Skip to main content ↑ ↓
Topic: Transposing from Eb major to Db major (Read 12011 times) previous topic - next topic

Transposing from Eb major to Db major

When I try to automatically transpose from Eb major down a tone to Db, NWC forces the new key to be C# major. Can I force it to Db major?

Re: Transposing from Eb major to Db major

Reply #1 –
Manually change the key to Db then Transpose Staff 0 (zero) semitones.

Re: Transposing from Eb major to Db major

Reply #2 –
I'll give it a go, though you'd have thought that transposing by 0 semitones would (by definition) do nothing.

Re: Transposing from Eb major to Db major

Reply #3 –
Ah well, it's a bit cleverer than that - it also does an audit of accidentals, apparently.

However, it doesn't quite do enough, IMHO. I had a problem the other day with a piece that changed from C major to C minor temporarily, although the key signature in the score didn't change. Of course, this meant there were a lot of accidental flats about, except that NWC would have treated them as sharps (when entering from MIDI keyboard). There's no way to tell it to treat accidentals as flats by default - you have to either enter the notes manually (which is a pain), or enter them as naturals and then edit them (which is impossible if you want to change one note in a chord).

What I ended up doing was actually changing the key to C minor. To make it look right as well as sound right, I needed to force accidentals just for that section, then change the key to C major, then audit accidentals without changing flats to sharps. That's two wishes, Eric! The first one, to apply audits just to a section, is already in the list. I haven't tried it, but I assume that if I audit accidentals in a section of score in the key of C, flats will be converted to sharps. Wish two is about to appear in the list!

Re: Transposing from Eb major to Db major

Reply #4 –
An Enharmonic Flip tool that worked on selected notes would be a big asset. Particularly in minor keys.
D minor always attracts a Db instead of C# because the key signature has flats!

Re: Transposing from Eb major to Db major

Reply #5 –
That didn't work. Using a piece in Eb major enter the tonic minor chord, bass clef, Eb, Eb, Gb.
Now transpose down 2 semitones, not updating playback. Manually change the key from C# major to Db major. Transpose 0 semitones. You now have C, F, Enat. This is wrong. The bottom two notes are now a semitone too low, and the top note is enharmonically (is there such a word?) wrong. It should read Db, Ab, Fb. I could live with manually changing all the Enaturals to Fb, but having to manually change the C to Db and G to Ab is wrong.

Re: Transposing from Eb major to Db major

Reply #6 –
That's because the accidentals of the C-sharp and F-sharp are implied. If you change the key signature from sharps to flats, the C-sharp becomes a C-natural. To avoid that, use "Tools | Force Accidentals" to show all the accidentals, and then change the key signature and transpose 0 semitones.

Note that you'll still get an E-natural, even if you respell it as F-flat. So transpose 0 semitones first and respell then.

HTH,

Yves

Re: Transposing from Eb major to Db major

Reply #7 –
Ooops - (blush)

Forgot to mention the Force Accidentals step (sorry Nigel)!

Just as well Yves picked up on that.

But the Fb = E problem highlights the need for some form on Enharmonic flip tool - this problem occurs so often on the leading note accidental in minor keys that this really requires a fix.
NoteWorthy has Minor key signatures selectable when adding a key sig - perhaps transposition should be by key rather than by step.
ie Transpose Ebm to Cm to trap those accidental problems.

That wishing well gets deeper every day.
I don't even hear the splash with the ones I've dropped in.

Re: Transposing from Eb major to Db major

Reply #8 –
I just tried the same as the method I mentioned in step 5, except that before starting I enabled "force accidentals". It didn't help - I still end up with the wrong chord.

Re: Transposing from Eb major to Db major

Reply #9 –
It should work, *including* the F-flat. The fact that NWC leaves you with an E-natural instead of F-flat in a tonic minor triad in the key of D-flat, IMHO, a bug.

Re: Transposing from Eb major to Db major

Reply #10 –
We agree. I was trying to explain what NWC was probably going to do, not what it should do. Would it be clearer with a comma after "This way"?

Yves

Re: Transposing from Eb major to Db major

Reply #11 –
No, that wouldn't make any difference.

I'll admit that the first time I read your post, I thought you said "This is the way it should work . . ." On re-reading, I realized this wasn't so, but I still wanted to make my point about the oddness of the E-natural.

What this really shows is that there's ambiguity in English between two different meanings of "should", one of them expressing moderately strong expectation ("He should be here by 2:00.") and one of them expressing a belief about correctness or rightness ("You should say 'Thank you.'").

Re: Transposing from Eb major to Db major

Reply #12 –
>The fact that NWC leaves you with an E-natural instead
>of F-flat in a tonic minor triad in the key of D-flat,
>IMHO, a bug.

We agree. As we said before, we acknowledge this as a bug (the triad should be preserved). However, the fix is non-trivial, so it will not appear before the next major release.

Re: Transposing from Eb major to Db major

Reply #13 –
Perhaps you haven't forced the accidentals at the right moment. Since NWC seems to automatically audit the accidentals after a transposition, the procedure is:

1.Do the "real" transposition (-2 semitones)
2.Force the accidentals
3.Change the key signature
4.Do the enharmonic transposition (0 semitones)

This way it should work, except for the F-flat.

HTH,

Yves

PS: I guess that the chord you mentionned should be E-flat, _B-flat_ (not E-flat once again) and G-flat. ;)

Re: Transposing from Eb major to Db major

Reply #14 –
Thanks. I knew this topic had surfaced on the Newsgroup, but I didn't remember whether you'd expressed an opinion on whether it was actually a bug. It's nice to know this will be addressed at some point.

Re: Transposing from Eb major to Db major

Reply #15 –
I read the foregoing discussion with some interest; the issue of E natural/Fb should not arise, as Db major doesn't have Fb (except perhaps as an accidental).

Re: Transposing from Eb major to Db major

Reply #16 –
The thread resolved into a discussion of transposing the tonic minor chord in Eb to Db.
That's how the Fb appeared.

Re: Transposing from Eb major to Db major

Reply #17 –
That worked fine thanks! Hurray!

As said the Fb's came out as E naturals, but there's only a few of those at the start of the piece before I move from the Dorian Mode into the Major Mode so as I pointed out I can live with that. Excellent, pity I had to do each line one at a time. It'd be nice to mark all the staves (sadly Ctrl-A has been taken by something else) and run the operation once.

Re: Transposing from Eb major to Db major

Reply #18 –
NON TRIVIAL!?

>We agree. As we said before, we acknowledge this as a bug
>(the triad should be preserved). However, the fix is non-
>trivial, so it will not appear before the next major
>release.

Why does NoteWorthy Online say that any transposing problem is non-trivial? Do you not realise, first of all, that this is one of the larger discussion topics open now? To me that says that it is a greater problem than NoteWorthy thinks.

Suppose you have Beethoven Leonore overture for which you decide to transpose C Clarinets to the more standard Bb. No, this does not cover the E-natural/F-flat bug - that alone is non-trivial. You have to realise, though, that this bug is not restrained to the E-natural/F-flat transposition. The entire transposing process is a gigantic flop! It is way too much work for a sequencer to simply change the key of a part, much more for an entire piece (as I was getting to earlier.)

Forgive my forwardness, but I do a fair deal of transposing and don't understand why NoteWorthy hasn't changed their approach. Whenever one is to laboriously hand imput a piece (however large), *if it is to be printed*, it will take them to great pains getting everything just so. Reminder accidentals, FLATS in a SHARP key (or vice versa), or anything enharmonic are essential to readability and ease of harmonization. All is well until you TRANSPOSE a part (or piece). All of the above is lost as soon as you make the transposition.

Any way to fix this? Go thru each part and check it against the original to make sure similar enharmonics. Laborious. Tedious. Once you have finished a piece then realise something must be transposed - well, if some of y'all have done it, you know what I mean. All the notes must measure to each other by the same interval size as before.

NoteWorthy Composer shoud try this approach automatically for ALL transposing:

1. Transposing should be by interval or by key rather than by "semitones". Since technically G-flat down two semitones is E-natural, how does the software know you don't want an F-flat? It has no idea.

2. Move entire staff together by the specified transposing interval. First move notes up by basic interval size (ie. minor 6th would be up six steps), then use key sig. or accidentals to change specific interval size (ie. C to Ab is minor 6th. - up six steps and add 4 flats). Accidentals would take care of any notes not properly sized by key signature. This would preserve interval relationship in all cases if done properly.

Since transposing by key in relation to the previous key is just by interval, they would logically work the same way. (Maybe it would be better to transpose by interval since it dosen't necessarily know what key you are in to start with. That I like - freedom to use whatever key sig. with any key.)

If Noteworthy would add a simple search/replace feature, we could get very clean transpositions done in shorter amounts of time. It would also be nice to be able to transpose/change/edit (etc) more than one staff at once.

JP

Re: Transposing from Eb major to Db major

Reply #19 –
In response to post 18, while I agree with your analysis of the problems, I think you have misunderstood what NoteWorthy Online meant by the 'non trivial' comment.

When a programmer describes a fix to a problem as non-trivial, he means it would be difficult to implement - usually more difficult than a user would expect. It is not meant in the way that you seem to have understood it, namely that the problem is not sufficiently important to be worth dealing with.

I hope this might clarify the terminology.

Re: Transposing from Eb major to Db major

Reply #20 –
I, for one, although not a programmer, understood NW's reply the way it was intended.

Re: Transposing from Eb major to Db major

Reply #21 –
Those still interested may like to look up the NG thread: "Mary's Lamb and her Bear ..." where We had a bit of topic drift! One strand of the thread was updated to "Improved transpositon (was Mary's Lamb ...etc)"

There are some suggestions there on how NWC could improve its transposition algorithm to get the spelling after transposition nearly always right.

Regarding the triviality or otherwise of implementing such an algorithm, I'm sure there are contributors to the Forum who are much better qualified than I am to comment.

Stephen
 

Re: Transposing from Eb major to Db major

Reply #22 –
I would like to see one fix that I think *would* be trivial to implement, to address the sharps-in-a-flat-key problem without me having to pore through the entire score. In this particular case, I read in a MIDI file that had a lot of A#s, and decided to change the key to F. When I was done, all the C#s had been changed to Db, and the F#s to Gb. If that's my choice, I would prefer to leave it in the key of C and read all the A#s, which isn't good either.

I would like to have Noteworthy allow me to set my preferred default spelling for each of the 12 notes in the scale. If this fix were implemented, I could simply go to a dialog box, and tell it that I want all C#/Db's spelled as C#, and likewise for F#/Gb's. Same is true for things like Bb, Eb in keys like G.

Another possibility is to provide a tool that only audits in-key accidentals. In other words, if you change the key to F, it would only audit A#s to Bbs, and leave all other accidentals alone.

Yet another way is to provide a "smart accidental audit", which would audit in-key accidentals to the key spelling, and out-of-key accidentals to their "most common" spelling, using the order of key signatures as a measure of "most common", so the defaults would be F#, Bb, C#, Eb, with ambiguity in the case of G#/Ab being resolved by the key signature. This could be dovetailed with the user-configurable default spelling, as well.

Sorry if this is a repeat of a previous comment. It appears there is a lot of discussion on this general issue, but haven't seen these specific solutions yet.

Re: Transposing from Eb major to Db major

Reply #23 –
Going back to the first question in this thread, I thought it might work to transpose UP 10 semitones, than highlight the entire stave, and move it down pressing the ctrl-down keys 7 times.

So I went to try it, and first tried to emulate the problem. Clef, time signature and key signature Eb major, and entered a half-note Eb major scale. I then transposed -2, and lo and behold, I did not get C# major, I got Db major.

I then looked a little more closely at the menu that pops down when you select tools-transpose, and found it gives you three choices for key signature preferences.

So, I think those wonderful people at Noteworthy have solved the problem. Which version were you running? I have 1.70 with Web Update 10.

Re: Transposing from Eb major to Db major

Reply #24 –
Hello - I also have problems with showing accidentals on imported MIDI files if they are supposed to be in a minor key. One example: g-minor - I cannot convince Noteworthy to write b-flat and f-sharp ... Is there currently any way to do this?
If not, I would very much support the ideas outlined in https://forum.noteworthycomposer.com/?topic=16 (hope the link works) - especially the first (and probably easily implemented) version of simply specifying for each note how you want to show it. There is ony problem with this approach: If the key of the staff changes. To overcome this, the feature could be extended to "audit accidentals" *only for the selected section* (if there is one). Using this feature, one couly even audit single chords (sometimes necessary with a "large 1 interval" (I do not know the English term - e.g. b-flat together with b-natural).

However, the 2 later versions shown in https://forum.noteworthycomposer.com/?topic=16 would come in very handy, too!

What is the status of the discussion here? (which thread) - and is there a possibility NoteWorthy will get such a feature in the near future?

Regards

H.M.Müller