have to transpose to play with others.
But, based on what I’ve read so far about the music theory, pattern transposition for notes that changes the key signature sounds like something that’s not normally done (as I’ve read that normally it’s done through chords leading into the new key). I know there’s a “jump” style step transposition that seems like it’s a good fit for pattern transposition, but is it so common that so many people on this forum ask and talk about pattern transpositions? Most of the other people’s music that I’ve read were guitar tabs (acoustic and electric) and I don’t remember many cases (if any) of step transpositions happening (but then again it’s somewhat harder to see them with tabs as opposed to piano roll).
So, ultimately, why do you use pattern transpositions? Do you have any uses for it that I didn’t list above? Any examples of songs or genres where they’re used more often than in others?
If all you want to do is to turn a transposition/pitch knob on a device, then transposing is mostly done for practical reasons, as mentioned here above.
If you want to use it as a compositional tool, turning the aforementioned knob will no longer be enough. In this context, the technical term is modulation, a topic on which you will find ample music theory because it is one of the corner stones of the equal tempered tuning system.
You can still use the transposition/pitch knob on a single part or a few parts and listen to what happens. Chances are that you will have to tweak some notes thereafter. I once accidentally pitched down a whole drum pattern by an octave. The sound was pretty dark and cool, so it became the version that I kept for my track.
Transposing can be great for composition. For instance, in blues you can transpose a mixolydian riff over the 1-4-5 progression to harmonize your riff with the chord progression
It’s almost always done to make the song easier to play. Or to make the song easier for the vocalist to sing. These two reasons probably cover 95% of the reason anyone transposes anything.
Different instruments have different ranges. Want to play a song written for piccolo on a tuba? You need to transpose.
Different ranges are easier or more difficult to play on different instruments. For example, on a saxophone you may want to avoid playing that really fast lick right where you shift to a different octave and have to press multiple keys simultaneously. Or different registers sound different and you want to play your soft, sweet tune in the clarinets’s lower register instead of its somewhat harsher sounding higher register.
If you’re using samples, your samples may sound better if you don’t have to pitch them up too much or your synth patch sounds better in some ranges than in others.
There’s a music theory distinction but not really any distinction in context of Op’s question about pattern transposition on grooveboxes if I understood it correctly.
The truck driver gear shift appears in almost every popular anime theme and vocaloid song. For some reason it has become an absolute staple of the genre.
I mean, the number of people actually using it for that purpose on elektron devices is probably not too frequent, but for a guy with a masterful cat avatar (maybe it’s not the masterful cat?) it might be interesting to listen for.
Conceptually explained as a quick dirty key change without a prepared modulation.
Agreed with most of the answers here but I have a few more to add…
—Quick-transposing up a whole octave is a good way to add emotion or variation to a melody without having to save it as a new pattern. Can also work with 5ths, etc, depending on your chord progression.
—If you limit your sequence/arpeggio to octaves or octaves and 1 or 2 other notes, using transpose is a quick way to make a funk or disco bass line. I do this a lot with the Monologue and the ESX.
(both of these first two are basically cheating at modulation, as others said above.)
—Some non-electronic instruments have different (“better” or “worse”) tones in certain keys, either because of resonance quirks or problems with the instrument. For instance, I have a very old and quirky piano that sounds nice and full in some keys, and a bit dull in others, no matter how many times I’ve had it tuned. I’ve also noticed my basses sound fuller in certain keys, I guess because of interactions between the neck, bridge/nut, strings, and pickups.
—Along those lines, most vocalists will tell you that transposing a song changes the way they physically sing it, which affects its tonal quality (higher=more intensity/lower=more subtle). For instance, a lot of Four Tops songs are pitched right up at the top of Levi Stubbs’s range, and you can hear that in his blisteringly intense performances. The same singer singing the same song but transposed lower might sound a bit more “dark” and have less “heat” to it.
—Finally, some synesthetic people swear that different keys have different emotional weight to them, though it’s probably different to every listener. I remember an interview with a synesthetic composer (wish I could remember who) who said he perceived Dm as a green color, which felt sadder to him than Am, which he perceived as having a dark red color.
Thanks a lot everyone, this helps! I definitely got exactly what I wanted from this thread I didn’t know about many of these usages, and some I forgot about.
This idea in particular was a pure mind-blown moment for me:
My process of key selection today is: randomly play notes that seem to sound good together keeping one note as “home”, and then google what scale it is so I can add background chords for it I think using all white keys would make things much simpler for cases when I want to try a particular mode.
Many of the other ideas mentioned like harmonization, accompaniment, timbre changes, etc. are also either new to me, or something I don’t usually think about, so this gives me something to look into later!
). As mentioned above, I’ve been seeing many people ask for or talk about transposition in Elektron boxes (or M8 or whatever else), but personally I’ve almost never used it for my writing in DAW or hardware.
I didn’t know about many of these usages, and some I forgot about.
I think using all white keys would make things much simpler for cases when I want to try a particular mode.