
1997 β’ π§π·
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porn animations // every character depicted here is 18+ years old // Do not follow me or interact with me if you're a minor.
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Ah yes, transposing instruments. Always fun, and usually the sort of thing done because instruments in the same family (i.e., the tenor, alto, or soprano saxophone) will try to have the same fingers for the notes they play despite having different ranges.
So to make it easier to move from one instrument to another they push that work onto the arranger!
So if I understand it correctly, this has a more practical use than a music theory use? And by that I mean, how the notes harmonize and stuff?
It's practical in the sense that every instrument in a family will have its keys in roughly the same relative place, so that actually playing the same note on a score should use the same finger layout. They'll match to different concert pitches but will look the same on the score. From the perspective of playing a saxophone, you'd see a middle-D on the score and you'd play it the same way for each kind of sax, but you'd hear different notes.
It's about harmonization in the sense that it allows a person to be able to play a wider range of notes than just one instrument could allow without having to learn an instrument with different fingers (the clarinet and saxophone, for example, have some shared design sensibilities but do have different fingerings for their notes).
This image might help explain the relationship a little better. "Written" refers to the notes that the sax player sees, and "Sounding" refers to the notes that make up the instrument's range relative to a C-based instrument like a piano. You'll notice all three instruments have the same written range (so that they can be played in the same way) but quite different sounding ranges (to cover different parts of the audio spectrum).
It's a little surprising and because I didn't really play instruments in the same family (piano, bass guitar, soprano (B-flat) clarinet, alto sax, and violin) it took me a very long time to realize this was why transposing instruments actually exist. If I'd ever played bass clarinet I'd have figured this out much sooner and also probably started a TMBG cover band out of high school.