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....hence the need to learn the topic of "Concert Pitch".




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Originally Posted By: rharv
Alto, yes, but tenor?


THAT mistake from an Alto Sax player!!

Good catch.

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When I taught myself sax, I learned it in concert pitch. So the fingering that is F# plays a concert A, and I learned that fingering to mean A. So I got to college, joined bands, and they handed me Eb music. I literally went home and rewrote every piece of music to be in C. By my 3rd performance class as a Junior I got to where I could do it in my head, but that first couple of quarters I spent a lot of time writing,

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Think of the soprano, alto, tenor, and bari sax. All are fingered the same way. You see a G in the notation, you finger it the same way on any sax. Can you imagine having to play a different fingering on each sax? So, all you need is music that is correctly transposed for the horn you have.

Brass isn’t quite as simple but it’s a similar concept.


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Originally Posted By: sslechta
....hence the need to learn the topic of "Concert Pitch".
This.

I get dragged into threads quite often when someone is confused because they started with a transposed fakebook. It’s always more logical to start in concert pitch and then convert.


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For a while Matt I went back and forth from alto to soprano to bari. And transposed in my head. No wonder I am crazy now.

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Originally Posted By: eddie1261
For a while Matt I went back and forth from alto to soprano to bari. And transposed in my head. No wonder I am crazy now.
And there it is, proof of what I was saying.


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I had a music teacher who'd wanted to play jazz and started with a saxophone. She stopped very quickly because she had absolute pitch and couldn't come to terms with music not in concert pitch. "I try to play a note but the wrong note comes out and I just became very confused".

My own preference, I think(!), would have been to learn the different fingerings for the instruments for concert pitch, or just choose one instrument and learn only it ... in concert. I did that as a child with recorders (C and F), but maybe I'm being naive about it. AFAIA the mouthing and breath control of the various instruments are sufficiently different and one really has to fully learn each instrument anyway, so I'm unclear if the different pitches really help.


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Originally Posted By: Matt Finley
It’s always more logical to start in concert pitch and then convert.

My first big experience in all this was with the William Byrd Suite. I told my theory instructor (1990s) that I liked that piece and the next day he had a Xerox'd copy of it for me. At the time I had a Commodore Amiga with Dr. T's Keyboard Sequencer, an awesome MIDI tool. My personal project was to transcribe as much of the Bill Byrd Suite to MIDI as I could. There's at least a dozen different instruments in it. The first instruments I recall inputting were things like piano and flute that don't typically require transposition. I then moved on to brass, clarinets, saxes, etc, then my work was much harder. It was easy to hear if a new instrument I added was not transposed correctly. It sounded waaaaay off. If anything, that was the perfect project to teach myself all this cool stuff on transposing and concert pitch.




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Rather late for the original question, but I think there are 30 keys in Western music.
7 flats through zero then 7 sharps, major and relative minor.

It can be argued there are many more, though, as the fifteen time-signatures each have seven modes, giving 105. And Blues and mixo-blues and... There undoubtedly more, because much music from other cultures doesn't fit neatly our Western 12-note scale.

Enough sums already. :-)


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