Transpose Music from C to E Flat

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Often, as a musician, you will encounter a situation where you have to transpose a piece of music from C to Eb. Especially in professional bands and orchestras, there may be instances where the music only comes in C parts, and all the transposing is left to you. If you find yourself in need of an alto saxophone, baritone sax, or Eb clarinet part, don't fret... simply whip out your pen and transpose! Over time, this will become almost automatic.</br>

Steps

Changing the Key Signature

  1. Understand what you're actually doing. To transpose from C to Eb, you're transposing the music up three half-steps, or to the Minor Third. You will have to adjust the key signature (add three sharps), notes, and accidentals accordingly.
  2. Change the key signature. Again, you'll be transposing a minor third, which you can probably figure out mentally if you've done this before, but for handy reference, you can refer to the chart below. To use it, you'll first have to identify the major key of the piece in C that you are transposing.

  3. Change the notes and accidentals. If you can figure it out on your own from here, great, or you may have used a program that automatically changes the notes with the key signature. However, if you're doing this by hand, here's another handy reference chart.

  4. Make sure the ranges are correct. If you're transposing for a very high-sounding Eb instrument, and all the notes you ended up with are below the staff, move them up into the playable range for the target instrument.
  5. Write or generate the new music. While writing by hand is an okay method, there are many computer programs that can make this easier, such as FinaleNotepad.
  6. Enjoy playing your transposed music!

Using the Bass Clef

  1. Put the C music on the bass clef, making sure to correctly write in the notes.
  2. Switch the bass clef sign to the treble clef sign without moving the notes from where they were. That means that the dots stay on the same line but mean different notes.
  3. Add 3 sharps to the key signature. When doing this a sharp cancels out a flat. For example, if the starting key signature had four flats, adding three sharps would make the new key signature have one flat.

Tips

  • This method can also be used to transpose scales.
  • A decent working knowledge of music theory will help a lot with transposing any instruments.
  • There are many free or relatively cheap computer programs that can make this much easier - often, you simply have to enter the music and click "transpose".

Warnings

  • It's fairly easy to get confused, especially if you haven't done much transposing. If you get too confused, take a break, and it will likely make more sense when you get back to it later.

Related Articles

Sources and Citations

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