TRANSPOSING RECORDINGS TO DIFFERENT KEYS FOR PRACTICEBY JAMES PARSONS

Here’s the scenario, which as a musician on the Bayside Worship Team, you will be familiar:

You have a recording of a song and the music charts that you’re going to be playing or singing at the weekend – you want to practice the song, you start to strum your guitar along with the recording, but oh dear! Something is horribly wrong! The recording is not in the key that the charts are in.

So, you can either carry on playing along in mismatched keys which is pretty painful or try to listen and learn and then play. If you are a singer it’s even worse – you’ll be straining your voice or learning a harmony which you can no longer sing when the band strikes up in the new key on Saturday evening.

If you’re like me, you’d like your practice to be as similar to performance as possible, so that we can be most excellent worshippers.

Thankfully, this is where technology comes to the rescue!

Here, I explain in a few simple steps, using some great free software, you can get your tracks into the correct key for practicing along with.

DOWNLOAD AND INSTALL AUDACITY

Audacity is a free sound recording and editing program. There’s a lot you can do

with it, should you so wish, but we will be using just a fraction of its capabilities here. Go to http://audacity.sourceforge.net/ and download and install it.

You will most likely want to save your transposed tracks as mp3 files, so that you can play them just about anywhere, so you will also need to install the LAME mp3 encoder following these instructions: here (and no, LAME doesn’t mean it’s not very good)

TRANSPOSE THE TRACK

Start Audacity, if you haven’t already.

Locate the recording you want to transpose.

Drag it into Audacity. You should see something like this:

Then from the Menus, select Effects->Change Pitch. This will bring up a dialog which does the transposition for us.

Input the “From” key (that is, the key that the recording is in) and the “To” key is what we want to end up with.

The only other thing you need to decide is to transpose up or down. Usually I choose the setting that gives the smallest Percent Change as shown at the bottom, but you may wish to experiment. Sometimes I prefer to transpose a male voice upwards if I will be singing or playing with a female worship leader, or vice-versa.

Then hit OK and let Audacity work its magic.

PLAY THE TRACKHit the Play button to listen to the result. Check it by playing your instrument or singing along. Hopefully you will now have a recording that matches the key of your music charts. If not, go back and check and do it again (Audacity has an Undo, so you don’t need to drag it in again). OK, the quality won’t win any competitions, especially for distant key changes, but it’s fine for practice.

SAVE THE RESULTNow, you want to save the result, but don’t use Save! Instead use File->Export… and then enter a new file name and fill in the form to set the title and artist data for the mp3 you create. I like to enter the new key in as part of the title, so it’s easier to find amongst my many music files.

I hope you have found this useful.

Queries and feedback welcome to: jparsons68@yahoo.com .au